Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991 (review)

From the time the modern Middle East was created after World War I on the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, and especially after World War II, it has frequently been consumed by violence and wars between Arabs and Jews, Arabs and Iranians, Arabs and Kurds, Arabs and Americans, and Arabs and Africans. In all these wars the Arabs fared worse than one might have expected from the prewar balance of forces. Although the Arabs often enjoyed great advantages in many conventional indices of military power—such as numerical superiority, better weaponry, strategic and tactical surprise, and foreign backing and support—they consistently failed to achieve victory even when it was well within their grasp.

In this ambitious study, Kenneth Pollack, who formerly was an analyst of Persian Gulf military affairs for the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) and director of Persian Gulf affairs at the National Security Council (NSC), attempts to explain the origins of the Arabs' prolonged record of battlefield failure. He does so by exploring the history of six key Arab armed forces—those of Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, and Saudi Arabia. He analyzes their structure, their development, their doctrine, and, above all, their combat effectiveness, which he considers the foremost factor underlying the Arab military predicament. The result is the most comprehensive account of the contemporary Arab approach to warfare yet published, one that paints the picture on a wide canvas without losing sight of the small detail.

Pollack is keenly aware that military effectiveness is not necessarily synonymous with victory and is by no means the only factor determining defeat and victory (e.g., the highly competent German army lost both world wars), yet he believes that it played the decisive role in determining the outcome of wars between the Arabs and their non-Arab foes from 1948 to 1991. The foremost example of this pattern is Israel's repeated victories over the larger and better-armed Arab armies, but we can find equally glaring examples of military incompetence if we look at Iraq's abysmal failure in 1980 to defeat the poorly equipped and disorganized Iranian army, Iraq's incomprehensible strategy during the Gulf War of 1991, and Libya's ill-fated intervention in Chad.

To be sure, there are differences in the developmental patterns and combat performance of the various Arab armies—a factor that may lead some to question whether it makes sense to lump them together. Yet as Pollack aptly points out, these armies displayed far more similarities than differences in their military effectiveness—so much so that battlefield accounts of the various Arab armies and air forces often sound like plagiarized versions of one another. The similarities enable Pollack to treat them as a collective whole by undertaking a comparative analysis of the main components of military effectiveness such as unit cohesion, strategic and tactical leadership, morale, technical skills and weapons handling, information management, and logistics and maintenance.

His analysis yields a number of rather surprising findings. For example, he reveals that the cohesion of Arab armies on the whole was quite good during this period, and on many occasions was nothing short of outstanding. Even when placed in dire situations in which it would have been reasonable to expect the best of armies to disintegrate, Arab tactical formations tended to remain resilient. They fell apart in large numbers only when ordered to conduct a general retreat or when faced with aggressive pursuit by their attackers. This state of affairs is particularly remarkable given the invariably poor combat performance of Arab junior officers from 1948 to 1991, the uneven level of generalship, and the severe problems of relying on poorly trained military personnel to employ and maintain sophisticated weaponry. These deficiencies, in turn, had a devastating impact on overall Arab performance during an age of warfare in which decentralized command, aggressive and innovative tactical leadership, and advanced weaponry were the keys to victory.

The main conclusion from Pollack's exemplary study is that although the...