Where was the Air Force on the morning of Simchat Torah?

The Air Force has a central place in our concept of security, but in the surprise attack it clearly failed. The Air Force must make the necessary repairs as soon as possible. An open letter to the corps commander

Meir Most and Ofer Shalev, Mida  January 22, 2024

Where were they at the moment of truth? Photo: IDF spokesman

On Shabbat morning Simchat Torah, when the war broke out, they took from the military, generals, junior and senior commanders in the armor, the infantry brigades and the Harmash of the Tshal tanks and tigers and without any order they charged, shot the terrorists and when they ran out of ammunition they rushed forward and ran over the terrorists with their chains. The impressive example , of many kinds, are three tanks under the command of commanders and air defense units that raced dozens of kilometers, arrived, shot and ran over fifty terrorists. Heroes and heroines, soldiers and civilians who understood the gravity of the event and despite the vague and partial picture of the battle took a personal risk to save the residents of the surrounding area and fighters who were surprised A complete surprise. There are many examples in which we saw resourcefulness and an impressive personal initiative of soldiers, policemen, and other citizens who, without a battle image, and without any explicit guidance/order, took their personal weapons and flew to the surrounding area to rescue and save settlers and soldiers who were attacked in their beds.

What would happen if, instead of a tank firing inside Bari, fighter planes flew at low altitude with afterburners over Kfar Gaza, Nahal Oz, Bari and Nir Oz and caused sonic booms? What was the impact on the killers outside? What would be the result if the fighter planes would destroy the paragliders that cost ten thousand dollars with their burners and jet stream? This is what the Air Force did to Egyptian helicopters that crossed the canal in the Yom Kippur War. The musketeers from the air force’s depleted musketeer fleet had to fly to Ramon to arm themselves, the fighter planes during a flight time of minutes could be launched pair after pair after pair especially since the armament configuration of cannons is the lightest and requires a very short arming time. And when the ammunition runs out they pass at altitude Low with burners above the gangs butchering and burning and smuggling them out.

True, it is possible that our forces would also have been injured, as unfortunately happens in the war, but how many hundreds of the 1400 massacred would have been saved from the massacre? How many dozen of the 240 abductees would have escaped the abduction? Even just being in the air and giving a picture of the situation so that the IDF knew what was going on? Unfortunately, none of the above happened, and the butcher slaughtered and raped and murdered and shot, and we did not hear any ear-shattering thunder of our planes in the sky.

Did the Air Force act as expected?

The Air Force has fighter jets on standby at any given moment. The standby planes are armed with air-to-air missiles and cannons with a murderous rate of fire that can shoot down planes in air combat and also create names on the battlefield as we have seen in the shooting cameras of the television monitors.

The State of Israel will devote a significant portion of its resources to the Air Force knowing that on the day of the surprise order, in those critical hours until the reserve army and the regular army are mobilized, the Air Force will hold back the enemy’s ground forces for a few hours with the help of its powerful and advanced fighter jets and anti-aircraft guns. Despite the surprise and the lack of intelligence, did the air force, which is considered one of the best air forces in the world and has the most advanced array of fighter jets, did the air force operate in the first hours as expected? Where was the air force? Why didn’t any lightning plane snip, no falcon or thunder plane shoot, and no mighty plane the bad guys at those hours?

As is well known, the Air Force was in Sukkot and Simchat Torah in the ‘silence’, something that was mentioned in the media by sources as a possible reason for the late response. The ‘silence’ means – there are no training flights and only operational activities are carried out, including PMs and alertness. In the ‘silence’ there are no training flights, which might have made it possible to divert planes from the air to the surrounding area. It is important to mention here that alertness and response times should not be affected as such by the silence.

Why weren’t several pairs of fighter jets that were on standby for a violent patrol launched already on Saturday morning to fly at an altitude of 1000-2000 feet to understand what was happening and leave it to the decision of each carrier to set targets and snip at them, especially targets close to the fence. The Air Force was not seen in the area until around noon, and even then it sent planes to Gaza for bombing, which did not help at all in dealing with the problem of breaching the fence and the settlements. The Air Force knew about the breaching of the fence from the reports of the anti-tank and anti-tank missiles as early as eight in the morning.

Ask yourself what would happen if at 08:15 a low-altitude fighter plane sniped at the infiltration funnels? What would have happened if they had flown at low altitude with full burners and caused chaos on the ground so that some of the Nova Festival hostages could escape? In the 1970s, Air Force planes did this several times over Cairo. As far as we know, fighter jets were launched, why then didn’t any fighter jet fly over the settlements at an altitude of 1000-2000 for a violent patrol for the purpose of collecting the pilots’ self-intelligence and transferring it from building to building, and later initiating assistance, demonstrating presence and carrying out intimidation/sniping flights on infiltration concentrations?

In an emergency and in ambiguous situations like on the morning of 7/10, there is no and no need for PM to operate planes, even the machine guns that were launched into the area collected intelligence on their own and attacked. This is how air crew fighters acted in similar cases in the past. Is there such a command for such situations? If not, why doesn’t it exist? If it exists, why hasn’t it been activated?

There is nothing more ironic than the flight of the F-15s over the death camp in Birkenau when the leader of the building read the sentence in connection – “We the pilots of the Israeli Air Force, in the name of the horror camp, rose from the ashes of the millions of victims. We bear their silent cry, salute their heroism, and promise to be a defender of the people The Jew and his country – Israel” while making a cynical comment that he violated the order and lowered below the authorized flight height over the Birkenau camp. Why didn’t a single F-15 descend over Gaza village and over Nahal Oz, Bari and Nir Oz when a holocaust took place in the territory of the State of Israel.

Has the determination and fighting spirit in the Air Force remained the same as before?

When the fighter squadrons took down the abort schedule of the training flights, a schedule that encourages controlled aggressiveness and competition between fighters whose personal abilities must be as sharp as that of a super athlete, then there are no fighters with a knife in their teeth.

When a significant part of the training takes place in the simulator rooms, then maybe you save a little on the edges, but you lose a lot of abilities. Is the dosage between simulator training and flight correct? When you proudly show cooperation with other air forces, it contributes a lot to public relations and may help in distant operations, but it certainly doesn’t help in Holocaust-like events like that Saturday. Don’t all these dampen the fighting spirit of the pilots and their personal abilities?

Therefore, the question arises, along with the advanced technology and advanced aircraft screens, has the fighting spirit been damaged?

Unfortunately, the Air Force completely adopted the screen war of the Second Lebanon War, which received every possible criticism for the absence of the commanders from the field and the management of the battle from a distance, because when they attack only from the height and from a distance so as not to be hurt, whatever the reasons, and rely only on technology and do not encourage the pilot to maneuver the plane Close to the limits when it is required we reach similar results to what we have seen in the past and today in the American Air Force. We saw an example of this in the fall of the F-16 plane near Shafaram in 2018 from a missile strike when the plane was flying in a straight and horizontal flight without any maneuver after receiving a launch warning.

The heroic ethos of the Air Force was built in the Six Day War and the Yom Kippur War, and especially in the words of Bnei Peled in the song “You can’t stop playing this tune” as Yair Rosenblum wrote,

We have two ways to play one according to notes written in advance and sometimes there are no notes there are no notes and you have to play without notes

And the Air Force did not do it this time.

In order to understand the events and learn lessons immediately, an in-depth investigation must be conducted now, including learning lessons immediately in cooperation with parties outside the Air Force. This investigation must be carried out immediately and published to relevant parties and the public, and even before the end of the war. The Air Force had to prepare for Saturday’s outline, we saw such riots and attempts to break through by thousands of Syrians in the Golan Heights in 2012, we have seen tens of thousands of Gazans on the fence in recent years. The writing was on the wall, and the Air Force had to prepare for this outline.

Retired Lt. Col. Ofer Shalu and retired Col. Meir Most are former