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Armies of Sand - The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness (Paperback)
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Armies of Sand - The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness (Paperback)
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Since the Second World War, Arab armed forces have consistently
punched below their weight. They have lost many wars that by all
rights they should have won, and in their best performances only
ever achieved quite modest accomplishments. Over time, soldiers,
scholars, and military experts have offered various explanations
for this pattern. Reliance on Soviet military methods, the poor
civil-military relations of the Arab world, the underdevelopment of
the Arab states, and patterns of behavior derived from the wider
Arab culture, have all been suggested as the ultimate source of
Arab military difficulties. In Armies of Sand, Kenneth M. Pollack
assesses these differing explanations and isolates the most
important causes. Over the course of the book, he examines the
combat performance of fifteen Arab armies and air forces in
virtually every Middle Eastern war, from the Jordanians and Syrians
in 1948 to Hizballah in 2006 and the Iraqis and ISIS in 2014-2017.
The book ultimately concludes that reliance on Soviet doctrine was
more of a help than a hindrance to the Arabs. In contrast,
politicization and underdevelopment were both important factors
limiting Arab military effectiveness, but patterns of behavior
derived from the dominant Arab culture was the most important
factor of all. Pollack closes with a discussion of the rapid
changes occurring across the Arab world, and suggests that because
both Arab society and warfare are changing, the problems that have
bedeviled Arab armed forces in the past could dissipate or even
vanish in the future, with potentially dramatic consequences for
the Middle East military balance. Sweeping in its coverage, this
will be the go-to reference for anyone interested in the history of
warfare in the Middle East since 1945.
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