The 1973 Arab-israeli War: the Albatross of Decisive Victory

The Six Day War of June 1967 saw the Israel Defense Force (IDF) achieve a decisive military victory over Egypt, Jordan, and Syria while sustaining relatively few casualties. Despite the subsequent image of Israel as a regional military superpower, Egypt attacked again in 1973, eventually resulting in a peace treaty that promised to return the entire Sinai to Egypt. It is the contention of "The 1973 Arab-Israeli War: The Albatross of Decisive Victory" that the IDF's dramatic 1967 victory unconsciously created an albatross in the form of a belief in its own invulnerability coupled with the belief that Egypt would perform as poorly in the next war as it had in this one. In a spirit of overconfidence, Israel prepared to fight its next war just as it had in 1967. The 1973 attack caught Israel off guard, the Egyptians performed much better than expected, and, even after the IDF recovered from its initial stumbles, Egypt was by no means out of the game militarily. Once a cease-fire took effect, the Israelis quickly grasped how ill prepared their army had been for war and the resultant three weeks of hard fighting and relatively heavy casualties. As the author notes, "If the United States had experienced equivalent losses in the Vietnam War, it would have suffered 200,000 American dead - a figure four times the actual number." Given this situation, Egyptian President Anwar Sadat quickly proposed a negotiated peace, which a suddenly war-weary Israeli public warily accepted. Both as an incisive narrative of the 1973 war and an analysis of the self-deception and overconfidence that too decisive a victory can breed, "The 1973 Arab-Israeli War" is an invaluable work of scholarship as well as a cautionary tale for students and practitioners of modern warfare. Orginally published in 1996: 104 p. maps. ill.