Naif al Hilali
FULL MEMBER
- Joined
- Nov 5, 2016
- Messages
- 324
- Reaction score
- 24
- Country
- Location
Bismillah ir Rahman ar RaheemMy only comment looking at the inventory of Egypt AF is that it is multisourced and very varied. It can potwntially be a maintenance nightmare. What are your thoughts.
A
Yo have to look at it in the light of their history; short-changed delivery of some neutered weapon systems from their one ally in past wars and the ensuing distrust of weapons suppliers in general (notwithstanding the sourcing and stocking of complete arsenals from the US in the post-Camp David Saadat and Mubarak eras - the coffers and force inventories were pretty depleted at the beginning of that decade-and-a-half era and they wanted to appease their new masters; the huge amount of US aid money and local assembly was salivating but ended up making them mostly dependent on a single source once again).
Sissi in particular is extremely paranoid and very wary of the US, Turkey, and Saudi Arabia. He would practically sell the country to buy exorbitantly-priced French arms (even in extremely limited numbers) so that he may have something operational in the air, on the ground, (and now on the seas) to combat whomever will try to topple him both from within and without.
The Saudis have traditionally bought a lot of junk - French AMX tanks, British Lightning and Tornado ADV interceptors, etc. - so that they might have something, hopefully half their inventory available, in case they need to go to a war not sanctioned by their US overlords. If they could, they would expand beyond US and Great Britain to include more French and Italian arms in their purchases (Switzerland, Sweden ,and Germany are currently becoming no-gos for them; Spain seems OK; the Russian almost-romance did not quite take).
The current Saudi defense minister, the King's son, is actually more encouraging in what he seems to want to do so far - source and invest in technology acquisition and local manufacture. The scrapping of the over-priced and useless US Littoral Combat Ships was a promising first step. Their self-reliance mantra seem to be encouraging Qatar and the UAE along the same path also.
Looking at things from the perspective of disciplined forces such as the Turkish and Pakistani armed forces who meticulously maintain their inventory and tend to want to reduce their logistics footprint and superfluous equipment support requirements so that they can actually fight a war without getting hobbled by a disparate and varied inventory on the very first day, the Arab way looks strange to us. But it seems normal to them from their excessive paranoia (justified often), lack of manpower and training, and shoddy (and until now foreign dependent) maintenance policies.