A very interesting essay - but it works better if you substitute 'arabic nations' with 'dictatorships'. Most of what he's talking about has far more to do with the mechanics of maintaining a dictatorship than arabic culture.<p>He probably missed this because he's both unwilling to acknowledge that he's been training the troops of dictatorships for his adult career, but also, that the US is generally involved in the propping-up of such dictatorships.<p>US forces tend to spend a lot of time training extremely demoralized and unenthusiastic conscripts, surrounded by officers who see their own soldiers as the enemy, and don't trust eachother - and that's exactly what you expect of the army of a unpopular dictatorship, and it's exactly what such armies have looked like throughout most of history. The problems that mysteriously vanish when he talks about the 'elite units' are vanishing because the elites actually like the regimes they're in.<p>They also seem to vanish when they worked with the Kurds, for instance.
<i>In every society information is a means of making a living or wielding power, but Arabs husband information and hold it especially tightly. U.S. trainers have often been surprised over the years by the fact that information provided to key personnel does not get much further than them. Having learned to perform some complicated procedure, an Arab technician knows that he is invaluable so long as he is the only one in a unit to have that knowledge; once he dispenses it to others he no longer is the only font of knowledge and his power dissipates.</i><p>This information hoarding behavior also occurs in large enterprises. I know one programmer who got to sit in a cafe reading a book, because she was the only one who understood how a particular subsystem worked. (She had written it in a particularly diabolical way, and only she understood the underlying system of objects only existed as adjacent entries in long arrays, which then underwent merge sort-like "merge" operations involving 4 array indexes, of which there were dozens of variations which called each other recursively. The company that had produced the system was defunct, and no manuals for the format could be found.)<p>One way to counteract this, is to require all groups within the company to provide a standardized API for accessing their systems, and to evaluate each group by how useful it is to the rest of the company.
random thought: maybe if enough wars are lost, they'll stop practicing war and try to get their needs met by other means.</randomthought><p>I think Norvell B. De Atkine might have missed out on some key details due to his status as an outsider. Especially if every Arab with whom he interacted truly suspected he was a zionist spy. It's difficult to overcome that kind of paranoia and the skills for doing so are not taught in the U.S. military. Also, it sounds like a lot of these people are being forced to participate in the wars, and that's just a recipe for failure. Guns are scary it takes a lot more than a draft to convince someone to stick around for that shit.<p>Another thing to consider is that the rituals used to build loyalty in the U.S. military are kind of a secret. Generally, only the ones participating in the rituals get to know what they are. The content is not entirely intuitive either: imagine being told to sleep in a 1-meter wooden cube in the woods; ants crawl into the cube and bite you; at bedtime, human chanting is played from speakers inside your cube, alternating between quiet and deafening over five minute intervals until the sun comes up. This is meant to build unit cohesion. It's weirdo shit devised by psychos to break human minds.<p>Also, the article is called "Why Arabs Lose Wars" but half of the examples he initially cites are wars in which both sides were arab: Egypt v Yemen, Syria v Lebanon, Iraq v Kuwait. Arabs won those wars... but I guess that wasn't worth noting because the losing side was arab?<p>Those were just some details which stuck out to me while I was reading the article. I acknowledge that about half of this article is objective, fact-based observation and those observations were genuinely interesting. I think that his evidence is inconclusive simply because of the context in which his observations were gathered.
An excellent and very readable book on this in the modern era is "Arabs at War" by Kenneth M. Pollack<p>He examines a number of recent wars in the area of interest and discusses some of the common findings he makes. He also finds a number of situations in which armies in the region are effective; it's not just a hit piece.
I was expecting a dull write-up but this essay is extremely insight full and deep.<p>The problems and issues are probably not restricted to the military apparatus.
Many organizational inefficiencies in e.g. Turkish political/private organizations are due same reasons.
TLDR: Arab armies are ineffective because of the all the internal, external and ethnic politics which hinders all kinds of cooperation and unity at the battalion-level, otherwise on the unit and soldier-level they are comparable to Israeli units.
I think the author is describing a symptoms of an ill organization structure rather than the root causes. The reason why there is no trust, sharing of information and centralized authority in modern Arab state armies because Arab societies never really transitioned successfully into a functional nationalistic countries. Arabs never really believed in nation state and in the absence of strong bonding narrative, there is no common ground for the group to collaborate and fight thus you end up with individuals seeking their self interest and subsequently the symptoms which the author observed.<p>Modern nation state concepts were forced into a region that is predominantly tribal and religious in culture therefore the resulted states, governments, armies and other national institutions are merely a superficial layer on top of a largely religious, ethinic and tribal societies. The west had a long and painful (400 years plus and two major wars) transition from societies dominated by religion to a national secular societies and eventually a capitalistic global societies. That transition never really took place in the Arab region, instead what happened is that western society tried to force national borders and proxy presidents after the world wars on societies that didn’t have the cultural foundation for it and the region has not really managed to reconcile, unify and agree on it’s identity ever since.<p>So why do arabs lose war? Because really there is no state or reason to fight for it. This was very clear in Iraq when fighting ISIS, the men of the country only mobilized after a religious greenlight from a senior clerk despite the fact that ISIS were at the border of the country's capital.
Mostly because there is no Arab or Muslim empire left after Europeans killed off the Ottoman empire and it's easy to beat down tyrants with few allies. What's the reasons for these tyrants, dictators, and terrorists. Insecurity. What's the reason for insecurity? Lack of empire... so you always end up becoming someone's bitch... which leads to feelings of insecurity and inferiority.<p>The only way to deal with this is to become a vassal of an existing empire and good examples of this are Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.