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Needed: better Arab armies

The Middle East Institute (MEI) hosted a book talk on February 14 with Kenneth Pollack, resident scholar at the American Enterprise Institute (AEI), former CIA intelligence analyst, and the author of Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness.

Pollack argues that since the second world war, Arab armies had underperformed. He believes that the size, material factors and the weaponry with which they waged war could have enabled Arabs to win easily, but instead they lost catastrophically. The few times they won were modest victories. Reflecting on the core reason for Arab military backwardness in the last seventy years, Pollack attributes it to Arab society itself. He argues that what defines a good and bad military in the industrial age warfare is a hierarchy based on mission-oriented orders in which the general gives the subordinate a sense of what he is trying to achieve and leaves it to them to figure out how best to do it. Arab culture’s educational system, though, inculcates a rigidly top-down system of organization and hierarchy.

Pollack explained that every culture develops in response to its own circumstances. And Warfare is usually a competitive activity against the organization of another society that organizes itself differently. Arabs were trying to fight industrial warfare in a way that their culture and society did not equip them to do, against foes who were way better equipped l(ike, for instance, the Israelis).

Strikingly similar patterns of underperformance in Middle Eastern wars suggest recurrent problems. Descriptions of Egyptian performance in 1948 and Iraqi performance in 2014 read like plagiarized versions of one another. Arabs have not experienced the industrial revolution, or the information revolution of today. 

Apart from the cultural piece, Pollack identifies a set of problems Arab armies suffer. Most Arab generals were inexperienced and did not know what they were doing. Junior officers are passive, inflexible, unimaginative, and unable to respond to battlefield developments. At the bottom of Arab chain of command, personnel had difficulties handling their weapons and maintaining them properly. The more sophisticated a weapon it is, the harder for them to handle. For instance, All countries who trained Arab armies (the Russians, French, Americans, and British) attest that they performed better with the older Soviet MIG 17 and MIG 21 than they did with American F4 and F16. Providing Arab armies with sophisticated weapons did not improve their combat capability. 

In addition, the Arab world is replete with bad civil military relations. Many regimes lacking legitimacy tend to be concerned the generals surrounding them, as the leaders themselves came to power by overthrowing others. They seek therefore to hobble the military so that can not do likewise. Saddam Hussein was an outstanding example, as he put people in charge whom he knew to be incompetent. The golden rule has thus always been loyalty over competence.

It is important for those who want the US out of the region that it not to be replaced by Iran, Hezbollah, ISIS, or Al-Qaeda. Without the US, it is imperative to leave behind a strong Arab army able of defending against these threats.