On the U.S. side, the effort to train Arab militaries has been sincere, persistent, and doomed. The U.S. Air Force has been trying to train the Egyptian Air Force (EAF) to fly the F-16 for decades. However, well into the 21st century, the EAF’s standard pattern of attack has called for two planes to approach nearly simultaneously from either side of a target, on a collision course. Consequently, even in training exercises, one plane out of every pair has to swerve at the last minute to avoid a midair collision—causing that pilot’s bombs to go far from the target.
Because the Egyptians don’t record their missions or debrief, let alone actually critique their own performances, and no one at operational levels wants to rock the boat by pointing out that their tactics are suicidal and their training rigged, all of these practices have become institutionalized elements of EAF training, and U.S. pilots have reported constant frustration trying to convince the EAF that its school solutions are not only wrong but potentially fatal. One American pilot who had trained with the EAF told me that it was “probably good” that the Egyptians didn’t use live ordnance in practice because if they did, they would lose a lot of their aircraft and pilots to these ridiculous tactics and distorted training practices.
The Egyptian pilots and tacticians involved in devising this absurd practice were prisoners of a series of problems that have haunted Arab armies throughout the modern era and that have grown out of contemporary Arab society itself.
