The Missile Wall in the October War
Review
When the state-run al-Hayʾah al-Miṣrīyah al-ʿĀmmah li-l-Kitāb released Ḥā’iṭ al-Ṣawārīkh fī Ḥarb Uktūbar (The Missile Wall in the October War) in 2014, the author had been dead for more than thirty years. Major General Mohamed Said Ali, a founding figure of Egypt’s Air Defense Forces and one of the architects of the 1973 missile belt, died in 1983 at the age of sixty-four. He had kept detailed diaries during the October war but never published them. They remained with his family until 2014, when his son, Adel, submitted them to the state publisher as the first book in a new “Egyptian Army Series.”
That long silence is revealing. During the decades of state-sponsored October commemorations under Hosni Mubarak, which focused almost exclusively on the glories of the Mubarak-led Air Force at the time, these diaries were left untouched. Only after the 2013 coup did the military establishment decide to resurrect them. The timing was no accident. The 2014 publication, framed as the “rediscovery” of a hero’s manuscript, suited the new regime’s effort to canonize the armed forces and rewrite Egypt’s modern history as the story of military salvation. A document written by a soldier for his comrades became, in Sisi’s Egypt, an instrument of nationalist myth-making.
The Making of a Soldier-Author
Mohamed Said Ali was born in 1919 in Mīt al-ʿIzz, Fāqūs District, Sharqīyah, to a well-off rural family. He earned his shahādat al-tawjīhīyah in 1936 and began studying science at Alexandria University before leaving to join the Military College in 1940. Commissioned in 1942 as an artillery officer specializing in anti-aircraft guns, he fought in the 1948 Palestine War and received the Nawṭ al-ǧadārah (Medal of Military Courage).
Through the 1950s and 1960s, he rose steadily, commanding air-defense regiments, studying in the Soviet Union, and founding Egypt’s first anti-aircraft artillery school in 1966. By 1970, he commanded the Eighth Air Defense Division, which built and operated the ḥā’iṭ al-ṣawārīkh. During the October 1973 war, his division deployed SAM-2, SAM-3, SAM-6, and SAM-7 systems across the Canal Zone and claimed to have downed 279 Israeli aircraft. Sadat decorated him with the Order of Military Honor for his role in the war.
After 1973, Ali became Chief of Operations of the Air Defense Command, then its Chief of Staff, and finally Assistant Minister of Defense before retiring in 1979. He received nineteen decorations in total. When he died in 1983, his notes and reflections on the missile campaign remained unpublished. Three decades later, they would be revived to serve a new ideological moment.
Engineering a Myth
