A Tale of Two Spyders: The Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam’s Air Defense System or Abiy’s Means of Regime Survival
By Karim E. El-Baz, Royal Military College
For nearly a decade, the three Nile Basin countries of Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan have been engaged in negotiations over the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD) in an attempt to reach a legally binding agreement on the operation of the dam. Despite multiple rounds of diplomatic meetings, technical expert panels and frequent Egyptian Papal visits to the Ethiopian Orthodox Church, Ethiopia still insists on filling the dam whether it reaches an agreement with Egypt and Sudan or not. In 2019, shortly after winning the Nobel Peace Prize, Ethiopia’s Prime Minister Abiy Ahmed Ali warned that his country is willing to mobilize millions of soldiers over the construction of the GERD. A few months later, then Ethiopian Deputy Army Chief, General Birhanu Jula, told state media that the “Egyptians and the rest of the world know too well how we conduct war whenever it comes.” The dramatic shift in the tone of Ethiopian diplomacy came only a few months after installing the Spyder-MR (Medium Range) air defence system near the GERD in July 2019. Therefore, will the Ethiopian Spyder-MR have a drastic impact on the regional calculations? Or is there an untold Spyder tale?
Ethiopian news agencies reportedly claimed that two Israeli firms, Israeli Aerospace Industries and Rafael, had installed Spyder-MR defense systems near the GERD in July 2019. The system is guided by an Elta radar making it effective against aircraft flying at low and medium altitudes, UAVs, cruise missiles, and precision-guided munitions within the system’s range. However, the military effectiveness of any Ground Based Air Defence (GBAD) system is not only measured by the missile range or radar type, but also by whether; 1) the system is part of some larger GBAD network, and 2) if the GBAD network itself is integrated into a larger doctrinal employment to fully defend a given airspace. Unfortunately for Ethiopia, these two factors are not met.
Regarding the first network requirement, Ethiopia is managing the Spyder-MR as a stand-alone system. In other words, the Spyder-MR is detached from the entire Ethiopian GBAD network and has to be managed by a separate crew to keep it operational, which reduces the system’s effectiveness. Ethiopia is unable to integrate the Spyder-MR into its current GBAD network because most of the existing network is dependent on outdated Soviet technology or recently procured systems of Chinese origin. Should Ethiopia integrate the systems, it could risk access to future flows of ammunition, spare parts and technical expertise required to maintain their existing military assets of Russian and Chinese origin.
As for air defence doctrine, Ethiopia lacks an efficient and effective air force to supplement its GBAD network, as it relies on two outdated squadrons of MiG-23 and Su-27 fighter jets whose operational status is contested and their ability to enforce aerial supremacy is questionable. These two variables alone would undermine the effectiveness of the Spyder system in Ethiopia; especially, if it is deployed to asymmetrically deter an adversary such as Egypt. The Egyptian air force not only outnumbers Ethiopia’s quantitively and qualitatively, but it can also deliver payloads to its desired targets without entering the Spyder-MR’s operational range. Based on these factors, the Spyder-MR system cannot effectively protect the GERD. As a result, an important question arises: if the Spyder-MR is tactically ineffective for Ethiopia, then why did Abiy’s administration bother procuring it in the first place?
Since his accession to power in 2018, Abiy Ahmed Ali has been facing a number of challenges that have handicapped his political agenda and threatened the sustainability of his regime. The first of these challenges is his Oromo ethnicity. The Oromo people constitute more than a third of the country’s 100 million strong population, and the ascension of Abiy Ahmed to power as the first Oromo leader in the country’s history was meant to signal a new beginning for this ethnic group. Abiy, from the very onset, had a hard time responding to Oromo grievances without showing bias towards his ethnicity, and by extension impacting the unity of the state. However, the shooting on June 29th of the popular Oromo musician, Hachalu Hundessa, in Addis Ababa triggered massive protests in the State of Oromia, and Abiy found himself facing a test in which he had to choose between his ethnic fidelity and his image as a Prime Minister for all the Ethiopians — he chose the latter. His choice has since led to hundreds of deaths and thousands of arrests of his own people.
The second challenge to Abiy’s leadership is his relationship with the Tigray. The Tigray People’s Liberation Front (TPLF), Tigray’s former ruling party of Ethiopia and armed force, has been a challenge to Abiy’s political agenda due to their previous considerable influence over the state’s political and military domains. Abiy needed to take control by isolating the TPLF, even if it came to civil war, to secure and replace their long-established influence over state apparatuses. However, in the process, Abiy found himself in a country whose unity was hanging by a thread.
To face these challenges, or to at least co-exist with them, Abiy resorted to the oldest trade secret; to distract from the domestic Ethiopian crises he would generate a common foreign enemy, and he found his endgame in demonizing Egypt. Portraying Egypt as the enemy required more than mere political campaigns through state-run media, it needed physical steps to supplement propaganda with materialistic steps to reinforce this image in the hearts and minds of the Ethiopian people, and procuring the Spyder-MR system served this purpose efficiently despite its tactical ineffectiveness.
When a country declares deploying a GBAD system near a strategic site, a common knowledge spreads, whether intentionally or unintentionally, that this strategic site is potentially under a threat of an attack. Abiy needed only to generate this common knowledge whether a real threat existed or not, and deploying a GBAD system despite its tactical ineffectiveness is sufficient enough to incept the idea that the GERD is threatened. What confirms this perspective is the unorthodox intentional leaks about the area of Spyder-MR deployment via the state-run media and the simultaneous shift in the Ethiopian tone towards the Nile Basin countries. Selling the Spyder-MR tale to Ethiopian people allowed Abiy to divert the people’s attention from a catastrophic course of political action that led to a civil war, to a more desirable course through which the regime emerges as a bulwark against foreign aggressors.
For these reasons, there are two tales for the Spyder-MR GBAD deployed in Ethiopia: a tactical tale and a political tale. With regard to the former, the system is militarily ineffective and inefficient when deployed against a country with sophisticated Long-Range Air-to-Ground capabilities such as Egypt. As for the latter, it entails that Spyder-MR is nothing but a political instrument.
Karim El-Baz is a researcher and a PhD Candidate at the War Studies Program at the Royal Military College of Canada. He is also the civil-military relations expert at MENACS, a project-based network under the auspices of the James Martin Center for Nonproliferation Studies and is a researcher at the Comprehensive Nuclear-Test-Ban Treaty Organization Youth Group.
