Stardate 20030424.0739

(Captain's log): Aziz Poonawalla writes:

Can I ask you a favor? I'm trying to research a question about Israel's conventional forces. I've been making a case that Israel's military is vastly superior to that of all the Arab armies combined - this was clearly true in 1967 and with American patronage, Israeli military culture, superior training, and of course the motivation of defending your home, this capability gap has widened, not lessenned. I feel that there may be numerical parity between Israel's conventional forces but not parity of capability.

Is this an accurate assessment? Can you shed some light (and some numbers) on the issue? I'd appreciate your thoughts.

I'm afraid it is not an accurate appraisal. For instance, it's true that they won in 1967, but the reason was that they stole a march on the Arabs. In order to have a force large enough to even fight the war, it was necessary for Israel to mobilize its reserve forces, and that didn't even bring them up to parity with the paper strength of the Arab forces arrayed against them.

Israel didn't win because it overpowered its enemies and muscled them to the ground. If Israel had had that kind of power, the Arabs wouldn't have made their plans to attack. The only reason Nasser was able to convince the Syrians and Jordanians to participate is that the Arabs all thought they had military superiority and would win easily.

Faced with Arab mobilization and clear intelligence that they planned to attack, Israel won because it made a sneak attack and caught the Arabs by surprise. Specifically, the Israelis ordered an air strike against Egypt's air assets on the ground, which was spectacularly successful.

The basic strategy in 1967 was to hold against Jordan and Syria while defeating Egypt, and then to shift forces north for secondary offensives there. Once Egypt's air force had been shattered, other air strikes were able to seriously cripple the Jordanian and Syrian air forces, and then Israel used its newly won air superiority first in the Sinai, and then elsewhere.

There was one way in which Israel was indeed vastly superior: it had an incalculably better officer and noncomm corps. For instance, analysis of the battle in the Golan Heights shows that Israel won in early fighting with an inferior armored force because the Syrians used awesomely bad tactics which permitted the Israelis to pick their tanks off easily while losing few of their own. The Israeli tankers used cover well, and coordinated movement and fire, because they had good sergeants. The Syrians were bumblers and basically threw their tanks into combat with little plan, and saw them get destroyed.

However, even to get the kind of military force needed to be competitive, Israel had to shut down its civilian economy. Its standing army wasn't even remotely large enough to fight against a threat that large. And the reserves couldn't be kept mobilized for more than a month without causing Israel to self-destruct economically. Part of why Israel jumped the gun was to gain the advantage of surprise, but part of why was that Israel had to get the war over with so that it could restart its economy.

Looking back on it, it can seem as if 1967 was an easy victory for Israel. But that belies the reality: it was a very close thing. If the Arab attack had happened according to plan, it is by no means certain that Israel would have survived.

In particular, if that initial air strike against Egypt had failed, the Egyptian air force would have been fully alerted. That would have meant that Israel would have to have fought it in the air, with much greater losses in jets, and more critically would have been busy doing that and therefore would not have been able to support the ground forces. And it would have meant that the Israeli ground forces would have been vulnerable to Egyptian air strikes.  All of which would have meant that the Sinai battle would have gone much differently. Israel likely would still have won it, but it would have taken longer and cost much more both in the air and on the ground, and it's not clear that the forces facing Jordan and Syria could have held long enough. It could easily have ended in disaster if there had been no outside intervention.

But since that initial air strike was very successful, the Egyptian air force ceased to be a factor in the war. Israel's air force could concentrate on neutralizing the air forces of Jordan and Syria while providing air support for the ground forces, carrying out interdiction and scouting the enemy, all of which provide massive advantage. And because military advantages tend to snowball, once Israel gained air supremacy it was able to gain other kinds of supremacy as well, and the war looked like a cakewalk.

But the fact that Israel seemed to win easily doesn't mean its victory was inevitable, or that Israel's military power was somehow vastly greater. That was never the case. In reality, one of the reasons why that war is so celebrated is exactly that militarily speaking, Israel was "David" to the Arab "Goliath".

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