CAIRO (Middle East Eye) – Egypt appears close to finalizing a $3bn deal with Italy for 24 Eurofighter Typhoon fighter jets, its first order for this model of aircraft. The deal is the latest in a series of fighter acquisitions Cairo has made from several countries over the past eight years. As a result, the Egyptian Air Force (EAF) has a diverse fleet of jets.
After the signing of the Egypt-Zionist treaty in 1979, Cairo procured the vast majority of its fighter planes from the United States, which replaced the Soviet Union as its leading arms supplier. Consequently, Egypt acquired the fourth largest F-16 fleet in the world.
Fast forward to 2014 and Abdel Fattah el-Sisi is Egypt’s president. He sought to diversify the Egyptian military, including the air force, and make it less dependent on Washington. As part of this endeavor, Cairo became the first foreign buyer of France’s Dassault Rafale multirole fighter jet in 2015 as part of a landmark multi-billion dollar arms deal.
Acquiring French fighters in addition to American ones is neither rare nor unique. Qatar, for example, is buying advanced F-15s from the U.S., Rafales from France, and Eurofighters from the United Kingdom.
But Sisi was not content with just the French fighters to diversify the EAF’s predominantly American arsenal. He went a step further and initiated Egypt’s most significant purchase of Russian weaponry since the 1970s, including 46 MiG-29M/M2 fighters for the EAF.
In 2018, he pushed ahead with an order for the more advanced Russian Su-35 Flanker-E in a $2bn deal - despite firm U.S. warnings that this could trigger sanctions against Cairo under the Countering America’s Adversaries Through Sanctions Act (CAATSA).
Of course, integrating Western and Russian military aircraft into one cohesive air force is not straightforward. One analysis even suggested that the EAF’s Russian jets will likely become little more than “an air force within an air force” due to interoperability issues.
“Egypt has had significant difficulties integrating its Russian-supplied MiG-29 and Su-35 aircraft into its largely Western-supplied networks and command and control systems,” Justin Bronk, senior research fellow for airpower and technology in the Military Sciences Team at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), told Middle East Eye.
Meanwhile, the Rafales and F-16s “are designed according to NATO STANAG (Standardization Agreement) standards, and so are much more easily integrated and interoperable from a weapons perspective”.
“I’d ascribe Egypt’s tendency to collect jets from everywhere as reflecting a political strategy - one you also see in nearby wealthy Middle Eastern countries - aimed at building relationships with various influencers at the expense of logistical efficiency,” Sebastien Roblin, a defence journalist said.