Strategic Weightlessness

This week’s issue includes an analysis of Egypt’s absence from the tripartite regional military alliance and reports on transport safety, the growing business empire of the Future of Egypt agency, capital punishment, and the secret military’s VIP jet.

I was interviewed by Jadaliyya about my book. I was also honored to appear on the New Books Network podcast, which happens to be among my favorite audio shows.

Mada Masr presents Egypt’s absence from the Saudi-Turkish-Pakistani Mecca Joint Defense Agreement primarily as strategic hedging: Cairo will not subordinate itself to a Saudi-led bloc, jeopardize relations with the UAE, Greece, or India, or join a non-Arab security framework. Those calculations are real, but they obscure a more humiliating reason. Under Sisi, Egypt has lost much of the strategic and military capacity needed to make alliance membership credible.

Because of its creed and over-diversified arms procurement, Egypt’s military suffers from deep structural problems that cripple its interoperability and its capacity to execute combined arms operations. The country’s mixed American, French, Russian, Chinese, and German arsenals create parallel training, maintenance, communications, and command systems.

This is why the Rafale detachment recently sent to the UAE has had no operational role and was only for show. This is why Egyptian aircraft participating in the 2015 Saudi-led Yemen campaign were sent home a year later after communications, guided-munitions, ground-control, and aerial-refueling problems made them difficult, even hazardous, to integrate into coalition operations.

Cairo is deeply concerned about the war’s domestic and economic fallout. A drone strike at Damietta has already demonstrated Egypt’s vulnerability, yet the government has not publicly identified the attacker.

So this is hardly a strategic masterstroke. Sisi stays on the sidelines because he has very little to offer. Joining such an alliance would only expose Egypt’s weightlessness: an economically vulnerable regime, a military designed for domestic control, and forces unable to operate effectively with supposed allies.