THE EXCLUSIVE DOMAIN OF OUTSIDERS?
by Luby Prytulak
You are at www.twelvebytwelve.net/balloons/balloons.html
Email comments to: lubyprytulak@yahoo.com
First posted 03 April 2013 05:32pm, last edited 04 May 2013 10:24am
The account below attempts to encourage radical innovation in education by amplifying a theme introduced in Explicit Transformational Syllabus (XTS) — that seemingly complex and intractable problems sometimes have simple solutions, as was exemplified in the simple solving of seemingly impossible area problems and in the simple solving of seemingly impossible educational problems. The account below, then, amplifies the same theme by detailing another example, that of the simple solving of the seemingly complex and intractable problem of having 102 of one's warplanes shot down by surface-to-air missiles.
Such belief in the possibility of simple solutions to complex problems needs to be encouraged because all of our educational problems do seem complex, and because simple solutions are the only ones that have any chance of being implemented, and the only ones that society can afford.
To begin, then, in the 1973 Yom Kippur War (alternatively known as the October War or the War of Atonement), Israel suffered heavy losses of aircraft to Soviet surface-to-air missiles (SAMs), as is recollected by Major-General Chaim Herzog:
[Col.] Yair saw Israeli planes coming in to stem the advancing masses [of tanks], but one after the other they were shot down before his eyes. [p. 79] Chaim Herzog, The War of Atonement: October 1973, Little, Brown and Company, Boston and Toronto, 1975.] |
The view from the other side of the conflict is typified by Mohammed Omadi:
It was wonderful to see all those Israeli planes shot down by our missiles — their air force was supposed to be even better than the Americans'. I was really proud. Robert Keatley, Wall Street Journal 11-Apr-1974 |
Although the war formally ended with the ceasefire of 25-Oct-1973, hostilities continued on a lower scale. For example, 02-Apr-1974 marked the 22nd consecutive day of tank and artillery duels with Syrian forces on the Golan Heights. Surprisingly, though, Israeli warplanes were nowhere to be seen throughout the post-ceasefire fighting. For some six months, the Israeli Air Force absented itself from all combat. The Syrians, emboldened by Israeli losses during the war, and by Israel's unprecedented absence from the skies, were increasingly menacing, and the Israelis increasingly concerned:
Responding to reports of substantial Syrian reinforcement of their frontline units, the Cabinet convened an extraordinary Sabbath-eve session to hear reports on the situation from Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and the top army command. Military sources said that Israel's forces would remain on full alert over the weekend. New York Times, 06-Apr-1974, p. 5 |
But what Syria had not anticipated, and what ultimately dampened its renewed bellicosity, is that during the Israeli Air Force's six-month absence, it had undergone a transformation, a transformation which began to be field-tested on 03-Apr-1974 with the resumption of overflights, and put to a tougher test three days later, on 06-Apr-1974, by Israeli resumption of bombings, neither of which occasioned any Israeli losses. The Israeli Air Force had regained its invulnerability, and has kept it ever since.
So, what happened? What new protective envelope had Israel wrapped around its warplanes?
Perhaps the answer begins with a 26-Oct-1973 letter sent to Israeli Defense Minister Moshe Dayan and five other Israeli officials.
An Israeli reply to the above had not been expected. From the Israeli point of view, if the heat-balloons idea was meritless, any communication with its originator would only encourage his submission of additional meritless ideas; and if the idea did have merit, acknowledging that it did would increase the probability that the originator might bruit it about, thereby decreasing Israeli lead time. But despite expectations, a reply was received from Dr. M. Simhi, Head of Radar and Electronic Countermeasures:
Additional letters were written, the one to Dr. Simhi shown below recommending a foam variant of the heat balloons idea, and others to American officials on the same subjects and further variations thereof not reproduced here:
And the result seems to have been that heat balloons came into use six months after my original 26-Oct-1973 proposal, and four months after Dr Simhi's 24-Dec-1973 reply, illustrating how quickly an idea can be implemented when the need is urgent:
Toronto Star 20-Apr-1974
Globe and Mail 20-Apr-1974
Time 02-Dec-1974
Time 08-Jun-1981
And seven years after the mailing of my 10-Jul-1974 foam suggestion I came across what looked like its realization. As my perusing of the media has always been cursory and sporadic, an appearance of an implementation such as this one usually should not be taken to be a first appearance.
New York Times 05-Nov-1983
It is not merely the case that heat balloons were initially tested but quickly supplanted — more than nine years after their first deployment they were still in use, as evidenced by the four articles immediately below:
New York Times 17-Nov-1983
Prescott Arizona Courier 04-Dec-1983
French Super Etendard fighter-bombers are equipped with "scarlet heat balloons" too.
New York Times 05-Dec-1983
Of course Americans are privy to all this information, and share its benefits. The downing by Soviet SA-7 missiles of both an Israeli Kfir and an American A-7E Corsair brings to mind the recognition that without constant fine-tuning and upgrading, weaponry begins to fail.
Globe and Mail 04-May-1984
"Infrared grenades" creating a hot screen to protect against heat-seeking missiles sounds very much like an offshoot of the foam variant. Use in protecting tanks was explicitly suggested in my letter of 26-Oct-1973.
Globe and Mail 28-Nov-1984
Showing surface-to-air missiles being launched, but unable to find their targets the way they had been finding them during the Yom Kippur War.
Wall Street Journal 12-Jan-1989
So-called "flares" sound like offshoots of the foam variant. Igniting balloon or foam was suggested in my later letters that are not reproduced above.
And turning to the Internet for more current developments, it becomes evident from the reports below that approaching 29 years after first deployment, heat balloons continue to play an integral role not only in Israeli aerial warfare, but in all aerial warfare.
The citizens of Lebanon may have seen more heat balloons in their skies than any other people on earth. Extracted from an 08-Mar-1999 letter from the Lebanese United Nations Representative to the United Nations Secretary-General
unispal.un.org/~ are the following mentions:
03-Feb-1999 Between 1300 and 1525 hours Israeli warplanes overflew the South at various altitudes. They dropped heat balloons in the Tyre area and carried out mock attacks in the Iqlim al-Tuffah area. |
The report immediately below is especially significant for revealing that the SAMs do not explode upon contact with the "heat balloons", but rather become disoriented, which is what would be expected from a foam variant "spitting in the missile's eye", as had been recommended in the second Prytulak letter to Dr. M. Simhi, dated 10-Jul-1974:
Capturing the News: Three Decades of Reporting Crisis and Conflict |
One more indication that the use of heat balloons might be better described as ceaseless than intermittent:
War Memories: No More Iffs.. Israelis, You Are STUCK !! |
The Aleppo University explosions of 15-Jan-2013 in the midst of the Syrian Civil War have been variously attributed, one explanation being that they were caused by SAMs diverted from their targets by heat balloons, from which can incidentally be inferred that Russian-supplied MIGS now also come equipped with heat balloons:
Dozens Killed as Explosions Hit Syrian University  Explosions erupted at Aleppo University as students were taking exams on Tuesday. The attack's source was unclear.
[...] One student said that insurgent fighters just outside Aleppo who apparently were armed with a heat-seeking missile fired it at a MIG fighter, that the pilot dropped a heat balloon as an evasive tactic, and that the missile followed the balloon and then exploded near a military post adjacent to the university dormitories. That account, however, did not explain the second explosion. |
The following two reports are the most recent that have been found to date:
Israeli Aircraft Drop Heat Balloons Off Naqoura 
Israeli aircraft on Monday released scarlet heat balloons over Lebanon's regional waters, in the first such violation in around a year. "Israeli warplanes dropped more than 30 scarlet heat balloons between Naqoura and Tyre within two hours," state-run National News Agency reported. Meanwhile, LBCI television said Israeli warplanes fired "five flare bombs over the sea off Tyre's coast." Earlier on Monday, the Lebanese army issued statements about a series of violations of Lebanese airspace by Israeli jets. Israel has escalated its flights over Lebanon in recent weeks. |
Israel Warplanes fly over Tyr, Drops Tens of Heat Balloons |
We have already seen above in the case of the Aleppo University explosions that MIGs now also come equipped with heat balloons.
A plane is most vulnerable to SAM attack when it has bottomed out and beginning to climb — which therefore is when it is most profitable to spew out its decoys.
An incongruity that is apparent in the image opposite, and even more so in the corresponding video, as well as in the case immediately below, is that although both are published with reference to "balloons" in their titles, the decoys released look more like flares. Perhaps in the early days it really was "balloons" that were released, and the label persists to this day even though they have become more like flares.
My initial proposal of 26-Oct-1973 envisioned a large-volume decoy on the information that a SAM might be either heat-seeking or radar-guided or both, and therefore when radar-guided would be most attracted to a large and radar-reflecting decoy. At the same time, it was anticipated that whatever decoy characteristics were preferred would be dictated by the characteristics of the SAMs that needed to be diverted. If it is the case today that SAMs are mainly heat-seeking, perhaps because countermeasures against radar-guided SAMs are implemented by alternative means, let us say electronic ones, then today's needed decoys would be designed to generate heat without need of large volume, which would explain their looking more like flares than balloons.
Whatever the case, it seems to be a fair generalization that prior to the first mention of "heat balloons" in the Toronto Star as well as Globe and Mail reports of 20-Apr-1974 reproduced above, no warplanes anywhere, not in the Yom Kippur War and not in the more protracted Vietnamese War before it, were dropping anything in their wakes in response to, or in anticipation of, SAM attack, whereas today all warplanes are.
No reason to restrict decoys to jet aircraft. The short streak pointing downward toward 5 o'clock is the helicopter.
The title assigned to this video seems to suggest that the decoys are being mistaken for incendiary bombs.
SAF MiG Rains Phosphorus Bombs
This Syrian Air Force MIG twice deploys packets of four decoys.
As is suggested by the title published with this video, decoys may be commonly mistaken for incendiary bombs. But if the brilliant objects shown being released were intended to start fires at ground level, it would be a waste of their fuel to ignite them at high altitudes. And if this MIG had been responsible for the distant ground-explosion plume shown toward the end of the video, that explosion must have been made by a bomb dropped well before the plane's decoys were released.
The reader might wonder whether there is an answer to the question of how the idea of strewing decoys in a warplane's wake came to me. The question does have an answer. In the first place, I read an article in a popular magazine — I think it was Esquire, but I have been unable to track it down — on aerial dogfighting, from which I extracted the conclusion that whichever plane positioned itself behind its opponent won. In the second place, "travelling behind" occupies a unique place in my consciousness, as I am acutely sensitive to exhaust fumes, and so when I drive I am constantly striving to escape being behind an exhaust-spewing vehicle, which is pretty much every vehicle — if I find myself in such a position I attempt to either fall back or pass. When I drive, in other words, I view the rear position as disadvantageous and therefore strive to accomplish exactly the opposite of what a pilot in a dogfight tries to accomplish. "Behind" to me signifies, to use an oater expression, eating the dust of whoever is in front. Putting two and two together, I viewed the lagging, and therefore victorious, warplane as nevertheless occupying a vulnerable position, fated to crash into whatever the leading airplane chooses to leave in its wake. If enabled to jettison the right sort of debris, it would be the lead plane that would win the dogfight. A missile too tends to deliver its payload when it approaches from the rear. In this frame of mind, the image of the targetted warplane jettisoning missile-damaging, or missile-incapacitating, or missile-attracting material is readily evoked.
It is inevitable that a weapons system will fall into both good hands and evil, will be directed towards just ends and unjust, and will be used sometimes responsibly and at other times recklessly. The single conclusion relevant here is that a weapons system of proven worth can be invented by an observer lacking conventional credentials.
One Yom Kipppur moral, then, is that the multi-billion dollar war industries of the US and Israel had been unable to see a solution that seemed obvious to someone outside the industry, someone in fact who had never studied either engineering or weaponry. Keeping this Yom Kippur moral in mind makes it possible to envision a happy ending to the contemporary — and historical — underperformance of the education sector. That happy ending would be the realization that professional educators are so deeply entrenched in their traditional practices as to be blind to the simple and powerful innovations standing ready to catapult education from least to most productive of all sectors, and that the multi-billion dollar educational-testing industry is blind to solutions to its problems that seem obvious to outsiders. Educational reform may be expected to follow the evolutionary path evident in the heat-balloons example — once highly-motivated reformers are located and engaged, a brief interval of infrastructure development will be followed by initial deployment, and a few years later everybody will be following suit, almost forgetting that there had existed a time when tools so indispensable lay unused.