On the morning of 7 October 1973, the second day of the Yom Kippur War, the Israeli Air Force set out to do the thing it had been planning for years. It would destroy the Egyptian surface-to-air missile belt along the Suez Canal, and with it the shield that let Egypt's army cross into Sinai.

By the end of the day it had called that operation off, launched a second one against Syria's missiles on the Golan Heights instead, and lost six Phantoms for one SAM battery destroyed. Operations Tagar and Dugman 5 are the most painful lesson in the history of Israeli air power, and the reason the Israelis later became the world's masters of air defence suppression.

The plan Israel had been rehearsing

After the War of Attrition along the Suez Canal, the Israelis knew exactly what they would face in the next war: dense belts of Soviet-built SA-2, SA-3 and mobile SA-6 missiles, covered by radar-guided anti-aircraft guns. Their answer was a set of pre-planned operations to smash those belts at the start of any war.

Tagar, Hebrew for "quarrel", was the Egyptian version. Attack aircraft would approach at very low level to stay under the radar, pop up and drop unguided bombs from medium altitude on the missile sites. First, though, the Egyptian airfields and anti-aircraft defences would be hit to clear the way.

On the morning of 7 October the first wave, which included A-4 Skyhawks, went in against the airfields. Wikipedia records seven Egyptian air bases damaged and two Skyhawks lost with their pilots. Then the plan was stopped.

Why the plan changed

On the Golan Heights, the situation was close to collapse. Syrian armoured columns had broken through, and the small Israeli force holding the plateau was being overrun. The Northern front needed air power immediately, and the Syrian missile umbrella was making every close air support sortie a gamble.

The remaining Tagar waves were cancelled. Aircraft were diverted north for Dugman 5, the equivalent plan for the Syrian missile belt, to be flown the same day with little time to update targeting.

Dugman 5: the wrong map

The F-4 Phantom crews flew into the Golan missile belt with target data that, according to Wikipedia's account, relied on outdated imagery. Many of the Syrian batteries had moved. Arriving at the planned positions, crews found empty sites, while the real batteries and the radar-guided ZSU-23-4 Shilka guns, deadly at the low altitudes the attackers needed, were somewhere else.

The result was a disaster. Six Phantoms were shot down and others damaged. Two aircrew were killed and nine taken prisoner. In return, one SA-3 battery was destroyed and one SA-2 battery damaged.

The lesson that took nine years

The Israeli Air Force did not give up on the SAMs, but for the rest of the war it largely had to work around them, losing aircraft at a painful rate while the ground forces eventually crossed the Suez Canal and destroyed many batteries on the ground.

Afterwards, it rebuilt its whole approach: real-time intelligence, drones to locate and decoy radars, anti-radiation missiles, electronic warfare and tightly choreographed strike packages. In June 1982, over the Bekaa Valley in Lebanon, Operation Mole Cricket 19 used those tools to destroy the Syrian SAM network in a matter of hours.

Seven October 1973 is where that story starts. A plan rehearsed for years met a fast-moving war, a changing map and missiles that would not stay put, and the Phantoms paid for it.

Sources: Wikipedia (Operation Tagar; Operation Model 5), AP Archive, IDF Spokesperson's Unit