EGYPT EXPANDS ITS STRATEGIC HORIZONS
Eurasia Security Watch No. 2, October 22, 2003
American Foreign Policy Council, Washington, DC
http://www.afpc.org
Editor: Ilan Berman
Associate Editor: Artem Agoulnik

Amid a shifting strategic balance in the Middle East, the regime of Hosni
Mubarak appears to have revived its regional ambitions. At a military
commemoration this month in the port city of Alexandria, held to mark the
thirty-year anniversary of the 1973 Yom Kippur war, naval commander Vice
Admiral Tamr Abdul Alim revealed what amounts to a major expansion in
Egyptian naval capabilities. Over the past year, Abdul Alim outlined, his
service has added no less than eleven new battle units, each outfitted with
German and American warships, and has placed orders for advanced American
military equipment like the Harpoon anti-ship missile and the Ambassador Mk
III fast attack craft. The force augmentation suggests a newly reinvigorated
maritime agenda for Cairo, which has not expanded its naval fleet since the
late 1990s.

Egypt's strategic expansion is not confined to its navy, however - a fact
attested to by two recent, high profile diplomatic meetings conducted by
regime officials. At the first, held in Cairo on October 18th, Marshal
Hussein Tantawi, the Chief of the Egyptian Army Staff, met with his Kuwaiti
counterpart, Lieutenant-General Fahd Al-Amir, and other high-ranking Kuwaiti
military officers to discuss the expansion of bilateral military ties
between the two countries. At the second, which took place the next day in
Damascus, an Egyptian military delegation held talks with Syrian Defense
Minister Mustafa Tlass on Egyptian-Syrian military cooperation and common
approaches to regional security. (Middle East Newsline, October 16, 2003;
Damascus SANA, October 19, 2003; Riyadh SPA, October 18, 2003)