With the departure of the Russians, the closest collaboration with our Arab neighbors seemed more than ever necessary. But the next month sadly demonstrated the gulf between theory and reality.

September 9-13: The council of the Arab League, at its 58th session in Cairo, decided to form a committee of the ministers of defense and foreign affairs of five countries to study ways to greater collaboration in the battle. Proposals were to go to the next meeting of the Arab Collective Defense Council towards the end of the year.

(The committee grew until 13 of the 19 full Arab League members were on it, so it became a mini-Arab Collective Defense Council in its own right.) The result of the committee was to confirm the assignment of troops from non-front line Arab countries according to what I had drawn up previously.

September 27: Almost immediately, however, we saw an example of how, despite such committees, personal relations still damaged our struggle. Brigadier Bahr, commander of the Sudanese infantry brigade assigned to us, came to tell me he had orders from Khartoum to withdraw his men. President Ga`far al-Numayriy had fallen out with Sadat.
 

It was a sad end to a developing relationship. When the Anyanya rebels in southern Sudan had 
become a real threat in November 1971, Egypt had supplied Khartuwm with 100 tons of bombs, air-to-surface missiles and the technicians to train them in both. In thanks, a Sudanese infantry brigade had arrived in Egypt in spring 1972; and Egypt had also been allowed to set up some of its training centers in Sudan to keep them out of reach of the Israeli Air Force.

Now this collaboration was being destroyed, because two men had fallen out. (The next month, while the Sudanese were being repatriated, we heard that our men training in Sudan were running into trouble, so the political decision was made to withdraw them too.)

October 2: Another example of how the Arabs dissipate their power. Civil war had broken out in Yemen in September. Already the Arabs were divided in their support either of the Yemen Arab Republic (Northern Yemen) or the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (Southern Yemen). Ashraf Marwan now phoned from the presidency. We were going to send bombers to support the north.
 
 

Given the disaster of our last involvement in the affairs of Yemen, and given our desperate need for every piece of equipment we possessed, I found this incredible. But the President, when I phoned him, confirmed it, decreeing that we should send five MIG-17s as well as four IL-28 bombers. The aircraft were to go to San`a' in Yemen via Jeddah in Saudi Arabia. Our pilots must not take part in the fighting, but they could train and brief the Yemenis. That same day, Yemeni pilots flew our fighters south. The IL-28, piloted by Egyptians, followed two days later.
 
 
 

Why? The price of some related deal with the Saudis? I never knew. All I saw was yet another example of how a significant portion of the Arabs' military strength is not merely absent from the battle but is actually wasted in conflict with other Arab forces which should also be at the front.
 

Fighting is the central military act; all other activities merely support it. Its nature consequently needs close examination.  Engagements mean fighting. The object of fighting is the destruction or defeat of the enemy. The enemy in the individual engagement is simply the opposing fighting force. This is the simple concept, and we shall return to it. But first we must introduce a number of other considerations.  If a state with its fighting forces is thought of a single. unit, a war will naturally tend to be seen in terms of a single great engagement. Under the primitive conditions of savage peoples this generally holds true. But our wars today consist of a large number of engagements, great and small, simultaneous or consecutive, and this fragmentation of activity into so many separate actions is the result of the great variety of situations out of which wars can nowadays arise. Even the ultimate aim of contemporary warfare, the political object, can-not always be seen as a single issue.  Even if it were, action is subject to such a multitude of conditions and considerations that the aim can no longer be achieved by a single tremendous act of war. Rather it must be reached by a large number of more or less important actions, all combined into one whole. Each of these separate actions has a specific purpose relating to the whole. We have already said that the concept of the engagement lies at the root of all strategic action, since strategy is the use of force, the heart of which, in turn, is the engagement.  So in the field of strategy we can reduce all military activity to the unitary concept of the     single engagement, and concern ourselves exclusively with its purposes. We will come to identify these purposes as we discuss the circumstances that give rise to them in the engagement. Here it is enough to say that every engagement, large or small, has its own particular purpose which is subordinate to the general one.  That being so, the destruction and subjugation of the enemy must be regarded simply as a means toward the general end, which it obviously is. But this conclusion is true only in a formal sense, and is significant only because of the connection between these various concepts.  We have brought up this connection only in order to get it out of the way. What do we mean by the defeat of the enemy?  Simply the destruction of his forces, whether by death, injury, or any other means-either completely or enough to make him stop fighting. Leaving aside all specific purposes of any particular engagement, the complete or partial destruction of the enemy must be regarded as the sole object of all engagements.     Carl Von Clausewitz; Prussian Military Philosopher