[kevin]

SAMs were able to deny Israeli air superiority in the first couple days. Note this is not the same as having air superiority themselves, the sky was a no-man's land. There are two different reasons this changes.

On the Golan front, the Syrians just plain ran out of SA-6 missles. The SA-6 didn't set-off Israeli EWR and were smokeless. They didn't have enough of them. After SA-6 ran-out, Israel had no trouble neutralizing SA-2's.

The Sinai was different due to Egyptian tactics. (Brief History Lesson) Israel figured Egpyt would try to take the entire Sinai Peninsula. So they deployed their armored forces back, with the intent of counter-attacking. Egypt bamboozled them. They decided to only take the canal a few miles and then stop and dig-in. They had an advanced, fixed SAM shield. Of course the initial Israeli counter-attacks were uncoordinated, CAS was destroyed, no arty, the tank brigades ran into a wall of armor and ATGM.

Just when everything was going great, Egpyt screwed up. Syria was getting its *** kicked so they pressured Egpyt to open up the southern front. They also faced political pressure from the Soviets to gain results. (The Soviets also wanted to observe mobile ATGM tacctics.) Egpyt launched armored attacks that just plain out ran the range of their SAM system. This was the battle of maneuver that Israel wanted and, with their excellent small unit leadership capability, just tore up Egpyt.