Armies of Sand
Armies of Sand asks, 'why have Arab militaries fought so poorly in the modern era?' It examines the performance of over two-dozen Arab militaries from 1948 to 2017, and compares them to a half-dozen non-Arab militaries, to conclude that politics, economics, and culture all contributed to the past weakness of Arab armies.
Stats for nerds
1recommend
4mentions
2people
2022–2026years
25% recommend75% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness by Kenneth M. Pollack
It's not a perfect book, but it illustrates a lot of military failures that haven't really been encountered much in the West in the last 80 years.
- TFA is based on the dissertation work of Kenneth M. Pollack. If you are into military history, his Arabs at War (2002) contains the historical part of the dissertation and is very informative. His second book, Armies of Sand (2019), contains the theoretical part and I didn't feel that it added much understanding.
- This article seems derivative of Kenneth M. Pollack's dissertation, published as Arabs at War: Military Effectiveness, 1948-1991 (2004). His second book, Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness (2019) doesn't add much to his basic argument.
- One researcher the author relies on, Kenneth Pollack, published his dissertation work in two books Arabs at War (2004) and Armies of Sand (2019). The first gives very good overviews of Arab combat performance over the 20th century. The second tries to place it all in a theoretical framework. While the 2019 book adds some recent history, I didn't feel that it improved on the understanding of Arab military performance that you get from just reading the first book. And no, it doesn't seem that things have changed much since the submitted article was written.
