Special Operations Forces in the Yom Kippur War

The Yom Kippur War was a war of armor maneuvering in masses and immense firepower. Thousands of tanks and hundreds of thousands of soldiers were thrown into battle by the belligerents, and the world witnessed one of the largest clashes of tanks since the Second World War. Furthermore, the war itself was decided by these very same maneuvering masses.
Nonetheless, in this war special forces also played a role, and in fact their involvement supported the maneuvering forces. The extent of their support is at the heart of this chapter.
The aim of this chapter is to examine how the armies of Egypt, Syria, and Israel used their special forces during the war. This chapter will examine the missions assigned to the various units and how, and to what extent their activity contributed to the battle efforts of the maneuvering forces.
Since the war was initiated by a joint Egyptian-Syrian attack, the chapter will also examine how the special forces of the Arab countries were integrated into the war plans prior to the war, how they operated during the initial phases of the war, and whether these actions contributed to the Egyptian and Syrian successes in the beginning of the war. In other words, this chapter aims to examine and analyze the place of special operations forces in conventional warfare, with the Yom Kippur War as a case study.
In this, the chapter will make a modest contribution to the examination of special operations forces in large-scale combat operations.