Name: Arabs at War
ISBN: 9780803287839

Arabs at War

Kenneth M. Pollack, formerly a Persian Gulf military analyst at the CIA and Director for Persian Gulf Affairs at the National Security Council, describes and analyzes the military history of the six key Arab states--Egypt, Iraq, Jordan, Libya, Saudi Arabia, and Syria--during the post-World War II era. This is the first time that the complete postwar histories of virtually all of these countries have been recorded in unclassified form. In particular Pollack focuses on the Arab armies themselves, helping to illuminate the persistent problems they encountered on the battlefield. He shows in detail how each Arab military grew and learned from its own experiences in response to the specific objectives set for it and within often constrained political, economic, and social circumstances.

What Hacker News says

wrpSep 2025

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.

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wrpJul 2022

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.

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EliRiversAug 2019

An excellent and very readable book on this in the modern era is "Arabs at War" by Kenneth M. Pollack

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.

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wrpApr 2024

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.

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