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DETERMINED TO AVOID THE central strategic miscalculation of what the Jews call the Yom Kippur War and the Arabs call the Ramadan War, the planners in Iran early on discovered they must choose from two modes of attack. In 1973, the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Iraq, together with contingents from Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Libya, Algeria, Tunisia, Pakistan, Sudan, Cuba, and North Korea, converged on Israel on the holiest day of the Jewish year, when all shops, offices, and businesses were closed, most of the population was fasting at home or in the synagogue, the country’s well-organized bus system closed down, its trains sat in their marshaling yards and no vehicular traffic was on the roadways. On this day even Israeli Arabs made sure not to drive, at least not through Jewish neighborhoods. The IDF whittled itself down to a skeleton force as soldiers and reservists found their way to a day of fasting, prayer and reflection at home.

On any other day, the reservists who make up the bulk of Israel’s armed forces would have been scattered and the roads so congested with traffic it would have taken hours for pilots to reach their planes, tank crews their tanks, sailors their vessels. Israel’s telephone system would already have been at peak capacity. The extra usage as parents called their children, as officers and enlisted personnel called their units, would have turned the national communications grid into one long busy signal.

Instead, when the sirens went off on Yom Kippur, there was not a man, woman, or child in Israel who thought it might be a drill. Phone calls were put through immediately. Reservists drove on near-deserted roads at one hundred miles an hour to reach their bases. Tanks and military vehicles used the same wide-open roads to meet the enemy attack and hold it until the reserves arrived to back them up. Were it not for the strategic blunder of an attack on the least effective day of the year, Israel might well have been destroyed in 1973.

General Niroomad’s planners spent months dissecting that day. They concluded that only two modes of approach were possible: a daylight attack that would have the Israel war machine tied up in traffic jams, or a nighttime attack benefiting from surprise. In the end the element of surprise, supported by fifth columnists to neutralize the Israel Air Force, won out. But the Iranians knew a night attack would find resistance from the Muslim armies: by tradition or preference or just fear of the dark, Arabs had never favored fighting at night. Even T.E. Lawrence could not convince his faithful Bedouins to attack before dawn.

Recognizing this lapse, during the British Mandate an officer in His Majesty’s forces sympathetic to the Jewish cause organized the first Jewish commando since the days of the Maccabees. Major Orde Wingate knew what he was doing when he called his outfit the Special Night Squads. In Israel’s War of Independence, IDF units became adept at taking back during the night what had been lost to overwhelming Arab forces during the day. But now the Iranians had a solution: the starlight scope, which sucks in available ambient light from even a moonless night and concentrates it to create a ghostly green-tinged image of what cannot be seen with the naked eye.

Armed with the SLS, not only Arab officers but entire units could proceed as though in daylight. SLS devices could be mounted in Egyptian, Iraqi, Syrian, and Jordanian tanks, on sniper rifles, on mobile artillery, even on trucks and armored personnel carriers. The question was: where could these instruments be obtained in massive numbers?

Though the West maintains constant satellite surveillance of the arms factories of the People’s Republic of China, no Western nation bothers monitoring the center of optics manufacture at Wuhan in Hubei Province—who cares if the Chinese are suddenly a good deal more myopic? In return for the usual guarantees of access to Middle East oil, China provided Iran, and through Iran the Arab armies, with a secret weapon that was hardly secret. SLS devices had been part of every armed conflict since the Vietnam War, but they had never been used strategically.

Now the Arabs are no longer afraid of the dark. What does it matter if the IDF is better trained, better organized, and more intensely motivated than any fighting force in history? Compared to his enemy, the Israeli soldier is blind.