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Egypt Air Defense Force
After most of the country's aircraft was destroyed on the
ground in 1967, the military placed responsibility for air defense
under one commander. Responsibility had previously been divided
among several commands. Egypt patterned its new Air Defense Force
(ADF) after the Soviet Air Defense Command, which integrated all
its air defense capabilities--antiaircraft guns, rocket and missile
units, interceptor planes, and radar and warning installations.
In 1989 the ADF had an estimated 80,000 ground and air
personnel, including 50,000 conscripts. Its main constituents were
100 antiaircraft-gun battalions, 65 battalions of SA-2 SAMs, 60
battalions of SA-3 SAMs, 12 batteries of improved Hawk SAMs
(I-Hawk), and 1 battery of Crotale missiles. Each battalion had
between 200 and 500 men, and from four to eight battalions composed
a brigade. Gun and missile sites were located along the Suez Canal,
around Cairo, and near some other cities to protect military
installations and strategic civilian targets. The ADF deployed some
of its more mobile weapons in the Western Desert as a defense
against possible Libyan incursions.
Progress was being made on a national air-defense network that
would integrate all existing radars, missile batteries, air bases,
and command centers into an automated command and control system.
The ADF planned to link the system to the Hawkeye early warning
aircraft.
A large share of the ADF's antiaircraft artillery, SAMs, and
radar equipment was imported from the Soviet Union. As of 1989, the
most modern weapons in the air defense system were the 108 mediumaltitude I-Hawk SAMs acquired from the United States beginning in
1982. These weapons were supplemented by 400 older Soviet-made SA-2
SAMs with a slant range of forty to fifty kilometers and about 240
SA-3s, which provided shorter-range defense against low-flying
targets. A British firm helped the ADF modernize the SA-2s. In
addition, Egypt was producing its own SAM, the Tayir as Sabah
(Morning Flight), based on the design of the SA-2. The ADF had
mounted sixty Soviet SA-6 SAMs on tracked vehicles as tactical
launchers. Sixteen tracked vehicles provided mobile launching
platforms for its fifty French-manufactured Crotale SAM launchers.
Egypt was also introducing its own composite gun-missile-radar
system known as Amun (skyguard), integrating radar-guided twin 23mm
guns with Sparrow and Egyptian Ayn as Saqr SAMs (see
table 16,
Appendix).
Data as of December 1990
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