16. Operation Focus
Warplanes are deadly in the air, but on the ground, they are utterly defenseless. That was the lesson of Mivtza Moked, or Operation Focus: preemptive Israeli airstrikes that destroyed Arab air forces on the ground and disabled their airbases at the start of the Six Day War, on June 5th, 1967. Israel’s lopsided victory in that conflict largely stemmed from the success of Operation Focus, an all-out attack by nearly all of Israel’s 196 warplanes. In radio silence, the Israeli planes flew low below enemy radar, headed out westward over the Mediterranean, then turned south towards Egypt. The Egyptians were surprised by the sudden appearance of Israeli warplanes over 11 airfields at 7:45AM that morning.
That time was chosen because the Egyptians had fallen into the habit of going on high alert at dawn to guard against surprise attack. By 7:45AM, however, the alert was usually over, the airplanes were back at their airfields, and the pilots disembarked to eat breakfast. In addition to surprise, the success of Operation Focus was due to technological innovation. The first wave of attackers concentrated on the Egyptian runways with a new prototype of penetration bombs specifically designed to render runways unusable. Those bombs didn’t just explode when they hit a runway’s surface. Instead, accelerator rockets drove the warheads through the pavement, before they detonated. The result was a crater atop a sinkhole.
