#the in-depth strategic and tactical case studies are really good and i've enjoyed them

[lilliankillthisman]

So far Armies of Sand: The Past, Present and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness has been enjoyable, informative but unsatisfying (and I'm getting a vibe that it's going to get worse). It's presenting a history and theory of military underperformance by Arab government forces post-WW2, written by an ex-CIA-turned-academic guy who clearly has a great breadth of knowledge about the topic.

He presents compelling evidence that military performance in Arab states over this period has been dreadful (which. isn't controversial), to an extent that it really looks like a pattern and requires an explanation. He puts up four factors that he says are popular explanations for the pattern among analysts and military officals and historians: over-reliance on inappropriate Soviet doctrine, widespread military politicisation, economic underdevelopment, and Arab culture. For each one, he gives in-depth case studies of conflicts involving Arab armies with these characteristics and others with non-Arab armies demonstrating the same characteristics, and compares them to show that the failures experienced by Arab militaries weren't demonstrated by non-Arab militaries operating under the same constraints (e.g. Egyptian and Cuban militaries were both trained as far as possible according to Soviet doctrine, but performed totally differently, and the ways in which Egypt's armies failed were clearly independent to the doctrine/went against that doctrine entirely).

Anyway. Like so many pop-history or pop-science books with a narrative to sell, you really benefit from reading reviews from people who know what they're talking about beforehand, and to keep an eye out for any gaps in the story they're telling you. Here, the reviews will tell you what you should really pick up from the Acknowledgements section at the start; he really doesn't talk to many Arabs for his book on Arab military history. He doesn't really engage with wider literature either, from the region or otherwise. The first big section of the book, on whether Soviet military doctrine was widely responsible for Arab underperformance, is genuinely a completely sound case for why it wasn't; it was in-depth and very well explained. But because Pollack is never interested in presenting competing points of view in the literature, I have no idea whether he's debunking a widespread myth that people take seriously, or if he's shadowboxing against a view that occasional officials will mention but which no one took seriously in the first place.

The narrative also is hung very firmly on the lynchpin of "there's an explanation that's true for all or nearly all Arab militaries". Which, you know. That's an ethnicity, not a Warhammer race. Maybe explanations don't stack up because not every country in the region has problems caused by the same things!

He also is definitely cherry-picking his comparison case studies; there are a lot of wars in the world, and he picks ones that work for his points. That isn't fatal to his arguments, and he's not really hiding it, but it's something to bear in mind.

Lastly, his section on whether Arab underperformance can be put down to economic under-development is... kind of a nothing-burger; I'm not sure he has or even needs a coherent argument. He gives very detailed accounts of the Chadian-Libyan wars and then of the Chinese offensives in the Korean War, which are super interesting vignettes on how the forces of underdeveloped nations can thrash technologically and logistically superior forces; I am not really sure they added anything to the thesis of the book. At some point you are just comparing incredibly different situations and forces, to no real point. "Arab militaries underperform compared to what their available resources should suggest" was the premise of the book that needed explaining; it didn't need 110 pages of argument to prove that it wasn't the explanation.

Anyway, I'm making this post now because the last third of the book focuses on whether Arab militaries underperform due to Arab culture, which... feels like it will want a separate post to talk about after reading, because apparently he's quite keen on this explanation. Even if you ignore that it seems dodgy and unpleasant, it's not an explanation that can really be falsified; it's not easily distinguishable from "Arab militaries are bad because Arab militaries are bad". It's the explanation you would have to fall back on if you didn't have a good explanation, and if there isn't actually a unified explanation you would end up looking pretty silly.