Israel in the 1973 Yom Kippur War: Diplomacy, Battle, and Lessons by David Rodman

Author:David Rodman [Rodman, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
ISBN: 9781782843658
Google: h-5szgEACAAJ
Goodreads: 30290315
Publisher: Sussex Academic Press
Published: 2016-11-01T00:00:00+00:00

Summary

That the IAF made substantial contributions to Israel’s victories in both the 1967 and 1973 wars is not in doubt. Most importantly, it ensured that Israel would not lose either war, which was—and still is—crucial to a state whose opponents contested—and still contest—its very right to exist. The IAF’s contributions to Israel’s victories with respect to its direct impact on the 1967 and 1973 battlefields in support of the IDF’s ground forces, on the other hand, were more modest in scope.

The attainment of air supremacy over Israel proper, as well as the attainment of air superiority over the battlefields, not only spared the state’s civilian populace and industrial assets, but also cleared the air, so to speak, for the IDF’s ground forces to come to grips with their Arab counterparts. Indeed, because of the radically different set of circumstances under which the IDF began the 1967 and 1973 wars, the IAF actually played a more important part in the latter victory, in the sense that it provided the crucial time and space for the IDF’s ground forces to mobilize and deploy for battle. In the words of the IAF commander during the Yom Kippur War:

Air superiority enabled our forces to mobilize, move[,] and act with no meaningful interference from enemy air. This is something not to be scoffed at under the situation we were in at the beginning [of the war].34

The IDF’s ground forces, not the IAF, however, ultimately defeated the Arab armies in both wars.

The most fundamental conclusion to be drawn from the IAF’s experiences in the 1967 and 1973 wars is that airpower cannot be relied upon to be decisive on the conventional battlefield. If more proof is necessary, one need look no further than Israel’s two most inconclusive wars. The 1969–70 War of Attrition and the 2006 Second Lebanon War are the two conflicts in which it relied most heavily on airpower to accomplish its wartime objectives. Even though the IAF performed very well in both wars, the absence of “boots on the ground” in Egypt and Lebanon, respectively, allowed Israel’s opponents to escape crushing defeats.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.