> The Arab military mind does not encourage initiative on the part of junior officers, or any officers for that matter. Responsibility is avoided and deflected, not sought and assumed. Political paranoia and operational hermeticism, rather than openness and team effort, are the rules of advancement (and survival) in the Arab military establishments. These are not issues of genetics, of course, but matters of historical and political culture.
Historically, the most important part of any military organization is the non-commissioned officer (NCO) corps. NCOs joined as enlisted men and gained promotion through combat (as opposed to “commissioned” officers), and are responsible for the on-the-ground tactical decisions necessary to implement a strategy. An NCO corps that’s empowered to take individual initiative is what allows an army to respond to new threats. They are the ones that keep soldiers in squares against a cavalry charge or close gaps arising in battle to prevent flanking maneuvers.
The examples are endless. The Roman centurions and the jointed maniple structure are why the legions defeated the Hellenistic Empires. Napoleon’s battles were won, over and over again, by intelligent commanders making good decisions on their own. The vaunted late 19th-century Prussian military machine was a victory of operations and strategy, and one of their greatest assets was their NCO that could respond to real battle conditions in a way that the French, for example, could not. You can see the same in the ongoing Russo-Ukranian war: Ukraine’s units are led by empowered NCOs with freedom, and so, they have far more tactical flexibility.
This generalizes beyond military organizations. The most important layer in a software company is the “tech lead,” who runs small teams to deliver specific projects. High-quality tech leads are essential to effective delivery; poor-quality ones create innumerable problems across the org.
But their effectiveness depends on an environment of psychological safety. If taking initiative means you own every unintended consequence, then people will choose self-preservation and the organization will suffer. This is as true in the army (see: Russia) as it is companies (see: Amazon of a few years ago).
The lesson here is that tactical execution is often more important to success than high-level strategy. The best strategy will not save poor execution, but the good execution has saved bad strategy over and over again (see: every Roman commander that ordered a charge). Strategy, however, is where most interventions happen, because its visible, obvious when wrong, and most importantly, it doesn’t require making hard changes to organizational culture to fix. Fixing execution, OTOH, requires grassroots change, and many orgs never have the political capital to even attempt that.
I don't know. Does "deference to authority," really describe the Middle East? This is a region where people constantly rebel against the government, often based on their own interpretations of theology. Syria had an authoritarian dictatorship for forty years, and then the second the opportunity arose we learned that the people hadn't internalized the values of the regime and the country burned down. Saddam was toppled and the Iraqis immediately started hitting his statue with shoes. You have Sadat's assassination, and Arafat years later saying he couldn't strike a deal with Israel without being killed by his people.
How does "deference to authority" explain any of that?
I think this is conflating two different things (and I accept this is partly my fault as I was writing within the confines of a short book review).
The point in Pollack’s book is about how people respond to authority within institutions. In my view, that is not the same thing as believing that political leaders are somehow sacred and never can be challenged under any circumstances.
You can simultaneously believe that sons should always obey their fathers, junior officers should obey their colonels without question etc etc. while believing that Bashar al-Assad does not legitimately enjoy said authority, after he and his minority sect have looted your country and tortured your family.
Intense belief in credentialism and hierarchy within a bureaucracy or a military doesn’t necessarily translate into a particular political leader enjoying some kind of divine right of kings.
(I’d add that not all of your examples here tell us much - e.g. Sadat was killed by a small group that merged into to al-Qaeda, so I’m not sure how much you can generalise from that)
It seems to me that in-group/out-group dynamics is enough to explain it. No one cares about the functioning of the organization. Your boss only cares about his own interests and those of his family, and if you make him look bad he's going to destroy you, so of course you're deferential to authority. The subordinates likewise can't be relied on to care about the wider mission, so they are micromanaged and controlled. This culture somehow produces extreme behavior at the other end of the spectrum, that is a small minority of fanatics that is willing to die for an abstract cause, and organizations composed of those people in particular like Hezbollah seem to function relatively well.
Regarding Iraq, they only started hitting Saddam’s statue with shoes after he stopped being an authority. They did the same thing with American troops and every subsequent government. Everyone is raised to be obedient on both the micro and macro levels
Conflating political instability with blind deference misses how fragmented authority operates across tribal and theological lines. Frequent rebellion often reflects competing local loyalties rather than an absence of agency.
This is another of those curve fitting articles about Arabs. Since they have effectively lost every modern war (with a non Arab power) there is a tendency to curve fit the blame on Arab society.
Almost all the qualities described (saving face, extreme subordination, overriding authority of the boss, innovation discouragement) are quite common in a Japanese corporate office. Naturally this will seem absurd - because they were a militarily successful society.
The Houthis are fully Arab and are societally indistinct from the Saudis (except the Shia Islam variance), and yet they repeatedly humiliate the worlds largest arms importer.
I've lived in both Japan and Arab nations for lengthy periods. In Japan, they succeed because their loyalty is to the nation. In Arab nations they flail around because their loyalty is to the tribe.
That is very much the common perception of the Arabs and Japanese. I'm not sure this directly relates to modern military success.
For instance the South Vietnamese were terrible at war with the North. Likewise South Korea.
It is undeniable that the Arabs have a very poor modern warfare record, across countries, wealth levels and forms of govt. I’m hoping the problem can be narrowed down without just throwing all Arab culture hoping something will stick.
On a more comical note, Arabs have a ready-made scapegoat for their defeat.
Jack Weatherford describes it in his 2004 book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. 20th-century Arab politicians regularly invoked the Mongol dismantling of their cities and libraries to explain why the West built the nuclear bomb before them.
There is an ounce of truth here. Hulagu, Genghis Khan’s grandson, sacked Baghdad in 1258, destroying the famed Bayt-al-Hikmah (House of Wisdom or Grand Library) and inflicting enormous devastation. But turning that catastrophe into a 20th-century explanation for technological backwardness is a convenient half-truth.
Besides, it smacks of escapism. Why undertake painful reforms in the present to build a better future when living in a glorious past and blaming someone else is easier?
Mark Manson makes the exact opposite point in his 2016 book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. He reverses Spider-Man’s famous maxim: "With great responsibility comes great power." His argument is simple: accepting responsibility for a problem is the first step toward solving it.
This is where the comical note turns serious. A society that buys into such political narratives eventually loses the habit of introspection, the starting point of reform.
Maybe the Arabs could revisit why the Mamluks beat the Mongols in 1260. And how this shattered the myth of Mongol invincibility. Strangely, the battlefield is around present-day Israel/Palestine.
Of course, Arabs are hardly unique here. Russians, Chinese, Indians, and Iranians have all blamed historical conquerors for later failures. Some have gone beyond getting ensnared in the past, though.
One question about this is why a culture that spread by conquering most of the Middle East and North Africa has now become so bad at war. The most obvious explanation is that modern war is so fundamentally different, but IDK.
Sounds like a lot of lazy generalisations, unless there's convincing evidence that Arab societies are somehow fundamentally different from Persian or Turkic societies.
Alright, this is shameless of me, but I love Pollack's book and ended up reading a ton to figure out if he's right. He is and I documented my thoughts in a series of 3 interlocking essays that constitute a review if you are interested:
Interesting that great powers with a long history of fighting can't finish battles in far away places anymore
Yet the ones that are will to fight at great cost can't win either.
War is works only in certain situations and conditions.
The places without a working civil society seem to doing fine without the rules of civil society. No one wants to help police those regions through peace keeping.
Lately there has been a lot of misreading of the room.
Don’t confuse wining the military campaign with securing the political objectives. Great powers more often win the military campaign but fail to win the political outcome they seek.
Motivation plays a large part in that failure. Motivation of the locals to fight change and a lack of motivation by the great powers to spend the time it takes to change a culture … if such is even possible today.
For a fractured political unstable regime that in the recent past was a led by Catholic who was oppressing Buddhists in a majority Buddhist country. I don't think you need to be a Communist to understand that Ho Chi Minh had more "street cred" in the authentically Vietnamese department compared to Recently Installed General #5 in Saigon
Kind of silly and nonsensical to blame rote memorization of Quran and in elementary school for loss of martial skill. Twentieth century Arab regimes largely formed secularized institutions especially the Police and Military. A large part of dying for the sake of Islam and the promise of eternal Paradise went by the wayside. The motivation to be a martyr won Arabs plenty of fights in a previous age.
I did work in Saudi Arabia many years ago. It was described to me very much so as risk aversion. You live in the desert. You take the same route to the next town or oasis as your father and grandfather. No deviation. Any deviation risks death. So change is very slow. This has changed in more recent times, especially in Saudi Arabia with many of the citizens sending their children abroad for education.
Great to see a new review of Armies of Sand out, this made me want to re-read the book! I'm still unconvinced of Pollack's thesis that Arab culture is the determining factor, or, more specifically, I found his refutation of the politicization/coup-proofing argument to be insufficient to rule out that as a more proximate cause of Arab military underperformance. Still a great book, I especially appreciate Pollack's talent for campaign and battlefield analysis
Well, it certainly helps Israel that Jews control the West and can summon the entire arsenal of US and NATO against their enemies.
Also, many Arab 'countries' were the creations of Western Imperialism that chose weak corrupt leaders who hardly inspired the people to rise up and fight.
There's also the matter of generally lower IQ among Arabs. Thus, they're less adept at technology and systems than Jews, Asians, whites.
Echoes many points from this (slightly outdated) essay: https://americandiplomacy.web.unc.edu/2000/12/why-arabs-lose-wars-fighting-as-you-train-and-the-impact-of-culture-on-arab-military-effectiveness/
I think this part was key:
> The Arab military mind does not encourage initiative on the part of junior officers, or any officers for that matter. Responsibility is avoided and deflected, not sought and assumed. Political paranoia and operational hermeticism, rather than openness and team effort, are the rules of advancement (and survival) in the Arab military establishments. These are not issues of genetics, of course, but matters of historical and political culture.
Historically, the most important part of any military organization is the non-commissioned officer (NCO) corps. NCOs joined as enlisted men and gained promotion through combat (as opposed to “commissioned” officers), and are responsible for the on-the-ground tactical decisions necessary to implement a strategy. An NCO corps that’s empowered to take individual initiative is what allows an army to respond to new threats. They are the ones that keep soldiers in squares against a cavalry charge or close gaps arising in battle to prevent flanking maneuvers.
The examples are endless. The Roman centurions and the jointed maniple structure are why the legions defeated the Hellenistic Empires. Napoleon’s battles were won, over and over again, by intelligent commanders making good decisions on their own. The vaunted late 19th-century Prussian military machine was a victory of operations and strategy, and one of their greatest assets was their NCO that could respond to real battle conditions in a way that the French, for example, could not. You can see the same in the ongoing Russo-Ukranian war: Ukraine’s units are led by empowered NCOs with freedom, and so, they have far more tactical flexibility.
This generalizes beyond military organizations. The most important layer in a software company is the “tech lead,” who runs small teams to deliver specific projects. High-quality tech leads are essential to effective delivery; poor-quality ones create innumerable problems across the org.
But their effectiveness depends on an environment of psychological safety. If taking initiative means you own every unintended consequence, then people will choose self-preservation and the organization will suffer. This is as true in the army (see: Russia) as it is companies (see: Amazon of a few years ago).
The lesson here is that tactical execution is often more important to success than high-level strategy. The best strategy will not save poor execution, but the good execution has saved bad strategy over and over again (see: every Roman commander that ordered a charge). Strategy, however, is where most interventions happen, because its visible, obvious when wrong, and most importantly, it doesn’t require making hard changes to organizational culture to fix. Fixing execution, OTOH, requires grassroots change, and many orgs never have the political capital to even attempt that.
Interesting …
I don't know. Does "deference to authority," really describe the Middle East? This is a region where people constantly rebel against the government, often based on their own interpretations of theology. Syria had an authoritarian dictatorship for forty years, and then the second the opportunity arose we learned that the people hadn't internalized the values of the regime and the country burned down. Saddam was toppled and the Iraqis immediately started hitting his statue with shoes. You have Sadat's assassination, and Arafat years later saying he couldn't strike a deal with Israel without being killed by his people.
How does "deference to authority" explain any of that?
I think this is conflating two different things (and I accept this is partly my fault as I was writing within the confines of a short book review).
The point in Pollack’s book is about how people respond to authority within institutions. In my view, that is not the same thing as believing that political leaders are somehow sacred and never can be challenged under any circumstances.
You can simultaneously believe that sons should always obey their fathers, junior officers should obey their colonels without question etc etc. while believing that Bashar al-Assad does not legitimately enjoy said authority, after he and his minority sect have looted your country and tortured your family.
Intense belief in credentialism and hierarchy within a bureaucracy or a military doesn’t necessarily translate into a particular political leader enjoying some kind of divine right of kings.
(I’d add that not all of your examples here tell us much - e.g. Sadat was killed by a small group that merged into to al-Qaeda, so I’m not sure how much you can generalise from that)
It seems to me that in-group/out-group dynamics is enough to explain it. No one cares about the functioning of the organization. Your boss only cares about his own interests and those of his family, and if you make him look bad he's going to destroy you, so of course you're deferential to authority. The subordinates likewise can't be relied on to care about the wider mission, so they are micromanaged and controlled. This culture somehow produces extreme behavior at the other end of the spectrum, that is a small minority of fanatics that is willing to die for an abstract cause, and organizations composed of those people in particular like Hezbollah seem to function relatively well.
Regarding Iraq, they only started hitting Saddam’s statue with shoes after he stopped being an authority. They did the same thing with American troops and every subsequent government. Everyone is raised to be obedient on both the micro and macro levels
Conflating political instability with blind deference misses how fragmented authority operates across tribal and theological lines. Frequent rebellion often reflects competing local loyalties rather than an absence of agency.
yes absolutely
This is another of those curve fitting articles about Arabs. Since they have effectively lost every modern war (with a non Arab power) there is a tendency to curve fit the blame on Arab society.
Almost all the qualities described (saving face, extreme subordination, overriding authority of the boss, innovation discouragement) are quite common in a Japanese corporate office. Naturally this will seem absurd - because they were a militarily successful society.
The Houthis are fully Arab and are societally indistinct from the Saudis (except the Shia Islam variance), and yet they repeatedly humiliate the worlds largest arms importer.
I've lived in both Japan and Arab nations for lengthy periods. In Japan, they succeed because their loyalty is to the nation. In Arab nations they flail around because their loyalty is to the tribe.
That is very much the common perception of the Arabs and Japanese. I'm not sure this directly relates to modern military success.
For instance the South Vietnamese were terrible at war with the North. Likewise South Korea.
It is undeniable that the Arabs have a very poor modern warfare record, across countries, wealth levels and forms of govt. I’m hoping the problem can be narrowed down without just throwing all Arab culture hoping something will stick.
Also, Japan is filled with Japanese people and the Arab world is filled with Arabs.
i don't want to assume your meaning here. would you care to elaborate?
I drive a Honda. How many Arab automakers are there? I use Nikon cameras. Any Arab choices?
On a more comical note, Arabs have a ready-made scapegoat for their defeat.
Jack Weatherford describes it in his 2004 book, Genghis Khan and the Making of the Modern World. 20th-century Arab politicians regularly invoked the Mongol dismantling of their cities and libraries to explain why the West built the nuclear bomb before them.
There is an ounce of truth here. Hulagu, Genghis Khan’s grandson, sacked Baghdad in 1258, destroying the famed Bayt-al-Hikmah (House of Wisdom or Grand Library) and inflicting enormous devastation. But turning that catastrophe into a 20th-century explanation for technological backwardness is a convenient half-truth.
Besides, it smacks of escapism. Why undertake painful reforms in the present to build a better future when living in a glorious past and blaming someone else is easier?
Mark Manson makes the exact opposite point in his 2016 book, The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck. He reverses Spider-Man’s famous maxim: "With great responsibility comes great power." His argument is simple: accepting responsibility for a problem is the first step toward solving it.
This is where the comical note turns serious. A society that buys into such political narratives eventually loses the habit of introspection, the starting point of reform.
Maybe the Arabs could revisit why the Mamluks beat the Mongols in 1260. And how this shattered the myth of Mongol invincibility. Strangely, the battlefield is around present-day Israel/Palestine.
Of course, Arabs are hardly unique here. Russians, Chinese, Indians, and Iranians have all blamed historical conquerors for later failures. Some have gone beyond getting ensnared in the past, though.
I wrote about this mindset in 2023 for ThePrint: https://theprint.in/yourturn/subscriberwrites-blame-it-on-the-mongols/1642942/
One question about this is why a culture that spread by conquering most of the Middle East and North Africa has now become so bad at war. The most obvious explanation is that modern war is so fundamentally different, but IDK.
Sounds like a lot of lazy generalisations, unless there's convincing evidence that Arab societies are somehow fundamentally different from Persian or Turkic societies.
Alright, this is shameless of me, but I love Pollack's book and ended up reading a ton to figure out if he's right. He is and I documented my thoughts in a series of 3 interlocking essays that constitute a review if you are interested:
https://mzwakhe.substack.com/p/armies-of-sand-part-1?utm_source=share&utm_medium=android&r=ntdfr
It a great question to ask.
The other question is why with all technology great powers cannot defeat small insurgencies around the world?
Is it the unwillingness to lose personnel or something else?
Motivation, no? Why should I go die in a rice paddy whereas that is a silly question to ask the North Vietnamese
Interesting that great powers with a long history of fighting can't finish battles in far away places anymore
Yet the ones that are will to fight at great cost can't win either.
War is works only in certain situations and conditions.
The places without a working civil society seem to doing fine without the rules of civil society. No one wants to help police those regions through peace keeping.
Lately there has been a lot of misreading of the room.
Don’t confuse wining the military campaign with securing the political objectives. Great powers more often win the military campaign but fail to win the political outcome they seek.
Motivation plays a large part in that failure. Motivation of the locals to fight change and a lack of motivation by the great powers to spend the time it takes to change a culture … if such is even possible today.
Checkout what a UN speech on Tuesday.
https://youtu.be/z8rN4Fnpz9E?si=HfwSfef02HYwaMUa
A lot of the public stance of big governments has not come pass.
Not entirely accurate, South Vietnamese were also fighting.
For a fractured political unstable regime that in the recent past was a led by Catholic who was oppressing Buddhists in a majority Buddhist country. I don't think you need to be a Communist to understand that Ho Chi Minh had more "street cred" in the authentically Vietnamese department compared to Recently Installed General #5 in Saigon
Kind of silly and nonsensical to blame rote memorization of Quran and in elementary school for loss of martial skill. Twentieth century Arab regimes largely formed secularized institutions especially the Police and Military. A large part of dying for the sake of Islam and the promise of eternal Paradise went by the wayside. The motivation to be a martyr won Arabs plenty of fights in a previous age.
I did work in Saudi Arabia many years ago. It was described to me very much so as risk aversion. You live in the desert. You take the same route to the next town or oasis as your father and grandfather. No deviation. Any deviation risks death. So change is very slow. This has changed in more recent times, especially in Saudi Arabia with many of the citizens sending their children abroad for education.
Great to see a new review of Armies of Sand out, this made me want to re-read the book! I'm still unconvinced of Pollack's thesis that Arab culture is the determining factor, or, more specifically, I found his refutation of the politicization/coup-proofing argument to be insufficient to rule out that as a more proximate cause of Arab military underperformance. Still a great book, I especially appreciate Pollack's talent for campaign and battlefield analysis
Evaluating the robustness of these conclusions requires accounting for asymmetric tail risks in deployment environments.
Because they are lazy.
Well, it certainly helps Israel that Jews control the West and can summon the entire arsenal of US and NATO against their enemies.
Also, many Arab 'countries' were the creations of Western Imperialism that chose weak corrupt leaders who hardly inspired the people to rise up and fight.
There's also the matter of generally lower IQ among Arabs. Thus, they're less adept at technology and systems than Jews, Asians, whites.
You skipped over the arabic army marching on the world, 1400 years ago
Because they are low IQ clannish Arabs.
Simple