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Why Arabs Lose Wars (2000) (columbia.edu)
6 points by Tomte 39 days ago | hide | past | favorite | 2 comments



The article is about the cultural reasons for "Arab" armies being relatively ineffective in conventional stand-up battles against A List western armed forces. Both the author's PoV and his target audience seem to be American military officers assigned to train Arab armies in how to fight such battles.

Within that limited PoV, you could say that the author is right - but the bigger picture is that winning stand-up battles is very different from achieving the objectives for which a nation went to war. And that difference is nothing resembling news. Carl von Clausewitz (perhaps the most famous western military theorist of all time) was writing extensively about that difference two centuries ago.


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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