What Went Wrong

When two U.S. Navy attack planes were downed during last week's raid on Syrian missile positions, Pentagon officials quickly ran into some heavy flak at home about what had gone wrong. In Washington and elsewhere critics demanded to know why the U.S. had suffered such humiliating losses in a single mission, especially when the Israelis have for years conducted similar sorties in the region virtually unscathed.

Navy officials who sought to deflect the criticism had plausible answers to many of the questions. True, the A-6E and A-7E fighter-bombers used in the attack were subsonic planes designed in the late 1950s, giving rise to charges that outdated equipment was at fault. But Navy spokesmen pointed out that even the Navy's new F/A-18 high-performance fighter-bomber must slow to subsonic speeds to deliver bombs.

Officials also dismissed the suggestion that because the planes flew at a relatively high 20,000 feet before diving for the attack, they were easier targets than if they had flown the entire mission at low altitudes, as the Israelis often do. On the contrary, said a high-ranking admiral, "if you come in low in daylight, you expose yourself to everyone with a gun."

Other aspects of the raid were harder to explain. The main reason the two planes had been destroyed, said the Navy, was that they encountered unusually intense antiaircraft fire. Yet the strike had been ordered to retaliate for

PEMULDER heavy Syrian fire the day before on a U.S. reconnaissance plane. Despite that warning, Navy officials claimed that the intense antiaircraft fire the next day had caught their pilots by surprise.

The Navy's A-6E, which cost $22 million in 1982 (the A-7E cost $14 million when last procured in 1980), is supposedly equipped with advanced electronics for low-visibility missions.

But a nighttime raid was ruled out on grounds that the pilots could pinpoint

their targets only in daylight. In spite of that, the attack was launched before an early-morning haze masking the Syrian positions had lifted.

Those disadvantages were compounded by a decision to dispatch the 28 planes in a "target rich" stream that gave the Syrian gunners a greater opportunity to adjust their weapons. "It's not so bad if you're the lead plane," says a U.S. pilot with experience in the Viet Nam War, "but if you're number five or eight, or worse, 28, you're going to catch hell." It seems likely that the two downed planes and a third that escaped with minor damage were hit with concentrated bursts of conventional antiaircraft or machine-gun fire, rather than by Soviet-made SA-7 or SA9 heat-seeking missiles, which can easily be deflected by dropping heat balloons. By contrast, Israeli pilots minimize the danger of antiaircraft fire by attacking with smaller strike forces often spread over several hours.

Still, even experienced Israeli officers conceded that a perfect bombing run against Syria's heavily fortified installations was virtually impossible. All the more surprising, therefore, was the U.S. decision to risk an air strike when an alternative was available: shelling the Syrian positions with the 16-in. guns of the battleship New Jersey, cruising off the Lebanese coast well within range of the Syrian targets. A Navy spokesman insisted that a "forward observer," such as a reconnaissance plane, would have been needed to help the battleship's guns zero in on Syria's missile batteries and to minimize civilian casualties. What he was unable to explain was why a reconnaissance plane could not be provided.

The Pentagon has tried to justify the losses from the air strike with the conclusion that the raid was "very successful and achieved our objective" of ending attacks on U.S. reconnaissance flights, which have already resumed. That view is mistaken, according to some military experts familiar with the Middle East. "I'll be surprised if the attack managed to do much lasting damage to Syrian antiaircraft capabilities," said one analyst, who predicted that the Syrians would soon redeploy their batteries. That raises not only the possibility of further strikes from U.S. forces but also the question of how such strikes should be carried out. This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.