Kenneth M. Pollack, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). 676 pp., $34.95.

Why have Arab armies performed so poorly? Whether fighting Israelis in 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973, Iranians in the 1980s, American coalitions in two Gulf Wars or being clobbered by the army of Chad in 1987, Arab forces have generally failed to achieve their military objectives. Kenneth Pollack, a respected veteran observer of Middle East political and military affairs, attempts to identify the underlying reasons in his compendious Armies of the Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness. The result is an informative, if somewhat flawed, book.

Pollack focuses on politico-cultural factors as the greatest determinant of Arab military failures. He makes a strong historical case for Arab weakness on the battlefields of the past century. Pollack argues that

[w]ithout question, the greatest, most consistent and most persistent problem of Arab armed forces in battle since 1945 has been the poor performance of their junior officers. From war to war and country to country, Arab tactical commanders regularly failed to demonstrate initiative, flexibility, creativity, independence of thought, an understanding of combined arms integration, or an appreciation for the benefits of maneuver in battle.

Pollack later adds several other shortcomings that applied to Arab ground and air combat: “…miserable air-to-air combat skills, negligible air-to-ground capabilities, minimal weapons handling skills, and poor maintenance practices.”

The bulk of his book is dedicated to explaining why this is the case. He dismisses as myths the four primary explanations given for Arab military failures: the notion that Arab armies lack initiative because of the influence of Soviet training on their officer corps from the mid-1950s until the collapse of the Soviet Union; the politicization of Arab militaries by their despotic governments; the impact of economic underdevelopment on Arab military performance; and Arab cowardice on the battlefield.

Pollack offers a powerful case against those who would argue that it was the rigidity of the Soviet way of war that undermined Arab tactical and operational initiative. He points out that none of the five Arab armies that were defeated by the outnumbered, outgunned and poorly trained Jewish fighters in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence had been trained by the Soviet Union. The most professional of the five, the Jordanian Arab Legion, was trained by Great Britain’s John Glubb; other armies, to the extent that their soldiers were trained at all, received some variant of Western—French, British and even Ottoman warfighting doctrines. Pollack does not outline the nature of those doctrines, tactics and training; he implies, however, that these were the opposite of how the Arabs operated on the battlefield.

By the time of the Six-Day War in 1967, the Egyptians and Syrians had been receiving Soviet equipment for several years. Nevertheless, Pollack points out that the Egyptians and Syrians had not yet fully absorbed Soviet tactics and doctrine, while Jordanian operations and tactics continued to reflect those of Great Britain. In the event, the outcome of the war was the same as that of 1948, and, one might add, of the 1956 Sinai Campaign. Israel, by now fielding a far more sophisticated and modern force, decisively destroyed the Arab air forces within forty-eight hours and Egyptian, Jordanian and Syrian land forces within a few additional days. Arab forces may have been humiliated once more, but it was not the fault of the Soviets or their warfighting doctrines.

It was during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, when Egyptian forces fully adopted Soviet doctrine and tactics, that they were most successful. That the Israelis were able to surround and cut off the Egyptian Third Army inside Egypt itself was due to Israeli resourcefulness and the failure of the Egyptian High Command to go beyond the formulaic planning that underpinned the military’s initial success in surprising the Israelis, rather than to the shortcomings of Soviet doctrine.

Similarly, it was the excessive caution of the Syrian tactical commanders that undermined what had initially been the Syrian army’s successful penetration of Israeli lines on the Golan Heights. Had Syrian forces continued onward and seized the three bridges that spanned the Jordan River, they would have been in an excellent position to retain the Golan or advance beyond the so-called Green Line into Israel itself. But Syrian commanders did not attempt to seize the bridges, thereby affording the Israelis valuable time to position reinforcements that ultimately made it possible to push the Syrians back toward Damascus.

Pollack does not offer any explanation as to why the Syrians elected not to press forward and seize the bridges, other than to note that

Syria’s Soviet advisors were incredulous that the Syrian brigades would halt without taking the bridges when they were so close, they faced so little Israeli resistance, and the bridges were the key to the entire war. This was entirely contrary to the most basic tenets of Soviet doctrine.

Instead, in a footnote from an article that appeared four decades ago, Pollack quotes then-Defense Minister Mustafa Tlas, who himself voiced surprise that the commanders on the ground misjudged the situation so badly.

One would have thought that Pollack might have found a more recent evaluation of the events he describes, and perhaps not relied solely on Tlas’ word, especially as Tlas was known to be essentially a political hack and rather incompetent. Tlas could well have simply been protecting himself by assigning blame to junior officers, a not uncommon practice in the Arab world and elsewhere.

That Pollack did not cite any more recent study to explain why the Syrians acted as they did—or, more accurately, refrained from acting—reflects the fact that, as he himself acknowledges, large parts of his volume draw heavily upon both his work as a graduate student and studies that he produced decades ago. It would have been helpful if he had cited more recent analyses of the historical events he describes.

Having made a powerful case that it was not Soviet training and doctrine that compromised Arab military effectiveness, Pollack devotes an entire chapter to reiterating his position by offering a detailed discussion of North Korean and Cuban military effectiveness respectively during the Korean War and the Angolan civil war. He argues that while both militaries relied even more heavily on Soviet doctrine and tactics than Arab armies, they nevertheless performed far more capably on the battlefield. Pollack’s case may be valid, though it includes analytically unsupported assertions such as the contention that North Koreans “handled their tanks adequately” and “North Korean artillery was quite good.” Yet even had he included serious quantitative findings to support those assertions, Pollack need not have devoted so much space to North Korean and Cuban operations in a book about Arab military performance. Having already proved his point, his discussion of these non-Arab militaries is essentially tangential and distracts from his primary theme.

Pollack opens his discussion of politicization of Arab armies with a rather sweeping assertion: “I tend to believe,” he writes, “that there really is no such thing as good civil-military relations, just different versions of bad.” He appears to include civil-military relations in the West, as well as in the Arab world and elsewhere. This is unpersuasive.

Despite recent tensions, the American system of civilian control generally has worked well. As a result, civil-military relations tend to be stable. When those relations break down, it is primarily due to a set of unique circumstances, such as Truman’s firing of General Douglas MacArthur for insubordination during the Korean War, rather than a material deficiency in the system itself. Pollack’s source for his eye-opening assertion is Samuel Huntington’s 1957 classic study, The Soldier and the State, which appeared only a few years after MacArthur was fired; much has taken place and has been written, since then. Vietnam, the subject of former national security advisor and three-star general H.R. McMaster’s 1997 landmark study, Dereliction of Duty, demonstrated that the system could indeed break down, as it clearly did again during the first years of the American occupation of Iraq.

Nevertheless, in general, the American system of civilian control has functioned as it was supposed to, arguably even in the case of Vietnam, as former Assistant Secretary of State Leslie Gelb and Richard Betts, a leading expert on military affairs, wrote in their 1979 classic, The Irony of Vietnam: The System Worked. Indeed, while there is a gap, possibly a growing gap between those Western militaries that rely on volunteers rather than conscripts and the publics they defend, the system itself does function as intended, as I can personally attest on the basis of more than four decades working in and with the Department of Defense. In any event, Pollack should have buttressed his case with more recent works like those of Peter Feaver, or the plethora of volumes on the Iraq War, rather than relying on the studies that underpinned his doctoral thesis.

His views on the malign nature of civil-military relations aside, Pollack postulates that politicized armies are those “where there are major malfunctions in the relationship between the civilian and military chains of command.” He organizes what he terms “politicization” into three sub-categories: “praetorianism,” after the Roman Praetorian Guard that seated and unseated emperors; “commissarianism,” the Soviet system of embedding political overseers in the military; and “palace guardism,” the employment of the military primarily to guard and protect the regime from internal threats. Pollack argues that the characteristics of each of these sub-categories have a negative effect on military performance, notably morale, but none is a determining explanation for Arab military ineffectiveness.

Pollack accepts that the near constant military coups in the Arab world during the 1950s and 1960s certainly affected Arab military performance in those years. Surprisingly, in making his case that “praetorianism” was not the dominant reason for Arab military failures, he does not point out that from the late 1960s until the Arab Spring, which did not emanate from the military, Arab regimes were remarkably stable, yet their militaries were no more successful. Perhaps he fails to focus on this phenomenon because, as in so much of this book, he draws primarily on decades-old sources and observations.

Pollack could also have buttressed his case by noting the difficulties that the Syrian Arab Army, tightly aligned with its governing regime, has encountered in the current civil war. Despite the use of barrel bombs, chemical weapons and indiscriminate bombing, the Syrian army has had to rely on Hezbollah fighters and Russian trainers, advisors and pilots in order to roll back the various groups that constitute the Syrian opposition.

Pollack barely mentions the Syrian conflict, now in its eighth year. Instead, he reviews Egyptian performance during the Yom Kippur War—repeating much of what he had written in a previous chapter but failing to note the impact and importance of the American airlift of supplies that Israel desperately needed in order to turn back the Egyptian assault into the Sinai.

Pollack also devotes a chapter to the effects of politicization on the conduct of Iraqi military operations in the eight-year war with Iran, the 1991 Gulf War and the Iraqi Army’s military collapse in the face of the 2014 ISIS offensive. Somewhat surprisingly, however, half of his chapter on politicization and Iraqi military performance deals with the earliest of these three conflicts, while it barely mentions Iraqi performance in the face of the American-led coalition in 2003 and describes in but three pages and a map the Iraqi military’s failure to roll back ISIS in 2014. Pollack does demonstrate that politicization of both the Egyptian and Iraqi armies hampered their performance on the battlefield, while depoliticization during the course of the wars resulted in only marginal tactical and operational improvements. Nevertheless, a volume that seeks to analyze present and future Arab military performance should have reversed the relative attention that these conflicts commanded, devoting more space to more recent conflicts and less to those of past decades.

Pollack acknowledges that “many of the Arab world’s most catastrophic defeats correlated with Arab militaries that were heavily politicized.” He does not apply the term “correlated” in its technical statistical sense, however. He does not explore the actual degree to which politicization has mattered more, or less, than some of the other factors he examines. To what extent is politicization a major factor, even if not the primary factor, that has affected how Arab militaries have fared? Or is it no more important than other factors? These questions remain unanswered.

Having asserted that politicization is not the primary determining explanation for Arab military failures, Pollack then devotes two chapters on the operations of non-Arab armies—those of South Vietnam and Argentina, the latter in the Falklands War— to demonstrate that politicization does not necessarily undermine tactical military performance. These discussions seem to prove that there is some negative correlation—never actually measured—between politicization and performance on the battlefield, that is to say, high levels of politicization do not correlate with defeat, as Pollack argues is the case with Arab militaries. As with his prior discussions of North Korean and Cuban operations, however, Pollack may have delved more deeply than necessary into the details of the Vietnam and Falkland Wars if his objective was purely to demonstrate that highly politicized forces could still perform well in battle.

Pollack then turns to rebut the argument that poor Arab military performance derives primarily from the economic underdevelopment of Arab societies. He argues that economic underdevelopment does not fully explain the overall ineffectiveness of Arab militaries. What he does not do, and could have done, was apply some rigorous analysis to his hypotheses.

Pollack offers the reader a table entitled “socioeconomic development of selected Arab and non-Arab states.” The variables that he lists include per capita Gross Domestic Product (GDP), literacy, infant mortality, life expectancy, percent of workforce in agriculture and inhabitants per physician, automobile and telephone. Yet he does not analyze which of these factors might have the greater impact on military performance. For example, do farmers fight more bravely than city folk? Does not having a television really matter? Moreover, the per capita GDP of most Arab economies—with the possible exception since the 1970s of the smaller Gulf States—does not reflect a normal distribution of individual wealth. Instead, these economies are heavily skewed toward a small elite with a negligible middle class and an impoverished majority. The table cries out for the kind of analysis that Pollack does not provide.

Pollack provides a similar table comparing the economies of Libya and Chad when he discusses the poor performance of Libya’s forces against those of Chad, one of the poorest nations on earth. He rightly points out that on the basis of comparative economic statistics, Libya, by far more highly developed, should have crushed the Chadian forces, but that was not what took place. Instead, Chad was able to repel every one of Libya’s incursions in the 1970s and 1980s. Nevertheless, in making his case, Pollack again fails to account for the anomalies in income distribution that plague Arab states. Were Libyan forces all drawn from the wealthier segment of its population? If not, might poor performance have been more a function of incompetence, intense politicization by the Qaddafi regime and the absence of morale, which more than offset Chad’s economic weakness?

Pollack also glosses over the critical interventions of both France and, to a lesser extent, the United States, in support of the Chadians. Yet absent these interventions, and, in particular, French tactical air-to-ground operations, Libya might well have defeated the Chadian forces. Finally, despite his lengthy chapter on the protracted Libyan incursions into Chad, Pollack does not offer any conclusions as to how the various elements of economic development, or lack thereof, directly or even indirectly affected the actual operations of the opposing military forces.

To buttress his case that economic underdevelopment does not correlate with military performance, Pollack provides a protracted discussion of the People’s Liberation Army’s (PLA) creditable performance against South Korean and United Nations forces after Beijing entered the Korean War. Yet Pollack does not mention the fact that the PLA was stocked with veterans of the Chinese civil war, which had ended but two years earlier. These men had successfully defeated Chiang Kai-shek’s Kuomintang forces by developing operational concepts and tactics that did not rely on the types of modern equipment that the People’s Republic of China did not possess. Without additional analysis, therefore, it is difficult to evaluate the extent to which this factor might have affected Chinese performance.

Given his inclination to buttress his arguments with case studies of non-Arab military performance, it is most surprising that Pollack chose to investigate PLA performance in the Korean War but did not address China’s more recent conflicts, with India in 1962, and of greater relevance to his analysis, with Vietnam in 1979. The latter war was one between two Communist states, with Vietnam receiving support from the Soviet Union. Although both countries claimed victory, it was the Chinese who penetrated deep inside what had been North Vietnam. Pollack’s discussion of the link between politicization and military operations would have benefitted from an evaluation of the relative performance of both of these highly politicized armies.

Pollack’s overview of Chinese operations in the Korean War repeats much of what he has already written in a previous chapter, though from a slightly different perspective; repetitiveness is one of the more annoying shortcomings of the entire volume. Finally, while Pollack also focuses on the possible relationship between economic development and Syrian performance in its various wars with Israel (again repeating much of what appears about those wars in prior chapters), he entirely ignores any lessons about the impact of economic development upon military success that might have been learned from Iraq’s defeat in 2003, Hezbollah’s standoff with Israel in 2006 or, for that matter, the poor performance of the Saudi Arabian air force in its ongoing operations against the Houthis of Yemen.

Having made the case that neither the influence of Soviet operations and tactics, nor the various forms of politicization, nor economic underdevelopment are the primary causes of poor Arab military performance, Pollack turns to cultural factors. He posits that “there is a compelling case to be made that the primary weaknesses experienced by the Arab armed forces since 1945 derive from culturally motivated patterns of behavior inculcated by Arab educational processes.” He further argues that of the two primary and interacting factors affecting warfighting capability, technology and organization, it is the latter that is far more amenable to control, whereas technology “typically comes into being for reasons having little to do with war-making, and rarely at the opportune moment for war leaders.” Even the atom bomb, he points out, and certainly fighter aircraft, derived from basic research that did not address military needs. Only military organization, he argues, is inherently warfare driven.

Pollack’s assertion that technological development is not directly related to battlefield requirements calls for greater scrutiny. On its face, Pollack’s argument seems credible enough, until one accounts for the many systems that were developed specifically to meet the military’s needs. These include stealth and guided missiles, as well as the Global Positioning System, the thermobaric weapon and the Internet. Apart from missiles, which the Germans first employed in World War II, all of the others derived from the efforts of the U.S. Defense Advanced Projects Agency, or, in the case of stealth, from the U.S. defense industrial base, specifically to meet military needs.

Having characterized technological development as a subordinate factor in military performance, Pollack goes on to assert that “…what matters is the extent to which those [culturally-driven] traits mesh with the technology and organization (including the tactics) being employed” by armies at any given time. After drawing on historical examples to prove his point, Pollack then argues that

[t]he job of the general is now to... turn the tactical victories won by his subordinates into strategic victories (largely by breaking through the enemy’s front lines, routing his reserves and rear area services, and either surrounding or causing the logistical and psychological collapse of the enemy army).

Once again, Pollack’s reliance on dated material undermines his argument. His primary source is Stephen D. Biddle’s fourteen-year-old study, Military Power: Explaining Victory and Defeat in Modern Battle, which focuses on the interaction between force employment and materiel, and is not necessarily tied to the twentieth-century operational objective of breaking through enemy lines. It is now widely recognized, however, that while the type of warfare Pollack describes may have been relevant to any conflict between NATO and the Warsaw Pact, or even between the U.S.-led coalition and Iraq in 1991, it hardly represents the manner in which military forces expect to fight in the twenty-first century. Operations along the Forward Edge of Battle, or its successor, the Forward Line of Own Troops, were Cold War concepts. They are unlikely to be relevant even in defending against a hypothetical Russian advance into the “Suvalki Gap.”

Having postulated the importance of culture, Pollack then offers a lengthy and digressive discourse on the nature of culture generally and its influence on human behavior. In so doing, he ventures into areas far beyond what a reader interested in Arab military behavior might expect, arguing, for example, that “[c]ontrary to the common wisdom, religions are essentially products of a culture, or even vessels of it.” Pollack admits that “culture can be a nebulous subject”; that he treats it “in a more precise and clearly delineated fashion than it realistically deserves”; and that “[t]o some extent this ‘reductionism’ may have distorted my treatment of culture.” So how can Pollack be so certain that culture is truly the primary factor underpinning Arab military performance?

Pollack contends that there are a number of singular cultural traits that best explain poor Arab military performance. The first of these is conformity, which, Pollack asserts, stifles innovation and creativity. He cites studies of Egyptian and Jordanian village life, and quotes the Syrian poet Ahmed Ali Sa’id that “[i]nnovators have been silenced, while static values and attitudes have been preserved.”

Pollack then highlights a second cultural factor that is pervasive throughout the Arab world: “the forces of honor and shame” that foster centralization of and deference to authority, and the passivity among subordinates that accompanies such behavior. He cites various studies to prove his point, noting the importance of authority in Arab households. One such study asserts that “[t]he youngster learns early in life to obey the father’s orders without questioning them...”

Group loyalty is a third characteristic that Pollack argues is endemic in Arab culture. He bases himself on numerous studies such as one that asserts that “[i]ndividualism has little positive value in Egyptian society” and another that found that in rural Jordan “[l]oyalty to relatives is expected at all times and under all circumstances.” Yet another cultural characteristic, according to Pollack, is the manipulation of information. Again, he cites numerous studies, including one that found that Arab students at American universities cheat more than their American counterparts.

What Pollack, basing himself on some Middle East scholars, terms “atomization of knowledge,” is yet another Arab characteristic. The term is meant to connote the inability of Arabs to integrate details into “a composite and well-organized whole.” He cites a report from the RAND Corporation that found that Arab students performed well on tests involving memorization, but poorly on tests based on analogies, which measured the ability to generalize. Finally, again citing a variety of studies, Pollack notes that Arabs demonstrate personal courage, but are ambivalent toward manual labor and technical work.

Apart from personal courage, which obviously is an advantage in warfare, Pollack argues that all of the aforementioned characteristics undermine the ability of Arab armies to succeed on the battlefield or in air combat. Honor and shame, for example, “appear perfectly correlated with remarkable passivity, especially among subordinates, demonstrated by modern Arab armed forces.” The desire “to avoid giving offense and to shift blame through secrecy, exaggeration, deception, or dissembling mimic the poor transmission of information along the chain of command displayed by one Arab military after another.” Moreover, a predilection toward manipulation of information has led superiors in the Arab chains of command to withhold information from subordinates.

Taken together, Pollack argues, these cultural characteristics explain the reluctance of Arab forces to employ maneuver at both operational and tactical levels. They also explain why Arab armies cannot innovate or conduct ad hoc operations as circumstances change; rather they can only operate well, if they ever do, when carrying out set piece battle plans. These factors, together with “an ambivalence toward technical subjects” explain Arab problems conducting combined arms and joint, air-to-air and air-to-ground operations. On the other hand, Arab culture has also fostered strong unit cohesion in battle, as well as individual bravery.

Pollack does concede that in one respect Arab culture does not explain military behavior, namely, certain technically-related operations that Arab have indeed demonstrated some capability, despite what he asserts is a predilection against technical subjects and work, as well as an aversion to manual labor. While Arab militaries have achieved a poor record in maintaining their equipment, they have “defied all expectations… in the areas of logistics and combat engineering.” His vague conclusion is that “something else was going on that helped out Arab armies.” He therefore argues that that culture, underdevelopment and, related to it, a lack of education, or at best rote learning, has its greatest impact on the poor performance of the lowest ranks, whereas politicization has its greatest impact on the highest ranks—namely colonels and general officers, who tend to be better educated and somewhat less prone to culturally-driven constraints. He might have added that while not all Arab graduate engineers actually enter the engineering profession—he notes that the degree itself is among the most sought after in the Arab world—it is possible that Arab combat engineers not only earned engineering degrees but did so with some proficiency.

Pollack also demonstrates that cultural norms as they apply to education in wider Arab society have had an especially powerful impact on Arab training methods and manuals. In his view, it could not have been otherwise. For, as he concludes, “it would have been remarkable if Arab militaries trained their men in a manner that differed from the method of teaching in the broader society.”

The educational methods of a given society need not influence military training, however. For example, American basic training, especially in the Army and Marine Corps, differs markedly from that of the way the rest of American society is educated. Again, American military analysts have long noted that Latin American navies, for example, operate only “by the book,” and show little initiative and imagination; is Latin American educational culture identical, or even similar, to the manner in which Arab children are educated? Though he addresses non-Arab military performance with respect to politicization and economic development, he does not do so when discussing culture. The presumption is that Arab culture and its impact of the military is unique, but Pollack adduces no supporting evidence in that regard.

To further underpin his case, Pollack looks at the linkage between Arab culture and the experiences of civilian organizations in the Arab world, both governmental and non-governmental. Basing himself on numerous studies of Arab organizational behavior, Pollack demonstrates that Arab state bureaucracies exhibit the same culturally-driven behaviors as their military counterparts. The same applies to behaviors in factories, universities, corporations and small businesses. And, as with the military, there is a variance between the impact of culture and other factors on lower levels of bureaucracy (or businesses, or universities) and upper managerial levels.

Pollack’s overall thesis certainly explains Arab military performance in the twentieth century. What is less evident is whether the various factors he identifies as the causes of Arab military failures can be weighted in the same way in the present or the future as they were in the past. He may speak of culture and military behavior appearing to be “perfectly correlated,” but runs no regressions, and never derives any coefficient of correlation, much less a perfect one.

His assertion that culture is the dominating factor that explains Arab military failures may or may not still be true, but Pollack’s sources tend to be dated and therefore of questionable value in explaining current or future battlefield performance. Indeed, more than in any other section of his book, Pollack’s discussion of Arab culture, which he himself acknowledges can change over time, fundamentally rests on findings of studies that appeared decades ago.

For example, his studies of Egyptian and Jordanian village life, by Hamed Ammar and Abdullah Lutfiyya respectively, appeared thirty-six and fifty-three years ago. His quote from the Syrian poet Mounah Khouri appears in a decades-old volume. The RAND study by Anthony Pascal that found that Arab students cheat more than their American counterparts was published in 1980. Indeed, a surprisingly large number of Pollack’s citations both in his discussion of Arab culture, and to only a somewhat lesser extent throughout his book, are drawn from work that can truly be said was published in a very different era.

Surely, there may have been some changes in Arab culture and behavior over the past several decades. Pollack does not address any such changes, however. Yet if culture is the primary driving force behind the failure of Arab militaries to dominate the battlefield, any changes in cultural behavior should have been reflected in Arab military performance, and if not, then perhaps culture is not as important a factor as Pollack would have one believe. Moreover, if there have been no changes in Arab culture since the bulk of his sources were published, that too is an important finding that Pollack should have addressed.

Pollack does devote two chapters to what are in effect exceptions that he trusts will prove the rule. He first examines the performance of state armed forces and then turns to those of non-state actors. The first of his categories includes the Jordanian Arab Legion’s operations in the 1948 Israeli War of Independence; Syrian commando operations in Lebanon in 1982; Egypt’s initial successes in the 1973 Yom Kippur War; and Iraq’s Republican Guard actions against Iran between 1986 and 1990. In all four cases, he argues that the armed forces were able to mitigate the normal effects of culture. The Arab Legion developed its own British-derived subculture. The Syrian commandos and the Republican Guard “benefited from the advantages of eliteness.” The Egyptian forces succeeded as long as they took decisionmaking out of the hands of their tactical commanders. Nevertheless, as his previous discussion already demonstrated, at the end of the day, none of these circumstances led to significantly different results on the battlefield.

Pollack then turns to Hezbollah’s performance in its various bouts with Israel culminating in the 2006 conflict, and the initial successes of ISIS in both Iraq and Syria. He first argues, without producing any direct evidence, that for every successful non-state Arab actor there have been “a dozen” that failed. He then goes on to explain Hezbollah’s success in terms of religious zeal and ideology and reliance on family and clan—both of which he previously had argued undermined Arab military effectiveness. He tends to minimize the importance of Iranian support for Hezbollah, though it clearly has become a dominant motive for Israel’s ongoing strikes in Syria. And he points to Hezbollah’s elite nature as another reason for its success, though he previously asserted that “eliteness” had but a marginal effect on Arab military performance.

As for ISIS, Pollack again points to religious zeal as a major factor in its initial successes. So too, he asserts, has been the movement’s absorption of foreign fighters, its cellular organization, its conduct of operations that are best described as irregular warfare and the group loyalty and bravery that are essential elements of Arab culture. He also notes that ISIS has faced poor adversaries—the very Arab forces that have been the subject of his study.

Pollack argues that Hezbollah and ISIS, like the militaries in the four cases he had just previously described, achieved success by overcoming long-standing cultural predilections. Yet his own analysis points to the positive impact on their performance of some elements of culture, whether religious zeal, bravery or group loyalty. Since he offers no quantitative multivariate analysis, there is no way of knowing the degree to which positive cultural factors or non-cultural ones were most important in explaining the performance of these two quasi-terrorist groups.

As a historical analysis, there is much to be gleaned from Pollack’s volume, though relative to the long list of nearly fifty wars that he presents near the opening of his book, the number of conflicts he discusses and to which he returns in chapter after chapter is surprisingly small. His argument that culture is the most important of these factors lacks the quantitative support to render it decisive. One could also conclude from his discussion of the impact of various forms of politicization that it is at least as important as culture in expanding poor Arab battlefield performance, especially as it too lacks quantitative analysis. Indeed, the volume as a whole is essentially qualitative, the presence of several tables notwithstanding.

Nevertheless, Pollack convincingly outlines the various reasons for Arab military failures in the twentieth century. Moreover, few, if any, analysts have previously examined the various aspects of Arab military operations and tactics to the degree of depth that Pollack provides in this volume. To that extent, Armies of Sand belongs on the bookshelf of anyone seeking to understand why Arab militaries fared as badly as they did in the six decades after World War II.

What the book does not really offer, however, is a guide to explain current and future Arab military operations. Why are Saudi air strikes failing in Yemen, given American training and until recently, ongoing military support? Why are the Houthis successful there? What can be expected of future Hezbollah operations given the lessons its fighters have learned in Syria? Pollack does not say. Perhaps he has another book in the offing.

Dov S. Zakheim was an under secretary of defense (2001–4) and a deputy under secretary of defense (1985–87). He is vice chairman of the Center for the National Interest.

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