Posted on 10/23/2003 5:38:46 PM PDT by yonif
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)
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