Wednesday, October 6, 1999     26 Tishri 5760   Updated Wed., Oct. 06 11:49
Egypt the new enemy?
http://www.jpost.com/Features/Article-38.html
By ARIEH O'SULLIVAN

(August 13) -- The army doesn't want to say it out loud, but behind closed doors the IDF is changing its attitude about Egypt --

This past spring, the Egyptian Armed Forces made a deal to purchase 10,800 rounds of 120mm smoothbore KEW-A1 ammunition for its M1A1 battle tanks. Just another arms purchase in the Middle East, only the KEW-A1 is a new version of the armor-piercing "silver bullet" made out of depleted uranium and said to be able to defeat any armor system on earth.

The US used the depleted uranium rounds with deadly efficiency in the Gulf War, where 4,000 Iraqi tanks and armored vehicles were destroyed and battlefields are still ticking with radioactivity, according to the Christian Science Monitor.

The DU rounds have long been in the IDF's arsenal, the Christian Science Monitor says. But now that Egypt is getting them, well, that's probably enough to make the boys in IDF intelligence sit up, not to mention the crews of Israel's vaunted Merkava tanks.

Twenty years of "cold peace" have never eliminated the deep-rooted insecurities and mutual distrust between the IDF and Egyptian armed forces. While the peace treaty has given the IDF some breathing space in its planning, the military has never taken its eye off our southern neighbor and war plans still call for a hefty reserve force to be set aside for dealing with Egypt, no matter where the confrontation breaks out.

THE tank-round deal came after the Clinton administration agreed to sell Egypt a $3 billion arms package that included 24 advanced F-16D fighter jets, 200 more M1 Abrams tanks (to be assembled in Egypt) and a PAC-3 Patriot air-defense missile system that even Israel hasn't received yet. Like Israel, Egypt will use its annual $1.3 billion US military aid to pay for the weapons.

Actually, since 1979, Egypt has received more than $35 billion in US military aid and economic assistance and spent some $25 billion on arms. It's armed forces are midway through a 10-year modernization plan and nearly half of its 3,100 tanks are Western, including 555 M1s, according to Jane's World Armies.

Eleven of its 12 divisions are now fully mechanized or armored and it has cut its army personnel from about 600,000 to 310,000 over the past 20 years, carrying through efforts to build a mobile and efficient force, according to Jane's.

But Egypt's most impressive achievement has been its air force, which the Middle East Military Balance described as undergoing "the most far-reaching transformation of any air arm in the Middle East."

Egypt has about 200 F-16s of the advanced C and D class and some two dozen Mirage 2000 interceptors. The rest of its air force is an assortment of older MiG 21s, F-4s and old Mirage fighters.

"Egyptian aircraft are equipped with such interception-enhancement precision-guided munitions systems as infrared and advanced electromagnetic missiles, which Israeli aircraft do not have," the Military Balance writes.

It added that the Egyptian air force was a "potent deterrence" and that Israel would have to take Egypt into consideration even if it was not directly involved in hostilities on another front. It also noted that Egypt's air power had the capability to block Mediterranean or Red Sea shipping routes, a factor which cannot be lost on historians who know that the '56 and '67 wars with Egypt were started as a result of a sea blockade on the Jewish state.

The Egyptian navy, too, is considered the most powerful in the Eastern Mediterranean. It recently acquired four Perry-class frigates and its corvettes are armed with SM-1 standard surface-to-air missiles, MK-46 anti-submarine torpedoes and some have anti-ship Harpoon missiles that are actually more advanced than those in the Israeli navy. Its large vessels enable the Egyptian navy to transport large numbers of forces to distant places.

WHILE other navies around the world, like the Indonesian navy, have purchased sophisticated equipment only to see it rust because they did not have the properly trained personnel to operate it, Egypt is not believed to suffer from that problem.

Egypt, of course, has had surface-to-surface missiles since early 1973 and has two missile brigades today, one with Scud Bs and the other with FROG-7s. Some reports say that Egypt has acquired the Scud C, which puts anywhere in Israel under its range.

Israeli commanders describe the improvements undertaken by the Egyptian military as nothing less than "amazing" and "scary."

A few years ago, Egypt was a very marginal actor in the IDF threat assessment. But slowly Egypt has been moving front and center, and its increasingly sophisticated and Western military today represents, on paper, the biggest conventional military danger to the IDF - a status derived from an IDF decision to take into account the risk of a possible conflagration with Egypt.

IDF commanders are reluctant to speak publicly of the Egyptian arms buildup since the two countries are formally at peace. But privately they have expressed concern over the aggressive character of the buildup.

The IDF is caught in a double bind. It sees the Egyptian army preparing to fight, yet is hesitant to call Egypt an enemy out of fear of turning it into one.

"It is unlikely that Egypt is developing this gigantic system against Libya and Sudan. What worries those in the military is the level of intention and the direction the Egyptian military buildup is taking. Most of all is the fact that peace remains thin and is largely a government-to-government interaction," says Shai Feldman, head of Tel Aviv University's Jaffee Center for Strategic Studies.

"There is another problem," says Feldman. "Risks of this kind have always been associated with self-fulfilling prophecies."

"This is precisely why dialogue between security establishments is so important. This is why we have formally and informally been pleading for a security dialogue with the Egyptians. We have it with the Jordanians. We don't have it with the Egyptians," he says.

Scars run deep in military intelligence. Following the 1973 Yom Kippur War, IDF commanders sidelined intelligence assessments - which failed miserably to predict the surprise attack - and roughly asked for the facts: Don't tell us what you think they are going to do, just tell us what they have. But this gruff attitude didn't last long. Peace was made and "intention" and "probability" returned to the lexicon.

PROF. Barry Rubin, deputy director of the Begin-Sadat Center for Strategic Studies at Bar-Ilan University, said that over the past decade Israel has gone through an important doctrinal change in the way it defines its chief threats.

"One of the basic fallacies in military thinking is: 'There must be a threat. What is the best candidate for a threat? Obviously the Egyptians are in the best shape of any Arab military in the Middle East. Therefore it is a threat.' This kind of thinking is dangerous and counterproductive," Rubin said.

Today, there is a need to prove that a neighboring force poses a clear and present danger.

The main clear and present danger for Israel today, consensus holds, is from a non-neighboring state like Iran using weapons of mass destruction, probably with medium-range ballistic missiles.

Nevertheless, no military man likes watching Egypt spend $1.3 billion a year for modern weapons. Still, IDF intelligence believes that Egypt has no clear interest in a war with Israel.

Some IDF circles even believe that Egypt's strong strategic relationship with the US creates a sense of dependence in Cairo and injects conservatism.

"The probability of war with Egypt," they say, "is close to zero." But this could change if:

1. Israel goes to war with Syria and Egypt sees this as Israeli aggression. It could then join in an Arab coalition against Israel.

2. A full-scale conflict erupts between Israel and the Palestinians - a more probable scenario - leading to total chaos, lots of bloodshed and possible damage to holy sites, which will put the entire Mideast peace process at risk. It's expected in intelligence circles that Egypt, which blazed the trail to peace with the Jewish state and suffered isolation because of it, would step in firmly on the Palestinians' side.

3. A fundamentalist coup occurs in Egypt, an uncontrollable event.

ALTHOUGH Egypt is a more secular state than other Moslem-dominated countries, the clash between Islamic fundamentalism and more moderate influences poses a serious threat to the country's internal stability. With no clear successor to President Hosni Mubarak, the potential for instability there remains high, creating even more uncertainty. And despite the peace treaty, the Egyptian army has been putting heavy emphasis on offensive training.

In 1996, the Egyptian Armed Forces fielded some 35,000 personnel in its largest military exercise since the peace agreement was signed. Known as "Badr 96," it included a simulated crossing of the Suez Canal. The Egyptian declaration that the enemy fit the profile of Israel caused consternation here, where there has been simmering concern over Egypt's ambitious military modernization program, largely funded by US aid.

Also, while busily preparing itself for offensive action with imaginary goals, the Egyptians have been quietly abusing, some say violating, the peace treaty with Israel. The past two years in particular have seen a "drastic upturn" in violations, one senior IDF commander said. For example, the one division allowed in the Sinai peninsula is actually a skeleton of four divisions which could quickly be filled up like a water balloon should hostilities break out. Bridgeheads have also been constructed on the east bank of the canal.

This is why intelligence officers are asking themselves whether Egypt is the new enemy.

But even complaining about the violations isn't easy. "The Americans are telling us 'Stop! You are drawing skeletons on the walls. The Egyptians are getting angry about it,' " said one senior intelligence source.

The IDF has never given up on its doctrine to plan for a two-front conventional war. But its desire to retire some of the old tanks in its inventory is hampering its flexibility, made even more complicated by the latest Egyptian behavior.

The IDF today holds two low-readiness armored divisions opposite Sinai. But IDF draw plans call for Israel to hold back another three divisions from another front to be shifted against Egyptian forces moving on Israel, according to Jane's Intelligence Review.

EGYPT'S modernization has also presented the IDF with a scenario it never had to face in the past. In all previous conflicts, the IDF's half indigenous/half US-bought weaponry was usually superior to that of the Arab enemy. With Egypt's increasingly Western armor, air force and navy, any future confrontation could pit similar Western weapons against each other for the first time in any Arab-Israeli conflict.

In such a case, the training of the personnel will prove vital. The IDF admits that winning air superiority against the Egyptians would be "very problematic."

OC Air Force Maj.-Gen. Eitan Ben-Eliyahu, hinting at a new Egyptian threat, said at a June 27 briefing with military reporters that the Air Force was taking into account the influx of advanced aircraft, both Western and Russian, into the Middle East. "This factor has obligated us to significantly change our entire air combat tactics," Ben-Eliyahu said.

Most people do not believe that the IDF is sophisticated enough to have concocted a new adversary out of Egypt as a ploy to win more defense funding from the government. Rubin notes, however, that the current view of Egypt could be used by the IDF to reprioritize or distribute its funding.

"On the other hand," Rubin says. "This is a healthy thing because people were mistakenly crying wolf about Syria. And as [former defense minister Moshe] Arens correctly pointed out, Syria is not so much of a threat because of their weaknesses. It is healthy to focus away from Syria."

Feldman believes that just because Egypt is gearing up to counter Israel it can be considered a threat. "Both Egypt and Israel are central players in this region and it is for this reason you have to have some military might behind you," Feldman says.

Arms buildup is a two-way street too. "It is quite understandable that an Egyptian gets up in the morning and sees the Israeli arsenal being assembled. They hear from Israel that it is not against them, but how do you convince them?" Feldman says. "Israelis said after '73 that they can't afford to rely on intelligence analyses but rather on the capabilities of the enemy. The Egyptians can say the same. They can say: 'We accept all of your assurances, but we have to respond to [your capabilities].' "

"We are justified in being concerned just as much as the Egyptians are concerned with Israel's alleged nuclear capability. The Egyptian army is growing and modernizing and we can't ignore that. They have very weak enemies that can't rationalize this buildup. But at the same time you can't deduce that from this buildup it will go and attack Israel," Feldman says.

Even if this assessment were to change, possibly for some of the reasons mentioned above, there appears to be little the IDF can do other than brace for an attack from inside its borders.

The entry of Egyptian forces into the demilitarized Sinai is a violation of the peace agreement, but it is not a casus belli. The entry of Israeli forces in the Sinai, on the other hand, is a cause for war.

MOST IDF commanders believe that a preemptive strike would be out of the question since its military benefits would be greatly diminished by its political disadvantages. It also runs the risk of intelligence mistaking an innocent force buildup as having aggressive intentions. And a preemptive strike, which is losing legitimacy around the world, would paint Israel as the aggressor and turn the conflict into a war of choice, something the IDF knows the public would be loath to accept.

Even if a limited war did break out against the Egyptians, the IDF insists that it has no desire to subjugate Egypt or even reconquer all of Sinai. Its goal in any war would be to make sure no Egyptian troops remained on Israeli soil, gain a foothold in the Sinai, push the Egyptian army back over the Suez Canal and maintain the ability to renew fighting. The main goal would be to avoid a war of attrition.

Such talk seems anachronistic and far away, particularly in light of the optimism that peace may break out with Syria and the Palestinians. But this is how the army is thinking and preparing for the future. No one in the IDF appears to have lost sight of the fact that we live in the Middle East.

In 1980, the IDF suddenly sent pilots to the US to train on the advanced F-16. Israel had been slated to receive the sleek fighter jet only in 1982, but the delivery was unexpectedly moved up two years when new planes became available. It seems that the F-16s had been ordered and built for the shah of Iran, a close US ally. But after his overthrow by Islamic fundamentalists the US diverted the jets to Israel.

For intelligence officers, it was a lesson never to be forgotten; that the distance between a close ally and a fundamentalist Islamic regime is just so short.