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@limburger – Mavericks in the Yom Kippur War:
Dude you are right on this. I was a little skeptical (let’s face it, Wikipedia is not a “source”) but poking around other sources including USAF and Janes … yes, it was definitely used in Yom Kippur. These were brand new at the time, entering service in mid-1972 and already exported to non-NATO allies by 1973?
I would suspect these were shipped over hurriedly after the war started as part of Operation Nickle Grass. This is when the US emergency-air lifted 20,000+ tons of supplies to Israeli in the midst of the Yom Kippur War, including aircraft and high-tech items that would eventually help them counter the Egyptian and Syrian SAM threat. I would suspect (I don’t know for sure) that this is where the Maverick came in, and could well have been a temporary feature in the IAF, at least until later in the 1970s or early 1980s when the Maverick became more widespread. At the time, though, the Maverick was the newest of the new, the absolute “silver bullet” that probably provided decisive or at least very helpful in knocking key links out of Syrian and Egyptian air defense networks that had, until this point, largely removed the IAF from the war,
http://www.airforcemag.com/MagazineArchive/Pages/2016/July%202016/The-Yom-Kippur-Airlift.aspx