THE SOVIET–ISRAELI WAR, 1967–1973ber life rafts. Demands would come in right away from Moscow to file a report for the chief
of staff: where [this occurred], how many guns were firing, how many shells, and what the
Eg yptian and Israeli casualties were.Ultimately, “a group of officers from our General Staff arrived, led by Maj.-Gen.
S.G. Krivoplyasov”—one of those who had badgered the advisers for detailed reports.
“He wanted to convene the senior advisers, but Lashchenko advised him to go to the
canal zone instead, and there to get acquainted with the advisers’ work and lifestyle.
... He wanted to use a radio transmitter, but under the agreement the advisers had
none, nor any car” to transport him. As long as they worked within the mandate
received directly from the Defense Minister and higher up, the advisers were evi-
dently able to pay little more than such contemptuous lip service to the armchair
generals.
Unlike the casualty-conscious Israelis, the Soviets from Lashchenko down saw the
engagements on the canal as live-fire exercises, an essential and routine component of
a long-term program, rather than the start of its ultimate fruition. Malashenko
recorded Lashchenko’s candid report to Nasser that according to conventional crite-
ria Eg ypt already had the necessary numerical advantage to take the offensive, but it
was still unfit to do so. The greatest weakness of the Eg yptian military—despite some
improvement in 1968—was its “low level of moral and psychological conditioning,
its lack of the fighting spirit essential for combat operations.” Defense alone left the
Eg yptian troops passive; many officers preferred classroom to field study; they had to
be “battle hardened.” Every round of actual hostilities was, then, a deliberate object
lesson.^65 Once an Israeli provocation was claimed, as it always was, the advisers did
not require high-level authorization to support the response that had been approved
in advance—and was periodically modified to meet new challenges. On the Israeli
side, it was belatedly realized that “the artillery ‘incidents’ of September–October
1968 were apparently a sort of trial run, a preliminary to the utilization of a limited
military option” that was decided upon shortly after the Six-Day War.^66
One such aspect of the 8 September duel was ignored in previous studies, even
after a few details about it emerged in the 1970s: the appearance of what seemed to
be a formidable new weapon on the Israeli side, and the Soviets’ effort to counter it.
One of the advisers’ regular tasks was to obtain and examine specimens of advanced
enemy hardware—both for use in refining the Soviets’ own arsenal and in order to
devise responses on the ground. At the end of June 1968, artillery expert Karpov was
summoned to inspect an unexploded Israeli rocket of a hitherto unfamiliar 216mm
model, which had “left a big crater” when it was first used a few days before.
In respect of the access granted to the Soviets, this invitation in itself marked a con-
siderable improvement since the Six-Day War. In June ’67, the GRU rezident in Cairo
had barely persuaded the Eg yptians not to “saw up” a state-of-the-art Israeli air-to-air
missile which had landed intact, but rather to hand it over for immediate shipment to