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line. In a stroke of good fortune, the brigade commander was Dovik Tamari, Avraham Arnan’s first successor as commander of the sayeret. While we waited our forward deployment, due in September, he included me in his discussions with his senior officers on tactics and planning. This inevitably included the core of our existing strategy: a line of fixed fortifications which we had built on our side of the canal after the war. They were known as the Bar-Lev Line, because the chief of staff ultimately had to sign off on them. But the main impetus had come from Avraham Adan. A former Palmachnik, known as Bren, he was the overall head of the armored corps.

There were strong critics of the Bar-Lev line, but few more vocal than Arik Sharon. The very qualities that had made him the perfect choice to lead Unit 101 and its successor commando units – a natural instinct to favor bold, preemptive attacks, allied with an absolute confidence in his own judgment and little time for those who challenged it – had stalled his rise up the military ladder for a few years. But now he was head of Israel’s southern command. He was convinced that in the event of another full-scale war with Egypt, the Bar-Lev line would be worse than useless. We’d find ourselves forced to defend a string of fortifications that could serve no real purpose in repelling a concerted Egyptian attempt to retake the Sinai. Arik’s preferred strategy was to let the Egyptian troops cross the canal and then confront them on terms where Israeli forces had a proven advantage: a mobile battle in the open desert.

When the debate came up in our brigade strategy discussions, I said I believed Arik was right. From our recent sayeret missions, I said there was no way the Bar-Lev fortifications could protect us. I knew how easy it had been for us to operate unseen between Egyptian positions across the canal, and they were only a few hundred yards apart. On some parts of the Bar-Lev line, there were six or seven miles between outposts. A whole Egyptian brigade could pass through.

Very few in the kirya, however, seemed ready to recalibrate our strategy against the Egyptians. Only later, when the damage had already been done, would it become clear that the navy was alone in acting on lessons learned from the fighting since the 1967 war. Having lost its largest warship to a more mobile Egyptian missile boat at the outset of the War of Attrition, it began focusing on deploying mobile missile boats of its own. But the air force was showing no sign of dealing with the implications of the Egyptians’ increased anti-aircraft capability – even though we’d begun losing planes and pilots to the new surface-to-air missile batteries Nasser had received from the Soviets. And I

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