What caused the Yom Kippur / October 1973 War?

[Tom Odom]

First post, but I've been a longtime reader of all these threads.

I think there was a rather fundamental difference between the way Syria and Egypt went about achieving their respective war aims.

Egypt crossed the canal, dug in, and waited for the counter-attack. I think it would be very difficult to credibly suggest that Egypt ever planned to threaten Israeli population centers. The Egyptian goal was to demonstrate to the Israelis that continued occupation of the Sinai would not be possible in the long-term; that it was contestable and that the Egyptian government had the political will and military ability to contest it.

The Syrians showed themselves to be much more ambitious from the get-go. The original Syrian war plan called for commando drops to the rear of the Golan, these were scrapped for political reasons, but the political implications are clear -- Syria wanted the ability to threaten Israel proper. While the Syrian political objective may have been to get the Golan back, the Syrian advance was nothing like the Egyptian one -- it looked much more like a conventional invasion rather than the lure into attritional combat that the Egyptian advance was.

I would tend to agree on the diifferent aims but I would also say that terrain as much as politics dictated what happened on the two fronts. The Golan's great value to either side has always been it's absolute dominance over coastal Israel. If the Syrians had taken it, I would say that shear momentum would have made stopping impossible, regardless of strategic objectives. All of that aside, the Golan also serves as a funnel, wllowing very little maneuver room. Heights of Courage on the IDF 7th Armored Brigade protrays that pretty well.

In the case of Sinai, Sadat and his generals figured out that if they gave the Egyptian soldier a chance to defend a position with protected flanks and some form of air cover, he would do a pretty good job of it. The terrain allowed for that once the Bar Lev line was penetrated; IDF and IAF assumtions that the Egyptians would fold in front of them proved disastrous. the classic was in the initial counterattacks by Israeli armor, They rushed forward and then turned into what they thought was the Egyptian flank; instead they paraded across the Egyptian front like ducks in a shooting gallery. I used to take visitors out to Sinai for staff rides. There was an IDF Centurion company strung out north to south along where this turning movement failed. The T34 below was part of the Egyptian unit that destroyed them.

Best

Tom