| There are a couple of reasons this is unlikely to happen. A. The dam already contains more than 4.9 billion cubic meters of water. That along with the wet season rain will mean breaching it will result in catastrophic flooding of Sudan which will result in death and loss of arable land. Each day that goes on, the water level is increasing, after a some time, Egypt itself will face flooding. B. Egypt has powerful military but it seems it was designed to fight Israel, not Ethiopia. The distances are just too great. Not many nations in the world have that kind of power projection in the world. That's an exclusive club of great powers like Russia, France, and superpowers like the USA and China. Most Egyptian fighter/bomber aircraft don't have the range to reach Ethiopia. And Sudan seem to be against war so they're unlikely to grant them passage as they will be the ones that suffer the consequences of a breached dam. The Egyptian airforce is getting new jets from France and Russia. Last I checked, which was months ago, only a few of those jets were delivered. It's unclear that the air crew have the resources, time, training to accomplish the difficult task of dam busting. C. The renaissance dam is a gravity dam. Giant concrete structure. It's not going to be easy to destroy. And attempts could just make it collapse on the water spillways. Which might end up even more disastrous. D. Dam or no dam, the water still flows from Ethiopia. And the Nile is not like the Amazon river in that it doesn't contain as much water. If Egyptian leadership plays a zero-sum game, where only they use the Nile then Ethiopia has zero incentive to protect and develop the water. In the age of climate change, this is a huge factor. Diverting some of the smaller tributaries would at most require a single grader and a few days of work. Diverting some 10 or 20% of the water would not be difficult. And that is far more disastrous to the stated objective of Egypt (Which is to maintain the colonial era agreement that allows them and Sudan 100% of the water). E. Ethiopia is currently a divided country. But when it comes to the dam, its people are 100% on the same page. Most western lenders don't finance any project on the Nile due to Egyptian lobbying. So Ethiopian populace paid for it out of pocket. Most salaried people payed for it out of pocket. WHat that usually means is giving up a month of your salary for the dam. And When Ethiopia is united, it is capable of putting up a good fight. As for the PRC, who do you think loaned to Ethiopia the money for buying the generators? And also, PRC has dams on similar rivers. It unlikely to positively accept such an act. |
To put this into concrete terms: the Renaissance dam is 476ft tall. According to Wikipedia[0], non-nuclear bunker buster bombs are limited to a penetration depth of ~20ft of reinforced concrete, which would barely dent a dam this size. Even the USAF would have a hard time destroying this dam from the air.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bunker_buster