Russia - Egypt military contracts

ahmedfire wrote:

miketheterrible wrote:

Kiko wrote:Blinken expresses worries over Egypt purchasing Russian Su-35s in a telephone call to the Egyptian side.

https://br.sputniknews.com/oriente_medio_africa/2021022417012363-eua-expressam-preocupacao-ao-egito-sobre-potencial-compra-de-cacas-russos/

This is the third time they already showed concern to Egypt.

Because sancrions on Egypt will be rejected from east and west ,Egypt has good relations with everyone .

On the other side the situation could be worth for US if Egypt went far from US and come more close to Russia ,China and EU.

Egypt is very close to Russia, Egypt remembers it was USSR that stopped the Israeli army during the Yom Kippur war and Russians have fought and died for Egypt. It was only in the collapse of the USSR that they moved closer to the US orbit but never fully away from Russia.

Isos wrote:They totally moved from USSR after camp david agreement in 1978 in weapon industry.

Between 1978 to recently they bought no weapons from Russia.

Now that they find out US weapon can't do anything against same weapon but in israeli hands they have to rebuild their army.

You can see the list of hardware they operate on wiki it's mostly US.

Camp david agreement killed them. They even trolled them with the name of the agreement, David.

US shot itself it the foot by refusing to supply AMRAAM to Egypt's F-16. Egypt is phasing out F-16 with Rafale, MiG-29M/M2, Su-35S.

Isos wrote:They totally moved from USSR after camp david agreement in 1978 in weapon industry.

Between 1978 to recently they bought no weapons from Russia.

Now that they find out US weapon can't do anything against same weapon but in israeli hands they have to rebuild their army.

You can see the list of hardware they operate on wiki it's mostly US.

Camp david agreement killed them. They even trolled them with the name of the agreement, David.

οne reason Egypt turned to Russia again for weapons is that after Sisi took over USA at that time freezed the arms transfers

George1 wrote:

Isos wrote:They totally moved from USSR after camp david agreement in 1978 in weapon industry.

Between 1978 to recently they bought no weapons from Russia.

Now that they find out US weapon can't do anything against same weapon but in israeli hands they have to rebuild their army.

You can see the list of hardware they operate on wiki it's mostly US.

Camp david agreement killed them. They even trolled them with the name of the agreement, David.

οne reason Egypt turned to Russia again for weapons is that after Sisi took over USA at that time freezed the arms transfers

Egypt is not Russia's ally not even in the slightest, they just have some aligning interests. People forget that the USSR under the control of the underwhelming Kruschev risked embroiling the USSR in WW3 for a unreliable friend like Egypt, who would go on to sell out the USSR for a measly $1 billion per year.

Well Egypt uses both sides to mess with the other.

Isos wrote:Just like turkish f-16 they wouldn't even be able to lock on israrli f-16/15, amraam or not.

@Goerge1

He also needed political support too. Without Russia and France/Italy, US would have put another puppet there.

Drawback of one man ruling a country is that once he is gone everything falls apart and you need to rebuild. That's why NATO wants Putin out of power.

Putin isn't one man though, and neither is Sisi.  Putin was put into power by the intelligence agency of Russia, much like the next guy will be (probably the current PM as he is popular) and the Army backs/backed Sisi (and I'm assuming the Egyptian intelligence as well). It's usually the intelligence/military of these countries help keep stability, much like Myanmar.

The days of a single individual ruling all are long over.  Putin doesn't work alone, and neither Sisi.  Only way the ruling ends of this class/group, is if they are overthrown by a US backed group or fake elections.

But I agree with you over your previous statement, US screwed Egypt hard and Egypt fell for it initially.

Isos wrote:Just like turkish f-16 they wouldn't even be able to lock on israrli f-16/15, amraam or not.

Actually that's not entirely true, Isos.  If you remember the Egyptian military operation Sinai in 2018 when they went into northeast Sinai to take care of ISIS in a large military capacity that included several F-16s.  What ended up happening is because of the extensive jamming the EGY military was doing, a large portion of southern Israel lost all their cell phone connectivity and in the interim of all that, one of the Egyptian F-16s flew along the border but crossed it and was actually flying alongside the border but in Israeli airspace.  The Israelis immediately dispatched one of their F-15Cs to intercept the EAF F-16 and before it could reach it, the EAF F-16 had locked onto the Israeli F-15 for a few minutes (probably either with an AIM-9 or even AIM-7 we don't know for sure) but the EAF F-16 returned to Sinai without any confrontation.  But what happened later made all of this interesting because the Israeli air force chief was infuriated that had happened and especially the lock-on and wanted to make a much bigger situation about it by requesting a meeting with EAF staff etc.  I think the Israeli brass ended up telling him to chill out.  The big deal is that it was a terribly easy lock on for the EAF's F-16 and probably because the Israeli F-15 pilot and interception team never deal with that and never expected it to happen either.  But that tells us that even the shorter-ranged missiles on the EAF F-16 can lock onto Israeli F-15s.

magnumcromagnon wrote:
Egypt is not Russia's ally not even in the slightest, they just have some aligning interests. People forget that the USSR under the control of the underwhelming Kruschev risked embroiling the USSR in WW3 for a unreliable friend like Egypt, who would go on to sell out the USSR for a measly $1 billion per year.

Depends on your definition of "ally."  If you put things into context, you can see that getting all of Sinai back at the time would've been either by continuing the state of war and eventually fighting another one again years later which would be much more difficult than the October war of 73 and the state of belligerence would've continued for decades without any progress.  Look at the tiny bit of Golan Heights stretch and now much of it is under threat of being annexed into Israeli lands.  This is what they wanted to do with Sinai there is no question about it.  Even during the peace negotiations they wanted to keep certain portions including a famous beach stretch near the port of Eilat.  But Egypt was immovable that every single inch of Sinai belonged to Egypt and needed to be returned and the only one capable of pressuring the Israelis to accept this without war was the US.  Egypt had no choice at the time unless it wanted to stay in a state of war for who knows how long after.

Hey, look at things now.  How much money has Russia made from Egypt from all these weapons purchases?  And I'm not talking about the MiGs and Su-35s.  We've bought S-300s, TOR & BUKs & several long range radars as well as Russia is building the first nuclear power plants in Africa in Egypt.  Plus a lot more.  So I think Russia is making out pretty good even if it got the raw end of the deal back after the war of 73.

Egypt remembers it was USSR that stopped the Israeli army during the Yom Kippur war and Russians have fought and died for Egypt.

USSR has threatened to intervene because US cheated the ceasefire deal and continued to massively supply IDF with all kind of weapons through the strategic airlift operation "Nickel Grass" . As example the US gave 90% of it's TOW mmissiles stock to Israel plus shrike missiles ,smart bombs ,hundreds of tanks and aircrafts . On the other side most of Soviet supplies were to Syria because the Syrian front was down and critical after 4 days of war begining.

In Fact they already had better tanks and better aircrafts than the Egyptian one but also they replaced any damaged or destroyed hardware quickly .But on  ground the Israelis couldn't achieve  a strategic goals from the battle , at the first week they lost 1/3 of their tanks and 1/3 of their aircrafts , at the end of it the Egyptian army still on the east of canal and didn't lose any area there .Egypt collected 800 tanks around the IDF gap on the west and rebuilt the SAM gap area and start shelling the IDF forces and dedicated to attack the IDF forces (that surrounded another EGY forces) had the advantage in numbers ( 2 :1 ) in all type of weapons which gave Egyptians a good chance to start the attack from 5 directions on the Israeli forces , at that time  EGY forces did 439 attack in total  from 31/Oct/73 to 18/Jan/74 (when the war was already stopped)  on the surrounded IDF forces which caused :

187 Israeli soldiers get killed
11 aircrafts shoot down
41 tanks/armored vehicle get destroyed
36 bulldozer / engineering unit get destroyed .

That’s why Israelis digged tunnels (width 7m and depth 5 m) , they also put 750,000 anti armor mines to prevent the EGY tanks from attacking them  , this is a situation of forces that tried to defend themselves from Egyptian's attacks , IDF was waiting the ceasefire to avoid being killed ,even after ceasefire the Egyptians did some hits (but Israelis didn’t) which means Egyptians  were in a good situation.

So IDF failed to occupy any city in the west of canal , his forces get surrounded with bigger Egyptian forces which start a separated attacks and IDF put his forces in a defence position waiting for the ceasefire to withdraw his forces from the Egyptian trap . At the end IDF withdrawed 35 km to the east and this was more than the target of Egypt ( the Egyptian target was to start a negotiations through occuping 12-15 km of Sinai ).

They totally moved from USSR after camp david agreement in 1978 in weapon industry.

Egypt before the war in july/1972 driven out the whole soviet experts from Egypt .There were already problems in getting all the needed Soviet weapons because Soviets already agreed with US to not start any new wars in the ME and the Egyptian president was angry on Soviets .

Camp david agreement killed them. They even trolled them with the name of the agreement, David.

Camp david was a peace treatment after war ,something is normal .Egypt was in indirect war with the US ,there is no need to resume it if Egypt would get it's lands back .Soviets didn't like it because it's a game of allies .When Mubarak came he reestablished the relations with Soviets in 1984 , in 1989, Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs visited Egypt but yes the collabse of USSR has delayed the cooperation too much .

Now that they find out US weapon can't do anything against same weapon but in israeli hands they have to rebuild their army.
Just like turkish f-16 they wouldn't even be able to lock on israrli f-16/15, amraam or not.

IFF can't stop the pilot from shooting down a friendly aircraft , it will alarm him but he has the final decision .

That's completely false. It was just a psy op.

No it was real and Sadat sent a letter to Brezhnev on Aug 1972 describing in details why this happened .First he said Egypt want only the Egyptians to fight the battle , second Egypt don't want to  spark off a confrontation between the USSR and the US .

After that he mentioned all the problems of getting the required hardware from USSR ,he gave examples in Navy ,airforce and ground forces . Also he showed worries from the calls for “military relaxation” that coming from Moscow that time .

It doesn't mean the relations were cut , the cooperation has continued .You can read the whole message here Message Addressed by President Sadat to President Leonid Brezhnev, Aug. 30, 1972.

Egypt didn't share it's deception plan with Soviets , it was completely secret to make Israel and US intelligence think that Egypt is not going to start a war at least for the next decade , and it works .

Yes it can. It's all software controled. We are talking about missiles, not guns where everything is mecanical.

US made Egyptian weapons are useless against israeli.

If it's so easy like that why would every US administration impose a set of restrictions on the sale of the AIM-120 , giving an enough reason to Egypt to buy another aircrafts from Russia and France ? they should give F-35 and F-15 with no worries on the Israeli security ,but they refused to supply Egypt with both aircrafts for the same reason .

Even on the same airforce ,having IFF doesn't 100% secure some accidents , two US Black Hawk were shot down despite functional IFF and visual ID over northern Iraq .British Tornado and a USN F-18 both downed by friendly fire .

As @Gomin -21 mentioned there was one incident when the EAF F-16 locked on IAF F-15 ,the story was confirmed by Israeli news .

Isos wrote:

That's completely false. It was just a psy op.

They stayed there. They send back some to make Israeli beleive that they have frictions with USSR so they wouldn't start a war with israrli without USSR's support.

But the real expert stayed and played a major role in egyptian AD and air force.

That was part of the surprised attack.

Where on earth did you ever read that information, my friend?  That is the first time I ever heard of any Soviets staying back, but especially ones that played a major role in the surprise attack and actually manned the SAM systems!?  That's just waaay off, Isos.  Don't forget that we had a war of attrition with Israel that lasted almost all of the 6 years between the end of the 1967 war and the start of the October War in 1973.  But it was mostly a 3-year war from 1967 to 1970 when a halt in that war of attrition was made and put together and I believe a deal by the UN was signed.  But a lot of cease fire breaks happened in between 1970 -73 when the Israelis would break it with the occasional illegal flyover with 4 or 6 Phantoms and the opposite would happen with the EAF MiG-21s or 17s dashing through occupied space.  But most importantly is the SAM defensive umbrella was already created and the Soviet help was already accomplished in those 3 years of the WoA.  

When the Yom Kippur war broke out, it took a few months for the Egyptian Armed Forces to move all the SAM batteries into place close to the canal under the cover of darkness and then camouflage them for the daytime so that none of the recon imagery can pick them up.  They knew the Israelis were watching but all of that was done by the Egyptian engineers who ordered and bought all the SAM-2s and 6s several years prior during the WoA.  BTW, there were several records broken during that was as far as SAM systems are concerned and one of the Egyptian Air Defense battalion majors won an award for the least amount of SA-2s fired for the downing of Israeli aircraft.   I believe that it's supposed to be between 2 to 4 SA-2 fired per downed aircraft and he was responsible for a pretty impressive number of aircraft against missiles.  I forget the exact numbers from the information I read and have so I won't quote any.  But if I ever run into it, I will post it.

Yeah there were no Soviets near the battlefield whatsoever.  Definitely not in 1973, at least.  They did come in and fly 5 MiG-21s during the war of attrition because the Egyptian pilots were complaining about several factors, one of them being that the fuel would move around from side to side once half of it was used up and created a very difficult imbalance in the aircraft for the pilot to work with.  Another was the bleeding of energy in minimum radius turns that was very difficult to power back out of.  These were all wartime elements that were probably never really experienced by either side until then.  I bet the Vietnamese dealt with them for sure.  But until there were dogfights during the war of attrition and the EAF complaining about the handling of the MiG-21 to the Soviets, they never experienced any of that themselves and pointed the reason at the EAF pilots' inabilities or lack of enough training or whatever which was a bit nuts because a lot of the pilots flying in 1973 were veterans whom had been around for a while.

So down came 5 Soviet pilots and for a week, they would fly missions out of Hurghada in Egypt and would sneak over Sinai to draw the Israelis out and unfortunately, all 5 Soviet pilots and their MiG-21s were shot down by IDF F-4 Phantoms and Mirage Vs.  Heck the EAF was even fighting dogfights against the F-4 Phantom II with the venerable MiG-17!  But that was the extent of Soviet pilots flying any missions or participating on any level with Egypt against the Israelis.

The start of the Yom Kippur War on October 6th, 1973 at 2:05 PM began with the shelling and pounding of the entire BarLev line and its 16 outposts along the entire stretch of7 the Suez Canal while 209 aircraft made of a mix of MiG-17s and 21s and Su- 7s flew into Sinai and bombed several targets before returning.  No Soviets participated in any of that initial raid which claimed the life of President Sadat's younger brother who flew one of the MiG-21's and was shot down IIRC.

Isos wrote:IFF can't stop the pilot from shooting down a friendly aircraft , it will alarm him but he has the final say.

Yes it can. It's all software controled. We are talking about missiles, not guns where everything is mecanical.

US made Egyptian weapons are useless against israeli.

I think we've proved that's not necessarily true.  @ahmedfire even posted the Israeli news of the IDF F-15 getting locked on by an EAF F-16 which would never happen unless the aircraft's radar is within the carrying missile's range and gives the computer the OK to lock on.

ahmedfire wrote:No it was real and Sadat sent a letter to Brezhnev on Aug 1972 describing in details why this happened .First he said Egypt want only the Egyptians to fight the battle , second Egypt don't want to  spark off a confrontation between the USSR and the US .

After that he mentioned all the problems of getting the required hardware from USSR ,he gave examples in Navy ,airforce and ground forces . Also he showed worries from the calls for “military relaxation” that coming from Moscow that time .

It doesn't mean the relations were cut , the cooperation has continued .You can read the whole message here Message Addressed by President Sadat to President Leonid Brezhnev, Aug. 30, 1972.

Egypt didn't share it's deception plan with Soviets , it was completely secret to make Israel and US intelligence think that Egypt is not going to start a war at least for the next decade , and it works .

The biggest thing that angered Sadat about the Soviets was their refusal to sell the EAF any of the long-range bombers that they wanted.  Hosni Mubarak had a plan that utilized these long-range bombers that would be used in a sort of threatening manner mostly and not flying to Israel and leveling off hundreds of thousands of civilians homes.  The Israelis killed a heck of a lot more Egyptian civilians that the Egyptian military ever came close to LOL yet they always have this fear that Egypt would behave like ISIS during times of war AND even in times of peace!  Unbelievable.  It's so infuriating and that infuriation came from seeing that certain unwillingness to provide those top tier weaponry that would make a huge difference.

I think the Soviets didn't want to see Israel defeated at all.  After all, how many Israelis are Russian Jews and what is the percentage of Russian Jews back then?  It was a considerable number that whomever was Premier at the time, be it Brezhnev or Nikita Kruscev, they were very cognizant of that fact and would've never wanted to see Israel defeated in a manner that would come back and bite them in the behind.  At the same time, they certainly didn't want to see Soviet weaponry defeated by American ones! lol, so they were in a quandary, for sure.  But in the end, they were given quite the gift with the way the EADS performed downing all those Israeli aircraft and especially the Egyptian soldiers that carried SAGGER packs and took out hundreds of tanks laying on their bellies shooting and guiding those ATGMs.  Even the way they used the MiG-21 and the kills they secured with that considering who they were fighting against and what they were flying and firing Sparrows! lol.  Yep, it was mostly the long range bombers that Sadat was furious about being denied that he thought would make a huge difference and it was almost right after he was told that, that he sent the remaining Soviets out of Egypt.

ahmedfire wrote:If it's so easy like that why would every US administration impose a set of restrictions on the sale of the AIM-120 , giving an enough reason to Egypt to buy another aircrafts from Russia and France ? they should give F-35 and F-15 with no worries on the Israeli security ,but they refused to supply Egypt with both aircrafts for the same reason .

I remind so many people of that all the time, especially the Egyptian request of 12 F-15s that was denied!  A small squadron that they would've accepted even without the AIM-120s and that was refused.  So the weapons packages play a huge part and the old secret kill switch is still just a myth, even till this day.

Isos wrote:They will have to buy one or two A-50U to back their mig-29 and su-35 which aren't connected to US made AWACS they operate.

A couple of il-78 will also increase their efficiency.

Check this out, it should interest you based on your post.  You know the EAF has been operating Russian and Chinese aircraft for a long time.  Granted the MiG-21's and F-7s that have been retired recently were older, there were also trainers like L-59s and others that were all networked.

Now with the recent modernization, there has been a new development which was the brainchild of the Rafale's RBE-2 AESA radar.  The EAF has a very interesting network that encompassed the use of its 8 E-2C Hawkeyes AWACs as well as its Beechraft into this newly created network.

Egypt’s fleet of military aircraft are able to share data and coordinate activity despite their mixed origins, thanks to a locally made command center, according to an Egyptian armed forces expert.

It’s rare to witness an air force flying fighter jets and helicopters of different origins, but Egypt operates aircraft from Russia, China, the United States and European nations.

“When it comes to the Egyptian Air Force in particular, it is definitely not possible for [American-made] E-2C Hawkeye 2000 early warning aircraft in service, for example, to direct the [Russian-made] MiG-29 fighters and exchange data with them, as is the case with the [American-made] F-16 and [French-made] Rafale fighters,” said Mohamed al-Kenany, a military affairs researcher and defense analyst at the Arab Forum for Analyzing Iranian Policies in Cairo.

“However, data is being shared between the different-origin aircraft through the command-and-control centers that are equipped with dedicated systems capable of linking the various radar, aircraft, sensors, reconnaissance and electronic warfare systems, and integrating all the information and data they receive into a unified system named RISC2.”

The Radar Integration and Surveillance Command Center was made by the Egyptian military’s Research and Development Department; Benha Electronics, which is affiliated with the Ministry of Military Production; the Military Technical College; and the Egyptian Air Defense Forces.



It doesn't look like much, but there is an obvious reason for that and what you see in this display is minimally avionics related.

RISC2 was introduced during the 2018 Egypt Defence Expo and is meant to automate control-and-command tasks. The platform is equipped with tools for flight planning, control systems for radars and various monitoring sensors (including models from the United States, Russia, China, France, Britain and Egypt), an automatic flight-tracking system, a network management system, and cybersecurity.

Al-Kenany said in addition to linking aircraft, the system allows the military’s land and sea combat platforms to share data.

“This system enables the dynamic exchange of integrated data with various command-and-control centers, with the next generation of cyber protection systems and firewalls ... as well as the Egyptian surface-to-air missile command center to analyze and assess the risks and air threats, and [determine] the type of air defense systems needed to deal with these threats,” he added.

He hasn’t observed any problems with Egypt’s air defense systems differentiating enemy aircraft from friendly ones. “The various types of IFF [identification friend or foe systems] produced by different companies for Egypt’s armed forces are designed to be compatible with all the systems and equipment operational in the country, and hence identifying their specific frequencies and codes as friendly, which prevents friendly fires,” he explained.

To overcome delays in data sharing, the Air Force looked to the Rafale "to link aircraft of different origins during the flight, since it is equipped not only with Link 16 data links but also with other solutions for non-NATO countries to operate in integrated operational [environments] with all platforms and with friendly combat assets, and airborne command and control, which allows it to operate in harmony with modern Russian fighters operating for the Egyptian Air Force,” al-Kenany explained.

He also pointed to Egypt’s TIBA-1 communications satellite, which was launched onboard an Ariane 5 rocket in November 2019 for government communications and military purposes. He said the satellite will facilitate data sharing between Air Force fighters and helicopter of different origins.

What is Egypt flying?

In terms of Western systems, the Egyptian Air Force currently operates 24 Rafale fighter jets (and wants to double that number), 20 F-16 Block 52 fighters, 10 AH-64D Apache Longbow helicopters (with plans to double its inventory), 15 Mirage 2000 jets, and eight early warning E-2C Hawkeye planes.

From the East, the service operates 46 MiG-29M fighter jets, 46 Ka-52 Alligator armed reconnaissance helicopters, and an unknown number of Mi-24 combat multirole helicopters, which first appeared in Egyptian service in 2018. The Air Force also ordered 24 Su-35S Super Flanker jets but has only received five so far, according to Russian media.



Egypt turned to Russia after the U.S. did not approve its request to acquire roughly two dozen F-35 fighter jets, an Egyptian military official told The Associated Press in 2019. The Russian deal for Su-35s was meant to diversify Egypt’s weapon suppliers because the U.S. has previously stopped military assistance over human rights concerns, said another official.

“Moving to diversify sources of military equipment and especially fighter jets is a direct consequence to embargos from specific countries, or monopoly of technology and refraining from technology transfer,” Lebanese Member of Parliament Wehbe Katicha, a retired Army general, told Defense News.

But the mixed fleet hasn’t significantly impacted training between Egypt and NATO members, al-Kenany said.

“Drills have been going on as scheduled between Egypt and NATO countries, but it is worth noting that I’ve never noticed a Russian aircraft in the drills with Western countries, or a Western aircraft in the drill with Russia. The only exception to this was the presence of Ka-52 with the mistral trainings.”


https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefiel...s-fleet-of-mixed-origin/#.X5pv5IrtHlQ.twitter

Considering of the central position of IRST and that horizontals doesn't have special fire resisting coating, it looks like standard Su-27. Syria have similar flag and roundel.

I would wait for official announcements before going off and predicting strange things in the twitter crystal ball

I would hope if Egypt are getting their Su-35s that a new batch for Iran should be made anyway... the region needs more super flankers...

The US is drip-feeding sanctions on Russia, a few new ones every year.

Which is working out great. It's giving Russia enough time in each case to take counter-measures and find alternatives