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

As military history books go, Arabs At War is meat and potatoes rather than haute cuisine. But, make no mistake, it's high quality meat and potatoes—in spite of the author's puzzling reluctance, at the end, to come to grips with the main issue. A former CIA analyst who served on the National Security Council, Pollack has a compellingly documented thesis: competent, professional military institutions have failed to emerge in Arab countries, despite an abundance of warfighting experience. As a result Arab military forces have been effective only in static combat situations, lapsing into ineptitude and defeat when confronted with more dynamic opponents like Israel, the United States, Iran, and even Chad.

With regard to the Arab-Israeli wars, which take up much of the book, the gold standard is Trevor N. Dupuy's Elusive Victory, published almost twenty-five years ago. Pollack offers some useful source criticism of Dupuy and others who have chronicled these wars, taking advantage of his access to histories, memoirs, and official documents that have appeared in recent decades. Much of this critical analysis is relegated to the endnotes, which are extensive and highly informative for the specialist. The combat narratives themselves are necessarily less detailed than Dupuy's, but competently rendered. Where Pollack shines is in his illumination of the more obscure corners—Libya's seesaw wars in Chad and the Iran-Iraq war in particular. His narrative flow, however, suffers from occasional lapses into a banal conversational tone that undermines the impressive scope of his research and the soundness of his analytical judgments. His technical grasp occasionally slips, as when he equates the Mirage and Hawker Hunter as same-generation fighters. He also entertains an amusing conceit that the U.S. military "learned to obliterate Iraq's air force, air defense forces, and army by watching the Israelis"—thereby writing off our post-Vietnam military reforms culminating in the unparalleled exercise environments of "Red Flag" and the National Training Center. On the whole these are minor quibbles.

In summing up, Pollack identifies chronic weaknesses in nearly every area of Arab military performance, including generalship, tactical leadership, unit cohesion, and technical skills. Information management receives particular attention—"Arab forces routinely operated in a thick fog of ignorance and half-truths." Intelligence organizations painted fantasies for the top leadership; commanders in the field routinely failed to exert much effort to gain situation awareness, complacently relying on what higher echelons passed along. The result was disaster piled on disaster, repeated in war after war. Pollack does identify some strengths: Arab logistical and engineering support was good in many instances, and most armies achieved gradual improvements in basic unit training after the 1960s. Strategic planning was sometimes excellent, but could not make up for the structural weaknesses noted above.

Somewhat surprisingly, Pollack hesitates to explore cultural factors that might explain this historic ineptitude. Islam as an inhibitor of modernization in the Middle East has been much discussed in the media, and military specialists might usefully turn to an article in the fall 2000 edition of the online journal American Diplomacy, "Why Arabs Lose Wars" by Col. (Ret.) Norvell B. De Atkine. Interestingly, this two-year-old article is not cited by Pollack, while De Atkine obligingly credits Pollack for his "exhaustive study of Arab military effectiveness." (Therein lies a mystery, if one notes the 2002 publication date of Arabs at War.) Pollack's book and De Atkine's article have a symbiotic relationship and ought to be read together: the latter drew on his experience as an attaché and military advisor to various Arab nations, while the former is straightforward historical analysis from a vast array of sources—offering penultimate conclusions that invite us to take the final, intuitive leap on our own...