It was just the shiny reputation and the novel bureaucracy." 4 Muḥammad Fawzī, Ḥarb al-thalāth sanawāt, 1967-1970: muḏakkirāt al-Farīq Awwal Muḥammad Fawzī, wazīr al-Ḥarbiyya al-asbaq, 5th ed. As for why the Egyptian armed forces didn’t adopt the guerrilla warfare style, no one knows. If we calculated the killed among the hostile tribesmen, who represent the enemy, against the amounts of the consumption of ammunition, bombs, and missiles, we would find that it was the most expensive cost among all the wars in the whole world. Indeed, the sands, the mountains, and the deserts of Yemen swallowed all this excess of ammunition. They were compelled to heavily exceed in using firepower as a show of force and to intimidate and terrorize this adversary. As a result of the impossibility of knowing the reality of this enemy, its powers, and potentialities, the Egyptian combatting uniformed forces experienced plenty of difficulties. It appears and disappears, gathers and deploys day and night. "These Egyptian armed forces, together with new Yemeni brigades and tribesmen allied with the revolution, carried out traditional operations against a weak enemy dispersed everywhere. Another former minister of defense, General Muhammad Fawzi, for his part, blamed military “bureaucracy” for the Egyptian army’s difficulties in Yemen while recalling in his memoir the inability of the army to adapt its fighting strategy and tactics in Yemen to the counterinsurgency model: Many of these challenges bear resemblance to the post-2013 Sinai campaign.įormer Defense Minister Field Marshal Muhammad Abdel Ghani al-Gamasi described the Yemen war in his memoir as a “police operation, which saw our armed forces pitted against irregular troops conducting guerrilla war in the mountains.” 3 Mūḥammad A. Yet, faced with an insurgency for the first time, during the intervention in Yemen where the Egyptian military fought alongside republican forces against Saudi-backed royalists (1963-1967), the Egyptian army exhibited crippling problems. Sirrs, A History of the Egyptian Intelligence Service: A History of the Mukhabarat, 1910-2009, Studies in Intelligence Series (NY/Abingdon: Routledge, 2011), 41 – 43, 111. The military had a long tradition of training guerrillas and conducting commando raids against the British and later the Israelis, in the 1950s and 1960s. its record in counterinsurgency operations is no better, in fact disastrous. If the Egyptian army’s history of conventional warfare has been marred with incompetence, 1 Omar Ashour, How ISIS Fights: Military Tactics in Iraq, Syria, Libya and Egypt (Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP, 2021), 186. A Troubled Past: The Egyptian Army’s Neglect of Counterinsurgency This paper will attempt to answer those questions, but first, it examines some catastrophic precedents where the army deployed its personnel in counterinsurgency operations, before delving into the recent Sinai war and what it tells us about the military’s mindset. Why did the Egyptian military, which had long avoided serious involvement in the police-led 1990s domestic War on Terror and the later fight against armed militants in Sinai, embark on a major counterinsurgency in Sinai following the 2013 coup? Why did it take the Egyptian military almost a decade to pacify the peninsula at a very high cost for Sinai residents and the military itself, despite the small size of the insurgent force and the relatively confined terrain where it operated?
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