Today’s project managers
have to know how to lead their teams within a dynamic environment, and there’s
no more dynamic environment than war. On October 6, 1973, Egypt and Syria
simultaneously invaded Israel in an attempt to regain territories lost in the
Six-Day War of 1967. It’s not as if Israel was taken by surprise; its leaders
had been considering a preemptive strike the very morning that the war began.
But the decision had been made not to preemptively strike, and the whole
country was taking a moment to observe Yom Kippur—the holiest day of the Jewish
year—when Egyptian and Syrian military forces crossed Israel’s borders.
“When the Yom Kippur War
broke out,” Uri Bar Joseph wrote in The
Watchman Fell Asleep, his account of the conflict, “I was at home reading a
book. About 20 hours later, I arrived, together with a few soldiers of my
reserve unit, at Hatzav, the Israeli base camp of the 9th tank
Regiment of the 14th Armor Brigade, some 25 kilometers east of the
Suez Canal. The camp was deserted. The doors of the regimental store-keeping
were wide open and a radio was still playing….A few days later, I learned that
the 9th Regiment was almost totally destroyed in the fighting that
took place during the first hours of the war.”
Giora Ben Dov, a reserve
pilot at the time, remembers a similar scene of shock and dismay after rushing
back to his air base from a vacation in London with his wife. “They sat down
silently, with a zombie-like expression,” he says about his fellow pilots who’d
already flown missions. “And after my first missions, I’d joined the club. I,
too, sat silent, adopting a similar expression.” In a reversal of the Six-Days
War, where this same squadron suffered almost no casualties, Giora and his
fellow pilots encountered heavy anti-aircraft fire and significant losses.
Like so many before it,
the war was not going as planned.
“We were not surprised by
the siren,” says former Lieutenant Colonel Yitshak David, leader of the Israeli
Air Force’s 109 Squadron, also known as The Valley Squadron. “We were waiting
for it, we were prepared.” But they weren’t prepared for the orders that came
down from above. “We were deployed to defend the wing….which infers air-to-air
combat, not an assault mission, as we had anticipated. At that moment, we
thought that something had gone wrong at the Air Force headquarters. It was
like having a snowstorm in the desert.”
Other squadron aircraft were given assault missions, but in an
area of Syria that was heavily defended by anti-aircraft missiles. “There was
nothing I could do or say to change the fate of that mission,” David recalls.
“Once an aircraft is airborne, it is controlled by headquarters only. I [did
go] to the deputy wing commander right away and told him to call it off, but
while we were conversing we heard over the radio that we had lost the leader of
the team.”
The war was not going as
planned because the plans—and there were “several mission plans that covered
all the range of tactical scenarios,” David says—were not going as planned. As
far as the pilots were concerned, headquarters was acting irrationally,
assigning missions that seemed random and unexpected. “We were flying into
zones defended by anti-aircraft missiles in order to take down a pontoon
bridge, which was easy to replace,” reserve pilot Giora says, “instead of
hitting quality targets behind the bridge, where the Egyptians were
maneuvering.”
In war, low-uncertainty
planning often gives way to high-uncertainty planning, but what about when
headquarters itself is contributing to the uncertainty? You have to follow
orders, obviously. But is there nevertheless a way to improve the situation? The
Israeli Air Force's 109 Squadron found several ways, including some impressive
work-arounds that made the Douglas A-4 Skyhawk aircraft much less vulnerable to
heat-seeking surface-to-air missiles (to be discussed in the next blog post).
Another way was less exciting but no less valuable: Yitshak David decided to
spend some face-time with his pilots, and not just once a day but three times a
day.
The squadron was a mixed
bag of reserve and mandatory-service pilots, their ages ranging over two
decades. But every pilot, regardless of rank, age or experience, was given the
opportunity to speak his mind. And the result was a rich supply of intelligence
gleaned during the missions. The pilots also found a loophole that allowed them
to contact their wing during a flight mission—a way around HQ’s strict control.
They were allowed to call in for navigational support before deploying their
bombs, and they used this opportunity to receive the latest warnings and
updates.
Early on in war, the
pilots of 109 Squadron were having some grave doubts about the orders that were
coming down from above. The missions themselves were not questioned, but it was
up to the squadron to execute those missions in the manner to which they saw
fit, and that’s where their own experience, communication skills and
collaborative ethos came into play, mitigating the damage and sustaining the
force.
Gil Wang conducted the study leading to the current blog post and the
next one. Gil, a Naval Architect, is a former yacht designer and project
manager at Dykstra Naval Architects, an Amsterdam-based superyachts design
office. From 2006 to 2014, Gil led numerous cutting-edge projects from concept
to completion. Today, he is pursuing his PhD, examining the feasibility of
expanding costal cities to their adjacent maritime environment.
