Predator Read Online Free

especially aeronautics, the best work and the best ideas were produced not by large organizations—especially those influenced by politics—but by small teams of talented people working hand in hand toward common goals.
    Karem’s belief in teams stemmed from his youth, when Israel was still a vibrant work in progress, a magnet for Jewish idealists, and a dynamic dream coming true for Jews the world over. He fondly remembered how, in those days, younger members of the fresh and still fragile Jewish state teemed with plans and hopes for building a new society, a fundamentally good civilization, and a sanctuary for the Jewish people after centuries of persecution and a Holocaust whose extent was still being revealed. His high school home room teacher for four years, a tail gunner in a British bomber during World War II, preached that the Jews would survive and secure their freedom only if they lived one for all and all for one. The young counselor who advised Abe’s chapter of the Aero Club stressed the importance of members helping one another with their designs. At IAI, Karem had been a rapidly rising star, but after proving several times that he could do major work faster and better with fewer people and save the taxpayers money at the same time, he found his efficiency rewarded mainly by resistance. One executive even reproached and threatened him for telling the Air Force that the modification of a particular fighter plane could be done in one year instead of the three IAI had estimated, saving two million out of the three million man-hours of labor the company was planning to commit to the project.
    By January 1974, Karem was fed up, and after running the idea past friends in the Air Force he announced that he was leaving IAI in May to start his own company. After he invited a handful of his favorite engineers to come along, an IAI vice president called Karem into his office.
    â€œAbe, we all love you,” the man said. “We owe you a lot. But we had a meeting about you forming your own company, and we decided we are going to crush you. So don’t do it.”
    â€œWhy?” Karem asked. “You are seventeen thousand people, and I’m going to be what, five hundred?” At the time, Karem hoped to build a company that would be about that size.
    Size didn’t matter, the vice president said, but “every time we’re going to propose something, they will say, ‘But Abe will do it faster and cheaper,’ and we’re not going to have that.”
    As Karem later learned, the warning was friendly, but the threat wasn’t idle.
    *   *   *
    The clash between Karem’s brash ways and the realities of IAI kindled his decision to leave the company, but something else was at work as well. The task of designing that radar-tricking glide decoy had led Karem to look at things in a new light. When he did, he had an epiphany.
    The decoy he designed for IAI was primitive; in fact, it would have been less capable than the remote-control target drones used since the 1930s to train fighter pilots and antiaircraft units. But while thinking about the problem the decoy was meant to solve, Karem realized that an unmanned aircraft with the right capabilities could do far more than merely trick SAM batteries into revealing their locations. A remotely controlled drone armed with antitank missiles and designed to loiter in the sky for hours at a time could be one way to defeat—or, better yet, deter—another invasion of Israel.
    Geography had forced Egypt’s tanks to mass as they funneled through holes blasted in defensive embankments to cross the Suez Canal and enter the Sinai Peninsula. “Looking at that,” Karem recalled years later, “I said, if we are right on top of this high concentration of forces, you can throw some missiles at them. They will say, ‘This is not a good day,’ and back off, and we are not killing that many people.