This is the first article in a series derived from the Military Balance 2025 report. We analyze everything present in the report and gather the information together, hoping to reach a useful understanding of the reality and existing problems.
All the upcoming information in this article, or in the following articles, comes from reliable sources with personal analyses that may contain both correct and incorrect elements, and I am not writing an analysis to criticize Egypt or the Egyptian army. You will find in the analysis positive points and negative points or existing problems. I strive to be objective to the greatest extent possible.
A quick reading of the report on Egypt reveals that Egypt's problem is a classic strategic gap issue. The state acts as a party that provides regional security to the outside, while its ability to fund its military is diminishing. Looking at the actual value of the defense budget, we see that it decreased by 13.9% in 2023, and then dropped again by 17% in 2024.
This means that we were spending $5.4 billion on defense in 2022, and we are now spending almost half of that, $2.79 billion in 2024.
What does this mean?
Either we are hiding a larger portion of the budget every year — which is probably an incorrect conclusion, and I will explain why shortly — or we are actually spending less on defense, which is the conclusion closer to the truth based on the available information.
The sources of decreased defense spending can be attributed to two main reasons: the loss of Suez Canal revenues during the period in question and reduced tourism revenues. These are the two main official sources we rely on to finance defense spending.
As for the army's civilian projects, where do their revenues go? They go into the 50% of the state budget that the former finance minister claimed he knows nothing about, and no one knows anything about.
This means that, according to the report, Egypt is at its lowest level of financial readiness to engage in war, and that any sudden war would be costly for Egypt and would be an uneven war from the very first moment.
The report states that Egypt, instead of focusing on its financial and defensive problems, sends deterrent signals in Libya, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa, and previously in Yemen. The report clarifies that this is not a contradiction but rather a choice made by Cairo itself, as it uses military activity as a geopolitical pressure tool to prevent its strategic role from being marginalized, even at a time when the state’s resources and defense spending are in a state of suffocation.
The gap between financial pressure and military movements represents a significant danger for a country the size of Egypt, because Egypt maintains a near-complete mobilization with a budget of about $25 per person annually, down from $48 per person in 2022.
This point requires some clarification.
In Egypt, there are 438,000 soldiers in the armed forces, 479,000 in reserves, and 397,000 in the Ministry of Interior, of whom 325,000 are in the Central Security Forces. This model relies on human power, not on high-value technology. This huge number represents a cost that consumes the state’s ability to spend on defense in procurement or the development of defense technology.
Egypt relies on two main elements for funding:
The first element is external liquidity, which is limited and unsustainable, including what comes from the UAE, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and the European Union.
The second element is American aid amounting to $1.3 billion. This has been reduced later, but we are discussing here the period referred to in the report, as this was the adopted figure.
This means that about 32% of Egypt’s total purchasing power comes from aid. In other words, the level of military readiness, the pace of modernization, and military movements are not strictly linked to absolute Egyptian sovereignty (the report itself explicitly refers to this).
This financial pressure creates operational risks that affect Egyptian military equipment.
Currently, Egypt possesses around 2,430 main battle tanks, including:
1,130 M1A1 Abrams tanks
850 M60A3 tanks
300 M60A1 tanks
150 T-62 tanks
It also possesses more than 4,200 armored personnel carriers and about 1,000 armored patrol vehicles.
As for the naval forces, they have been updated with 8 submarines, 16 frigates, and 2 Mistral-class aircraft carriers.
In the air force, there are 340 combat aircraft supported by heavy transport planes (21 C-130H and 21 C295M) in addition to around 174 training aircraft.
All of this creates what is known as quantitative or volumetric deterrence. However, the problem with this type of deterrence lies in sustainability, as Egypt’s armament system is a mix of old Russian weapons and modern European ones, which amplifies the effort required to secure spare parts and increases problems related to ammunition compatibility and training requirements itself.
With reduced defense spending, the main platforms do not collapse, but equipment and maintenance at the warehouse level are affected, and more importantly, the supporting equipment that allows advanced systems to operate efficiently. This is exactly what the Egyptian armed forces rely heavily upon.
The Egyptian army has 8 units of E-2C Hawkeye and 4 units of RE-3A SIGINT, in addition to Beech 1900 ISR/ELINT aircraft and their variants, and other planes equipped with ELINT technology. This is what the report indicates when it says that "Egypt may appear strong in terms of stockpile numbers, while simultaneously suffering from an increasing dynamic of hollow power in the background."
Egypt enjoys significant diversity in its armament system, and this diversification is still ongoing. I previously wrote an article on this topic where we discussed the positives of this diversity, but there is a serious downside that requires complex management, known in defense literature as the suppliers' veto.
The story of K9 Thunder illustrates the seriousness of this point. The modernization program for Egyptian artillery stopped for two full years due to a ban on German diesel engines, and it wasn’t resumed until mid-2024 when Egypt turned to using STX Korean engines. This was not a one-time purchasing problem, but a continuous purchasing process, which means that any defense system with multiple suppliers is very sensitive to any political or organizational decision in one country within the supply chain. Thus, diversification is not always a guarantee of independence, but may increase the level of fragility unless there is professional management of the supply chains and gradual localization of essential parts of the defense systems.
If we look at the Egyptian Navy, we find that it has missiles and sub-systems sourced from the United States (Harpoon, SM-1, RAM), France and Italy (Exocet, Aster 15, VL MICA), Russia (Moskit), Germany (MEKO/Type-209 systems), and others. This means that any restrictions or diplomatic shifts could disrupt the capabilities of the Egyptian navy, even in peacetime.
Egypt has adopted a policy that has evolved as a response to this problem, which is licensed production wherever possible. We can clearly see this in the launch of the shipyard in Alexandria for locally manufactured MEKO A200 hulls in December 2023, and the replacement of components to circumvent the ban as happened with the alternative solution for the K9 engine, and the addition of new suppliers such as Turkish drones and fast Turkish boats to intercept targets.
However, these solutions come with significant costs, as each of these solutions increases the issue of heterogeneity in Egyptian equipment and armament systems. Each new supplier imposes a new burden on the entire system — a physical, operational, and administrative burden. As a result, Egypt finds itself caught between two intertwined problems: flexibility in the face of complexity and sustainability in the long term.
The thread that ties this picture together is that Egypt seeks to compensate for weak funding and defense spending by engineering the military system itself, meaning that instead of increasing the quantity of weapons, it seeks to enhance the efficiency of deterrence and independence for every dollar spent from the budget.
This is clearly evident in the model of the Air Defense Forces as a completely independent branch from the air force, with a massive number of personnel totaling about 80,000 active service personnel and 70,000 in reserve, distributed across five air defense zones covering the entire republic.
This system works to create a dense network for low-level air defense, including over 136 point defense systems, along with 910 anti-aircraft guns, among which are about 600 S-60 guns. In addition to long-range systems like S-300V4 used to protect vital sites.
The idea here is that even if the air force sorties decline for any reason — whether due to funding, maintenance, or operational pressure — there remains a defensive cover capable of monitoring and enforcing deterrence.
The same logic applies to expansion in space capabilities; Egypt now has five satellites, including the communication satellite TIBA-1, in addition to satellites dedicated to monitoring and reconnaissance such as EgyptSat-A and Mirsat-2, along with two Horus-class satellites. Thus, Egypt possesses a complete national information loop extending from sensor to executor — i.e., a process of monitoring, then analysis, then command and control — without full reliance on foreign intelligence sources. This integrates with electronic warfare and aerial reconnaissance capabilities as mentioned in the report.
From here, we understand that when Egyptian defense spending is around 0.73% of GDP, and Egypt accounts for only 1.3% of total military spending in the Middle East and North Africa, at a time when per capita defense spending has decreased to $25 annually from $48 in 2022, the rational decision is not to buy more weapons, but to ensure that the existing systems operate with maximum efficiency, and that they are capable of monitoring, coordinating, and enforcing real deterrent costs.
Despite the importance of this strategy, it is not a permanent substitute for direct funding and defense spending. The infrastructure requires continuous maintenance and development. If financial shocks related to military spending continue while Egypt undertakes regional roles in Libya, Sudan, and the Horn of Africa, this system will continue to function, but it will become more fragile over time.
Any new revenue shock or supply chain disruption could severely shake this balance, because what is ultimately being built is an architecturally smart deterrent based on a weak financial foundation.
This is an AI-generated English translation. The original text is in العربية
PhD Researcher in Defense Contracting and Cooperation Policies