Sadat as Supreme Commander

Extant literature explains Egyptian successes and failures in the October 1973 War by Sadat’s restoration or abolition of ‘objective control’: when restoring ‘objective control’, Sadat succeeded; when abolishing it, he failed. However, Samuel Huntington’s theory cannot account for Sadat’s command performance, not because Sadat zigzagged between this theory’s extremes, but because he never thought or acted according to its recipe. I employ Eliot Cohen’s Supreme Command concepts to argue that Sadat’s command constituted an eccentric combination of military romanticism and politicization of war, whose paradox was reflected in the initial military successes and the achievement of Egypt’s strategic objectives despite the military failures by the war’s final stage.