How Egypt turned power imbalance into astonishing triumph
By Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
When Egypt entered the October War in 1973, the traditional balance of power stood firmly against it.
Israel had occupied Sinai six years earlier and held clear qualitative superiority in both air power and armour.
Egypt, meanwhile, still carried the heavy shadows of the 1967 defeat and faced a tangled web of military, political, diplomatic, and economic constraints.
Despite obstacles that seemed almost impossible to overcome, however, Egypt did far more than simply cross the Suez Canal.
It shattered the equation that had governed the region since 1967 and proved that military superiority, no matter how pronounced or long-standing, can never automatically harden into a permanent political reality on the ground.
The question the Egyptian leadership confronted was never how Egypt could become stronger than Israel. It was far more precise and far more daring: “How can Egypt use the power it does possess to limit Israeli superiority and make that superiority less decisive in the battle itself?”
The first condition for turning defeat into victory was the honest recognition of that defeat and of the reasons behind it.
Reform would never come through slogans. It demanded long, arduous years of effort, will, and quiet determination.
This is exactly what George W. Gawrych’s study of the Egyptian high command in the 1973 war, published in Armed Forces & Society in 1987, makes clear.
The success of the crossing, he shows, was rooted in the scale of the remarkable reforms that followed 1967: the reorganization of command and of the ranks themselves.
Those reforms were tested and strengthened during the War of Attrition, producing a more professional army marked by unity of command and clarity of purpose.
That professionalism showed itself unmistakably in the opening phase of the October War. In other words, the crossing was not born on the 6th of October. It was rather conceived in the aftermath of June 5, 1967.
The War of Attrition itself became part of a long reconstruction. Egyptian forces accumulated hard-won field experience, tested their own limits, refined methods of leadership and coordination, and studied the nature of the front and the patterns of their opponent.
It was as if the Egyptian leadership was quietly, thoroughly redefining the very meaning of force, seeking a precise way to reduce Israeli superiority inside a battle whose time and place Egypt would choose and control.
The Egyptian plan never aimed at a deep advance across Sinai or the total destruction of the Israeli army. Its goals were more focused and more realistic: cross the canal, breach the supposedly impregnable Bar-Lev Line, establish large bridgeheads east of the waterway, and hold those positions under the protective umbrella of air defence.
Artillery, anti-tank weapons, and military engineering were welded into a single integrated system.
The central premise was simple yet profound: reduce the opponent’s military superiority to the lowest possible effectiveness inside the battle Egypt had chosen.
Military engineering played a decisive role in making that equation work. The crossing was never just a human surge towards the eastern bank. It was an extraordinarily complex engineering and military operation that included overcoming the water barrier, the fortifications, the high earthen berms, building and securing crossings and bridges, all in a span of time almost difficult for the mind to grasp when one considers the precision and skill required.
The Egyptian surprise itself ran deeper than simply concealing the date of the attack. It rested on the subtler idea of preventing the opponent from reaching the correct conclusion at the decisive moment, even when he already possessed much of the right information.
The essence of the operation was to create a space of confusion and ambiguity between secrecy and strategic deception. Timing, the careful management of information, camouflage, troop movements, and gradual readiness, all became parts of one continuous battle aimed at seizing the initiative from an opponent who openly boasted of his military and material superiority.
Most importantly, the Egyptian political leadership remained acutely aware of the limits of its own power. Military action was never detached from the political objective. It was designed to support it, to bring about a fundamental shift in the political environment that had hardened after 1967.
On October 6, 1973, Egyptian forces succeeded in crossing the Suez Canal and turning that crossing into a military and political fact that could no longer be questioned or explained away, defying every American and Israeli intelligence estimate of Egyptian and Arab capabilities.
In doing so, Egypt succeeded in making Israeli superiority less able to prevent the achievement of its own military and political goals. It pulled the region out of the dark tunnel that had closed after 1967 and broke the monopoly of the prevailing balance of power.
Through its armed forces, the Egyptian leadership also managed to impose a new reality built on functional coordination among the various instruments of Arab power.
While Egyptian and Syrian armies fought on the ground, the oil-producing Arab states turned their economic and political weight into a strategic lever, cutting production by 25 per cent and applying pressure on the consuming nations.
That coordinated pressure helped push the US towards seeking a negotiated settlement for fear that the conflict might escalate into a direct confrontation between the world’s two superpowers at the time, namely the US and the Soviet Union.
This functional coordination was not confined to the oil producers. It also extended across the Arab world through economic, diplomatic, and political ties.
The crossing of the Suez Canal by the Egyptian Armed Forces became a redefinition of Egypt itself after 1967, a restoration of confidence and a deep realization that defeat is never a permanent fate, that a nation need not remain captive to the image of its earlier failure.
At the same time, it sent a clear message to Arab brothers everywhere that Israeli superiority is not an unchallengeable destiny, and the situation created after 1967 could no longer continue without exacting a painful cost.
Perhaps the most lasting achievement of the canal crossing was that Egypt reworked the terms of the regional power equation so that the continued occupation of Sinai became far more complicated politically and strategically than it had been before. Negotiations would now have to begin from entirely different premises.
Dr Ashraf Abul Saud
Writer and an international relations scholar
