Explaining the Ineffectiveness of Arab Armies

The armed forces, one might argue, are the most important institutions of the state since they alone have the capacity not just to defend it but also to destroy it. In authoritarian polities the military plays an especially critical role since the generals' active support is indispensable for regime maintenance. Still, until just a few years ago the armies of the Arab world—composed exclusively of authoritarian states—were some of the most understudied militaries on the planet. Although following independence, the robust political role of many Arab armies received extensive attention, from the mid 1970s all the way up to the 2011 uprisings, only a few scholarly studies appeared on the region's militaries. In the interim period academic interest in Arab military politics waned, obtaining reliable information without endangering oneself and one's sources was difficult, and the little that was published was rarely presented in a methodologically sound and systematic manner.¹

This state of affairs changed in 2011, when the armed forces' decisive role in the resolution of the Arab upheavals reminded us just how little we knew about them. After the uprisings the armed conflicts and political revitalization in much of the region attracted renewed scholarly attention, benefitting from the explosion of media coverage and the (partial) breakdown of some old rules and norms that impeded research into the military in the past. As a result, the past seven or eight years have seen an upsurge of strong academic work published on Arab armies. Several excellent monographs,² compendia,³ and dozens of scholarly articles—including symposia in issues of the International Journal of Middle East Studies in 2011 and the Journal of Strategic Studies in 2013—signaled the return of politico-military issues to the forefront of scholarship on the region.

The most recent and the most notable of this rich harvest is Kenneth Pollack's Armies of Sand, published in early 2019. The book's primary goal is to explain an old conundrum: the remarkably and consistently weak combat record of Arab armies. Few scholars are better positioned to take on this task than Pollack. For the past three decades he has held jobs as a Washington analyst and adviser at the Central Intelligence Agency, the Brookings Institution, and now at the American Enterprise Institute, with stints on the National Security Council: in all these endeavors he focused on security issues in the Arab world and the wider Middle East, notably Iran.

Armies of Sand originates in Pollack's 1996 dissertation at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, "The Influence of Arab Culture on Arab Military Effectiveness," a 792-page (!) study that purported to explain "why have Arab armed forces fared so poorly in combat since 1945?"⁴ The explanatory variables he introduced—"the characteristics of dominant Arab culture"⁵—were nearly identical to those analyzed in his new book, the discussion of politicization was very similar, and a number of the key case studies of that work were the same as well although presented in a less persuasive and confident manner. This after all, was a dissertation, written for a different audience and for a different purpose by a young scholar.

Pollack's revised thesis became a 700-plus—page tome published by University of Nebraska Press under the title Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948–1991 in 2002. Although some of the dissertation's rough edges were smoothed out, the book retained most of its problems. One scrupulous reviewer faulted it for not offering a compelling and wholly original argument to explain the study's central question, for the problematic research design that limited "what Pollack's analysis can tell us about Arab states' efficacy in war," and for the "method of assessment of his evidence" that was deemed "at best ambiguous and, at worst, highly subjective."⁶ Still, Arabs at War was a major contribution partly because of its detailed and discerning case studies and, perhaps even more so, owing to its attention...