Speaker 1: Many people have heard of the Navy Seals, obviously in
Speaker 1: the Green Berets, but today we're talking about a different group,
Speaker 1: Egypt Sakha Forces, and this is a unit that got
Speaker 1: built the hard way through defeat, humiliation, in a total
Speaker 1: institutional gut check. That's usually how the best special operations
Speaker 1: unit get made, not from a firm nation in flesh
Speaker 1: with confidence, but from a nation that got its teeth
Speaker 1: kicked in Sakka means thunderbolt in Arabic, and the roots
Speaker 1: of this unit traced back to the aftermath of the
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty seven Six Day War. There is a short
Speaker 1: version if you don't know that war Egypt, Jordan and Syriah.
Speaker 1: It got absolutely dismantled by Israel in six days. Egypt
Speaker 1: lost to Sinai Sayanai peninsula, lost most of its air
Speaker 1: force on the ground before it even got airborne, and
Speaker 1: took a level of strategic embarrassment that doesn't just hurt,
Speaker 1: it forces dramatic change. And that's exactly what happened. Military
Speaker 1: leadership looked at what went wrong, and one of the
Speaker 1: glaring issues was a total lack of specialized units capable
Speaker 1: of one could have unconventional warfare, deep recon and rapid
Speaker 1: direct action behind enemy lines. Conventional forces, though, weren't enough,
Speaker 1: especially against an enemy like Israel, so Egypt started building
Speaker 1: out dedicated special op capability in the Saka forces became
Speaker 1: the tip of that spear in nineteen seventy three October.
Speaker 1: The war rolled around six years later. This was a
Speaker 1: different Egyptian military. Saka units were used for deep infiltration,
Speaker 1: sabotage X operations and strikes against high value targets behind
Speaker 1: Israeli lines. Some of these operations involved helicopter insertions deep
Speaker 1: into contested territory to hit airfields, disrupt logistics, and create
Speaker 1: chaos in the enemy's rear areas, where while the main
Speaker 1: conventional force pushed across the Suez Now. Not every one
Speaker 1: of these operations went clean. This is the nature of
Speaker 1: early stage operations done. You're going to have friction, you're
Speaker 1: going to have losses. But the point is Egypt to
Speaker 1: learn the lesson. You cannot fight a technologically superior, highly
Speaker 1: mobile enemy with conventional infantry tactics alone. You need people
Speaker 1: who can operate independently behind the lines. And that's really
Speaker 1: the DNA of Sokka. It's a unique unit built specifically
Speaker 1: around the idea of operating and denied hostile, unsupported environments,
Speaker 1: and that doctrine didn't disappear up to nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: After decades, saka's role expanded well beyond conventional deep strike
Speaker 1: operations into counter terrorism, hostage rescue, and internal security ops,
Speaker 1: particularly as Egypt started dealing with serious homegrown terrorism, especially
Speaker 1: in the Syinai Peninsula in the twenty tens, where groups
Speaker 1: tied to Isis. We're operating an active insurgency against the
Speaker 1: Egyptian state. What about selection or Egyptian special forces broadly
Speaker 1: speaking across Sokka and the broad Egyptian airborne Commando pipeline
Speaker 1: is built around extreme physical nutrition combined with psychological pressure testing.
Speaker 1: We're talking punishing endurance events and brutal heat. Because remember
Speaker 1: a huge amount of Egypt's operational environment is desert, the
Speaker 1: Cianai in the western desert, aline of living in border,
Speaker 1: so candidates need to be conditioned specifically for that environment,
Speaker 1: not generic fitness standards. Long rock marches, under load obstacle
Speaker 1: courses designed to break you physically and mentally at the
Speaker 1: same time, close quarters combat evaluation, and sustained sleep deprivation
Speaker 1: phases where instructors are watching less for who's the strongest
Speaker 1: guy in the room and more for who keeps making
Speaker 1: sound decisions when they're exhausted, hungry, and mentally worn. That's
Speaker 1: the actual selection of criteria every serious special ops pipeline
Speaker 1: in the world. It's never really about raw physical dominance,
Speaker 1: about the decision about those who don't fall apart under
Speaker 1: compounding stress and SOAKA also trains heavily in airborne operations
Speaker 1: as a huge part of the original doctrine was built
Speaker 1: around rapid infiltration by air chute combined now with amphibious
Speaker 1: infiltration training since Egypt's got serious coastline exposure, and you
Speaker 1: start to see a unit that's built to be inserted
Speaker 1: by air, sea, or land, depending on what the mission requires.
Speaker 1: That kind of multi domain infiltration capability as a hallmark
Speaker 1: of a mature special ops force. Let's get into the
Speaker 1: canaterrorism piece, because this is where the Sakha has actually
Speaker 1: seen the most sustained real world operational tempo. After twenty eleven,
Speaker 1: during the instability following the Arab Spring and intensifying to
Speaker 1: the mid twenty tens the Cyanai Peninsula, it came home
Speaker 1: to an active insurgency primarily driven by you may remember
Speaker 1: Williott Cyanai, the local ISS affiliate. This wasn't some low
Speaker 1: intensity nuisance problem. This was a sustained campaign involving IEDs
Speaker 1: ambushes on Egyptian military checkpoints and attacks on civilian security targets.
Speaker 1: Sakoff Horses, alongside other elements of the Egyptian military, became
Speaker 1: heavily committed to counterinsurgency operations of North Cyani, operating in
Speaker 1: brutal terrain, extreme heat against an enemy that blended into
Speaker 1: the local population and used classic insurgent tactics hit and
Speaker 1: run engagements, buried explosives. This was a fundamentally different operational
Speaker 1: problem in the conventional deep strike missions of nineteen seventy three.
Speaker 1: Counterinsurgency requires a completely different skill set. It's slower, it's
Speaker 1: more intelligence driven, requires operators who can build relationships with
Speaker 1: local populations, gather human intelligence, and execute precision rates based
Speaker 1: on that intelligence. Units that can transition between high intensity
Speaker 1: conventional special ops and long term counterinsurgency without losing effectiveness
Speaker 1: are rare, and that transition is exactly what this group
Speaker 1: did from Egypt, and it has to make it over the
Speaker 1: past decade plus. One thing that doesn't get talked about
Speaker 1: enough with units like this is a psychological toll sustained
Speaker 1: counterinsurgency deployment. Talking about a single high intensity mission, you're
Speaker 1: talking about operators bring doing repeated rotations into the same
Speaker 1: hostile terrain year after a year against an enemy that adapts,
Speaker 1: that plants IEDs, that studies your unit's habits and exploits them.
Speaker 1: That kind of prolonged exposure to ambiguous threat where danger
Speaker 1: is in a single event but a constant, low grade presence.
Speaker 1: But this is a very specific kind of operational fatigue.
Speaker 1: It's not the acute adrenaline spike or single radio but
Speaker 1: it's a chronic high pervigil and sustain over years of
Speaker 1: deployment cycles that has real cognitive and physiological costs. What
Speaker 1: make SOAKA worth talking about is in flashy public operations
Speaker 1: or highly real because frankly, a lot of what this
Speaker 1: unit does doesn't get publicized. That's by design, that's true
Speaker 1: of most special ops. What makes it we're talking about
Speaker 1: is the institutional story behind it. A military that got
Speaker 1: humiliated in sixty seven, they took a hard look at
Speaker 1: its failures and built a unit. Specifically, it's designed to
Speaker 1: address that gap. Decades later, that same unit had to
Speaker 1: reinvent itself again to fight a completely different kind of
Speaker 1: war against an insurgency that didn't exist when the unit
Speaker 1: was first created. That adaptably, more than any other single operation,
Speaker 1: is probably the best measure of how seriously you could
Speaker 1: take a special ops unit. Not how good their pr is,
Speaker 1: not how many action movies get made about them. It's
Speaker 1: whether they can evolve when the thread evolves, and by
Speaker 1: that measure, EGYPT'SAKA forces have are in a lot more
Speaker 1: respect than most people have ever given them.