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The last conventional war Thirty years after the sirens started howling on that cursed Saturday, October 6, 1973, what is left to say the Arab-Israeli war that started on that day? The answer is, very little. The main outlines of the conflict have long been known. First, following an intelligence failure on the part of the Israeli army, came the coordinated Syrian-Egyptian attack which caught that army with its pants down. Next came the rapid Israeli mobilization and counterattacks on both fronts; by the time the war ended, Israeli forces had crossed the Suez Canal and were standing at the gates of Damascus. Details of the war still continue to emerge. However, all they do is reinforce the image of a war in which Israeli generals quarreled with each other, while their troops — grim, dirty and bloody — fought the enemy to a standstill and then turned the tables on him. In August 2003 the Hebrew daily Yediot Aharonot, using some newly discovered tapes, published a series of articles about the Yom Kippur War. The effort seems to have fallen flat. I cannot remember anybody mentioning the articles in conversation, let alone becoming excited about them. As so often happens, the passage of time is causing the details to sink into oblivion. Ye even as this happens, though, the place of the Yom Kippur War in the annals of the Arab-Israeli conflict is becoming clearer and clearer. Until 1973, inclusive, the most important threat to Israel consisted of tanks, aircraft, and the conventional armed forces that operated them. With each round in the conflict — those of 1948, 1956, and 1967 exemplify the trend — the number of men and machines deployed by both sides grew ever larger. As a result, the October 1973 battles were among the biggest since 1945; by some measures, the forces arrayed against Israel were equal to those of all European NATO members combined. Yet, apart from the fact that the aircraft and tanks used were much larger and more powerful than their World War II predecessors, militarily speaking the differences between the two conflicts were minimal. Except for a few details — such as having to use helicopters instead of light aircraft — a World War II German general such as Erwin Rommel, or an American one such as George Patton, would have felt at home on the 1973 battlefield. Conversely, had a time machine transported Israeli commanders back to the campaigns that took place in the Western Desert in 1941-1943, they could have taken over with a flying start. In fact, all they would have had to do is change the color of their uniforms. Since then, what changes there have been! In 1973 the most dangerous enemy was Egypt, a country with which Israel has now been at peace for more than 20 years. The peace may not be all that we have dreamt of, yet, in the words of a former Israeli ambassador to Cairo, the Egyptians are observing the Camp David Agreements "to the last grain of sand.‘ Having lost Soviet military support — on which it used to depend and without which it is no more than a small Third World country — Syria, according to a recent statement by a former chief of Military Intelligence, General (ret.) Uri Saguy, ’is not a threat." WHATEVER THE outcome of current events in Iraq — and the outlook there is not good for the Americans — the little that was left of the Iraqi armed forces after 1991 has been crushed and is unlikely to arise again. For the first time since it was founded in 1948, Israel finds itself without a conventional enemy. Militarily speaking, the October 1973 war marked the apogee of the armed conflict between Israel and its neighbors. Since then, that conflict has been receding. Apart from the three days of Israeli Syrian-clashes in June 1982, the vast conventional battles of October 1973 have had no successors. In the entire IDF there is now scarcely a single officer left who has commanded a company in a real war against a real Arab army. Anybody who can recall the last time an Israeli aircraft shot down an Arab one (1985) deserves a medal; whereas, in the past, Israel’s defense industry could boast that its products were "battle tested," now it has to rely mostly on simulators like everybody else. Partly because the threat has diminished and partly because of financial reasons, a considerable part of Israel’s armored divisions, which used to be the pride and joy of its army, are being disbanded. The men, primarily reservists, are being sent home; the machines, primarily old American M-48s and M-60s, have been left to rust. Barring a miracle, these divisions will not be reassembled in our lifetime. While the threat posed by conventional armies has been receding almost to the point of disappearance, the one posed by unconventional forms of war has increased. In 1973, the only ballistic missiles to reach Israel were a few short-range Syrian Frogs, which were aimed at the military airfield at Ramat David but missed, causing little damage. Since then, several of Israel’s neighbors — Syria, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Iran — have armed themselves with ballistic missiles capable of reaching practically every Israeli city. Some, notably Syria and Iran, are also known to possess chemical weapons, which they did not have in 1973. Others could produce them quickly if they wanted to. At least one, Iran, is expected to acquire nuclear weapons in the relatively hear future; though the failure of past predictions suggests that the date is not as close as some suggest. As the 1991 Gulf War showed, should another war break out between Israel and its neighbors, the former’s civilian population will be exposed to attack. Against this threat, Israel’s conventional forces are almost entirely useless. Since the number of Syrian missiles alone is estimated at about 260, the few batteries of Arrow anti-ballistic missiles Israel has deployed will probably also be almost useless. Indeed it could be argued that the only good thing about the Arrow is that the Americans have been footing a large part of the bill. Before and during the 1973 war, guerrilla tactics and terrorism played hardly any role and indeed the term "Palestinian" itself stood for a contemptible human being hardly capable of fighting. This has changed, and the Palestinians, by dint of a heavy sacrifice of blood, have arguably become the best fighters in the entire Middle East. Except for perhaps in Yugoslavia during World War II and in Afghanistan in 1980-88, seldom have so few, with so little, accomplished so much against heavily armed forces. At this time, they are on the verge of achieving what no Arab army could — that is, to force Israel to build a wall, which, if I understand Prime Minister Ariel Sharon correctly, will be followed by a withdrawal from much of the territories. As events over the past three years have so far demonstrated repeatedly, against suicide bombers the efforts of all Israel’s conventional and unconventional forces are in vain. To sum up, whatever moves Israel made, or whatever else it could have achieved at a lower cost during the October 1973 war, is now almost completely irrelevant and of interest to only a few military historians. What is relevant is the fact that, militarily speaking, the 1973 war was to Israel and its neighbors what World War II was to the rest of the world. In both cases the conflict was the largest and most ferocious until then and indeed in some respects the second was simply a rerun of the first. In both cases it came at the end of a long period of development during which the conventional forces that fought it became larger and larger. In both cases the introduction of weapons of mass destruction — whether overt or covert — meant that there should be no repetition and that, after a more or less decent interval, those forces should start to shrink. Just as the US never fought the USSR, another large-scale conventional war between Israel and its neighbors has become increasingly unlikely. Meanwhile, both in the Middle East and elsewhere, conflicts that used to be waged by aircraft and tanks are now being waged by very small numbers of men and women known as terrorists. As the current debate over the size of the defense budget shows, it is only now that harsh economic necessity is finally forcing the Israeli army to come to terms with the full consequences of the October 1973 War. And the sooner it does so, the better for us all. The writer is a military historian at Hebrew University.
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