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The Albatross of Decisive Victory: War and Policy Between Egypt and Israel in the 1967 and 1973 Arab-Israeli Wars (Contributions in Military Studies)

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In The Albatross of Decisive Victory, George Gawrych critically analyzed the conflict between Egypt and Israel during the period from 1967 to 1973 from within the context of policy, military strategy, and operational effectiveness. His overarching aim was to correlate Israel's decisive victory in the Six Day War of 1967 to Egyptian policy which culminated in the Arab-Israeli War of 1973. The thesis of his book is that Israel's hubris after her decisive victory in 1967 set conditions that a humiliated Egypt successfully exploited in the subsequent war of 1973. Gawrych presented a compelling, detailed, and well-organized argument to support his thesis.

Gawrych applied a Clausewitzian theoretical framework to his analysis. He was particularly adept at revealing how war and policy interact and influence each other during the course of armed conflict. Clausewitz's dictum that war is "merely the continuation of policy by other means" informed Gawrych's study of the conflict between Egypt and Israel, especially the recognition that policy "adjusts in response to changing circumstances on the battlefield." The method of Gawrych's analysis was chronological. Over the course of nine chapters, he divided his chronology into discreet periods to capture themes at political, strategic, operational, and tactical levels. Following is a brief synopsis of this chronology and the themes considered essential by Gawrych.

Gawrych began his analysis by describing the strategic environment immediately preceding the Six Day War. He related how Nasser, as the strongman of Egypt and ostensible leader of pan-Arab nationalism, caused events to spin out of control as he attempted gain prestige among Arabs. Nasser's sporadic mobilization, aggressive posturing, and jingoistic rhetoric help explain how Egypt "stumbled into war" without clear policy objectives or operational preparedness. Gawrych also described the situation in Israel in the weeks leading up to war but in less detail. He related how Israeli doctrine, operational planning, and overall military culture encouraged "audacity, initiative, and improvisation in its senior and junior commanders" while the military strategy called for "limited territorial objectives" to hold for post-conflict bargaining. Although Gawrych described the proximate causes of the Six Day War, he gave short shrift to the larger historical context and underlying reasons for the conflict that dated back to early Zionism and the founding of the Jewish state. Another minor criticism is his neglect of the crucial role of actors such as Syria, Jordan, Iraq, and other Middle Eastern states, as well as the role of the Soviet Union, the United States, and the United Nations in events leading to war.

Gawrych next described Israel's preemptive blitzkrieg and the rapid, over-whelming defeat of the Egyptian, Syrian, and Jordanian armed forces in the Six Day War. His operational analysis was superb and accompanied by insightful campaign maps and gripping accounts of key tactical events. He related tactical success to strategic and political outcomes of the conflict. With homage to the Clausewitzian unpredictability of battlefield violence, Gawrych described how the "lightning speed of Israeli advances on the ground stemmed more from the dynamic of the battlefield than political direction from the cabinet." After commencing an attack with limited military objectives, the Israelis suddenly found themselves in possession of the entire Sinai Peninsula, the Gaza Strip, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights. This decisive victory and Egypt's humiliating loss became the `albatross' that shaped events leading up to next Arab-Israeli War in 1973.

In the next three chapters, Gawrych analyzed Egypt's resurgence and Israel's stagnation. Israel's decisive victory on the battlefield failed to produce a long-term peace with her Arab neighbors. Their humiliating defeat actually led to a retrenchment and hardening of their determination to defy Israel. Gawrych described how Egypt led this initiative with military reforms, rearmament, and a prolonged border war. Gawrych correctly identified how Nasser maintained popular support with a mandate from the people to purge top military leadership. Nasser devoted his attention to re-arming and transforming the Egyptian armed forces from a "revolutionary army into a modern, professional, apolitical military." Although eighty percent of the Egyptian army's hardware had been lost in the Sinai, Egypt was able to begin an immediate rearmament campaign with massive military assistance from the Soviet Union. Gawrych described the men and materiel of this Soviet assistance but unfortunately did not delve into the Soviet Union's political or strategic relationship with Egypt.

The security situation remained unresolved even after the decisive military defeat of the Egyptian armed forces. With Soviet technical advisors and new equipment, including modern SAMs and MiGs, Egypt continued to harass Israel. Minor exchanges of small arms and artillery, punctuated by less frequent but more serious missile, naval, and aircraft engagements, characterized a new border war between the two states. Gawrych explained the cause of this conflict as the unwillingness of Arab leaders to "venture into direct negotiations with Israel from a position of weakness." This is an interesting point that should have been elaborated. The assumption that further conflict was necessary to break intransigent attitudes on both sides of the conflict is key to understanding the motivations of Nasser and, later, Sadat as they crafted Egyptian policy. The border conflict, referred to as the War of Attrition, reached a crisis with the deployment of front-line Soviet SA-3 and MiG-21 units to Egypt. Israeli pilots were directly engaged with Soviet `advisors' on deep strikes in Egyptian territory. Gawrych related how this alarmed President Nixon and led the U.S. to broker an official cease fire that went into effect on August 7, 1970.

Throughout the book, but especially in the sections describing the interwar period, Gawrych drew extensively on Arabic language sources. This provided an obvious robustness and non-Western perspective to his analysis. His bibliography cited 37 Arabic sources in addition to over 170 non-Arabic sources. As a faculty member at the U.S. Army Command and General Staff College he was also afforded the opportunity to interview Arab and Israeli participants in the conflict. His bibliography cited 22 such interviews that add richness and insight to events that occurred in the Egyptian and Israeli armed forces during this period.

Changes within Israel following the 1967 victory were not as sweeping as changes in Egypt but still had tremendous repercussions. The Israeli government basked in its glory following the Six Day War and the Israeli Defense Force rested on its laurels. Unlike Egypt, there were no tectonic shifts in Israeli military leadership, organizational structure, or doctrine. According to Gawrych, "The amazing victory of 1967 gave the Israeli army a feeling of invincibility on the battlefield, while the acquisition of the Sinai, the West Bank, and the Golan Heights had provided the country with strategic depth for the first time in its brief history." What Gawrych further explained is how this strategic depth resulted in Israel's shift from an offensive, maneuver-based defense to a defense-in-depth strategy. The most prominent manifestation of this new strategy was the Bar-Lev Line.

Gawrych's forte was his intimate understanding of Egyptian political and military systems. When Sadat assumed the presidency after the death of Nasser, Gawrych lucidly illustrated how Sadat linked ways, means, and ends to formulate Egypt's policy and military strategy. This is the book's most valuable contribution to the political scientist or military historian. Sadat's political goals were to regain national pride, discredit Israeli security theory and their sense of invulnerability, regain lost territory, and spur diplomatic activity from the United States. This ultimately translated into a strategy of limited war with the objectives of attaining operational surprise, inflicting the greatest possible losses on Israel, and the liberation of occupied land through diplomatic channels. Operationally and tactically, this meant a surprise campaign to seize key ground on the eastern side of the Suez, ideally portions of the Bar-Lev Line no more than 15-20 km in depth, and hold off Israeli counterattacks until a cease-fire. Strategic victory would be gained after the cease-fire during diplomatic negotiations with Israel and the United States. Gawrych convincingly demonstrated how Sadat's strategy was an extension of politics by other means.

Gawrych's description of Egypt's assault and the 1973 Arab-Israeli War was just as thorough and just as detailed as his previous account of the Six Day War. He again illustrated the campaign with informative maps, charts, and accounts of key tactical events. He adequately described superpower involvement and Sadat's diplomatic maneuvering to secure peace even as the battle raged. He also described the tactical, operational, and strategic blunders of Egypt as Sadat altered his war plans to aid Syria following Syrian setbacks in the Golan Heights. This afforded Israel the opportunity rally forces, take the initiative, and achieve operational breakthroughs prior to the cease-fire. Although Gawrych was meticulously complete in his tactical and operational analysis, he neglected some key attributes of strategy and policy. His book was focused primarily on Egypt and, to a lesser extent, Israel therefore he failed to adequately address the reactions and responses of other Arab states during the war, most notably Syria and Jordan but also Iraq, Saudi Arabia, and others.

Explanation of the political and strategic environment in the aftermath of the 1973 war also revealed Gawrych's ability to clearly distill and describe relevant issues. He masterfully described the cease-fire agreement worked out between Sadat and Kissinger and its reception by the Meir government in Israel. He also described how the ultimate tactical and operational victories of the IDF were still perceived by the Israeli people as strategic failure of an overconfident government and military. His analysis of how military losses, economic suffering, and political discontent led to the collapse of the Meir government in Israel was informative. Gawrych brings closure to his case study by briefly describing the path Egypt and Israel took to reach the Camp David Peace Accords, ultimately ushering in a new era in relations between Egypt and Israel. The accords were signed by President Sadat, Prime Minister Begin, and President Carter on September 17, 1978.

The Albatross of Decisive Victory was a comprehensive case study of an epochal period in the history of the Middle East. This book is highly recommended for in-depth analysis of Egypt and Israel during the years from 1967 to 1973. For broader historical perspective and greater insight into actors beyond Egypt and Israel, this book should be read in conjunction with other sources. This is also true for understanding how the Arab-Israeli wars fit into the larger context of the Cold War. Gawrych was extremely adept at describing the technical aspects of tactics, operations, strategy, and policy but his analysis of the personalities in his book were two-dimensional and `cardboard.' The reader was often left wondering who Nasser, Sadat, Eshkol, and key players really were. Gawrych explained what they did but not always how they did it or what they were thinking.

Overall, however, this was an outstanding book. George Gawrych convincingly demonstrated how Israel's decisive victory in 1967 created intractable problems that could not be resolved without recourse to further violence between Egypt and Israel. He applied Clausewitzian theory to describe how Sadat interpreted the strategic environment and how Sadat formulated his policy to obtain specific national objectives. His analysis also revealed how Clausewitzian uncertainty on the battlefield inevitably impacted strategy and policy. Gawrych's greatest contributions in this book were his insight into Sadat's strategy formulation, his clear descriptions of the linkage between strategic, operational, and tactical concepts, and cautionary lessons regarding the aftermath of decisive victory.