Crisis Management: Nixon, Kissinger and the 1973 War

Abstract

At 2 p.m. on Saturday, 6 October 1973, some 700 Syrian tanks, well supported by infantry, attacked Israel’s positions on the Golan Heights, as their airborne forces prepared to capture the vital Israeli observation posts on Mount Hermon. At the same time, over 1000 Egyptian guns bombarded the even more scantily held positions of the Bar-Lev Line on the Suez Canal and commando units spearheaded an immaculately conceived canal crossing which, by that night, had major elements of the Second and Third Armies consolidating inside their bridgeheads north and south of the Bitter Lakes. Such was the scale of the offensive, and the desperate courage with which it was met, that forty-eight hours later Israel had lost 500 dead. Most harrowing of all for government and public alike was the apparent failure of the air force, the key to success in Middle East warfare, to make any real impact on the battlefield. Well supplied with Soviet surface-to-air (SAM) missiles, in the first week of hostilities Syrian and Egyptian soldiers destroyed 80 aircraft, an attrition rate in planes and experienced pilots which could not be long sustained. Although the fortunes of war were to waver before finally turning, the success of the Egyptian and Syrian forces in preparing and carrying out this offensive destroyed one of the basic assumptions which had informed Israeli and, to a lesser degree, American diplomacy since 1967, namely, that Israel had such a measure of qualitative superiority over her antagonists that she had nothing to fear on the battlefield.