They were the smallest air force in the area, but they had the Americans helping them. Americans are fine if you know the bugle call will take a couple of years to cross the Atlantic and you can survive the wait. In the context of Arab - Israeli action, you bank on the Americans helping you to fix everything for the next war…

The Israelis wanted to hit southern Lebanon. This should be easy - provided there was no interference from the western flank - Syria. Map studies indicated that a Syrian observer on the eastern edge of the Bekaa Valley could vector manned aircraft or missiles onto any Israeli movement north into Lebanon. The Bekaa Valley is large enough to provide a wide deployment area for radars and missiles, without anyone cramping another's style. The radars and missiles have this huge target window above the eastern mountain range. So, the Israelis decided to take the Syrians' Russian built air defence system out in a series of bold, co-ordinated moves.

One fine morning in June 1982, the Syrian air defence radars suddenly bloomed into action - there were bogies inbound, at just the right altitude for the missiles. And there was the second wave, just right for the manned interceptors to take out. The missiles took the bogies out all right. Unfortunately for the Syrians they were unmanned vehicles, equipped with radar enhancement, so that they looked just like Israeli Mirages. There were just enough bogies to use up all the Syrians first line missiles. And when the Syrian interceptors blasted skywards to take on the second wave, the Israeli Mirages, having entered Syria unseen at zero feet several minutes before, pulled hard up and took the Syrian interceptors down from astern, leaving the Israeli A-4's in the second wave free to demolish the missile radars, launchers, and control centres.

The Israeli's had used all of their assets to get accurate radar and launcher positions long before the strike. And they kept real-time track of mobile radars and launchers. During the strike, they had drones over the major targets, observing and confirming their destruction. The action was a lot more complex than this, but these are the essential elements.

Unfortunately this action is not well documented. The Israelis don't like to talk about it - they feel that they're letting their tactics out. The Americans don't like to talk about it - they're now psychologically incapable of pre-emptive strikes and anyway, they'd never believed that one could use unmanned vehicles with such effectiveness. And the Russians don't like to talk about it either, because one of their prized export air defence systems was suckered big-time. But, documented or not, Bekaa Valley must take it's place in the annals of air warfare. It was the first offensive action primarily based on unmanned vehicles. Israeli doctrine would say it was a defensive action - a pre-emptive strike to nullify possible enemy air threats to the rest of the campaign. The rest of us military observers regard it as one of the finest examples of original offensive thinking in the history of Air Warfare.

It is generally accepted that in the first attack against the Bekaa Valley on 9 June 1982, the IAF destroyed 17 of the 19 Syrian SAM batteries and their radar sites, as well as 29 Syrian Air Force (SAF) fighters, without loss. The following day, the IAF destroyed the remaining two missile batteries. The SAF once more challenged the Israelis and lost 35 more aircraft, again without downing a single Israeli. By the end of July, Syria had lost at least 87 aircraft, while Israeli losses amounted to a few helicopters, one RF-4E, and an A-4 Skyhawk downed by a PLO SA-7.

The Bekaa Valley action was as close to perfect as any military campaign can ever be. It:

Military Philosophy rarely acknowledges the validity of such a bold course of action. Despite the history of the landings at Anzio and Inchon, American military action in 2002 is based on a zero casualty rate. Philosophically, this would be an outstanding situation - American military efficiency is considered to be such as to render resistance worthless. ( Shades of the Daleks? )

The conventional Western response to Bekaa Valley, usually couched in terms which would be understood in the Pentagon or Whitehall, was more or less to the effect that the odds were long, and they were lucky. This is quite incorrect. The Israelis understood their enemy, a facet of the military appreciation process that has not been at all obvious in western military or political thought for some years.

Consider the Australian response to Indonesia. The Foreign Affairs view which prevails now, is that they are a mature Nation and should be so treated. Yet any military observer would tell you that the Indonesians would be flat out organising a Sunday afternoon BBQ. And the same observer would be correct in pointing out that if by a miracle they did manage one they would then be incapable of organising a second BBQ the following weekend - even taking into account the lessons learned from the previous weekend's outing. Witness the destruction in Timor by the Indonesian Military - which occurred with the full knowledge of the Indonesian Parliament - was this the action of a "mature nation"? Yet Australia and the United Nations prefer to turn a blind eye to this (along with several thousand deaths caused by the troop's rampage)

Conventional Western responses usually assume that the enemy is domiciled in Shreveport, Dolphin Square, or West Farrar, and has the same thought processes as the native inhabitants. The fact that they drink Scotch, speak English and watch CNN does not mean that they draw the same conclusions, or that they have any appreciation of logistics. When they do, we will have real problems - as if we don't have enough already.

Our time scale now moves to the early 1990's. The Berlin Wall has long gone and most governments have failed to appreciate that the world will become more dangerous. The threat of MAD might have passed, but many of the madmen who were kept in line by the Russians are now free to rant and rave and engage in local power plays. And as they were all armed, usually quite comprehensively, by those same Russians, they can pose a significant, if short-lived, threat to the world. The best that one can hope for is that they will be unable to discharge their Russian debts, and thus fall into impotence as their ammunition and spare parts are consumed. The worst case scenario of course is that some former Soviet Union despot, or senior ranking officer will manage to sell off a few of the thousands of nukes scattered around the old Communist Empire. Even without the ignition codes, supposedly well guarded by the Kremlin, a nuke is a nuke, and the image of a disgruntled Soviet scientist hot-wiring a warhead is not beyond the bounds of reality. So the world remains a very dangerous place.

A number of factors now united to force UAVs into the more progressive ranks of military thought. One must understand that Strategic Reconnaissance, in the American Scheme of Things, is not a military function. It is a function of the National Reconnaissance Office, a civilian organisation, reputedly formed by the CIA many years ago, in order to control strategic reconnaissance assets. The author is open to correction here, as there are several significant biographies which he has not yet read, by such people as Monty Bissell, the CIA underwriter of the YF - 12 and SR - 71, and arguably a man of considerable foresight, to say nothing of persistence in the face of the technical problems which beset the Blackbird.

The Gulf War did a lot of good work in drawing together the rather fragmented American Defence industry (industrial, government and civilian). Stories of projects so secret that their results could not be used to prosecute the war abound. JSTARS, the aircraft radar system which enabled the Allies to plot, track and destroy enemy vehicle convoys was in the middle of a series of tests to determine whether it was of any use at all when it was summarily ordered to the war zone.

One of the major problems in the Gulf was the lack of mid-term reconnaissance assets. The satellites worked fine and kept to a regular, predictable schedule. Saddam Hussein’s Intelligence people knew when they were due overhead, and took appropriate action to avoid observation. So they photographed a lot of post strike targets, which CIA analysts said had not been neutralised, because they could still see them. The USAF also programmed its few photo aircraft for post strike sorties, and concluded that targets hit yesterday were hit, or missed, and then took appropriate action. There is a huge gap between these two reconnaissance approaches.

Lessons learned…and forgotten. Unless you have a photo of some place as it was yesterday, last week, and two weeks ago, you cannot determine the true significance of today's photos. Sure they'll convey some information, but without a past history their value is limited. This is a hard lesson to convey; the RAF learned it in WW II, when they had absolutely no photographic coverage of Europe before the war, and for at least 15 months after hostilities started. Until they began widespread photographic coverage of occupied Europe as a matter of routine, they had little idea of what today's photos meant, because there was nothing to compare them with.

The same problem arose in the Gulf. There was no system that could supply medium resolution photography over the area of hostility to the Commander in the field. Thus there was no way that air photography could direct attention to changes, because there was no record of what anything looked like before the latest photo.

It is like looking at Wednesday morning's photo of Alten Fjiord and discovering that the battleship Tirpitz has sailed! But if you photographed Tirpitz in Alten Fjiord on Tuesday at 1700hrs, you can say:" Where has Tirpitz gone ? She left by 0900 at the latest, and so has had a maximum 14 hours sailing at around 20 knots. Let’s plot a radius of 280 miles from the departure point, fly recon over the area and see if we can find her."

The CIA had the satellites, and the latest models of the U - 2, now called TR - 1, but the results of these sorties went to Langley who sent written assessments to the Gulf, not raw photos. So they were days old when received. And there were just not enough TR -1's ( the SR - 71 had been retired before the Gulf War started, and was not re-activated. Magnificent aircraft, but very, very expensive).

You can now see where we are going. There was a reconnaissance failure in the Gulf War. The photo analysis should have been carried out by the people who were going to use the information, not by experts closeted thousands of miles distant who had no real sense of the urgency of the situation. So the CIA/NRO moved to fill the gap with UAV's. To use manned aircraft would be to invite the military into the ring, since only they could provide the pilots for manned vehicles. But with UAV's life would be much simpler for the CIA/NRO…they wanted them and they wanted them quickly.

End