Volume 4, No. 1- March 2000
Volume 4, No. 1- March 2000
Abstract: The author argues that the reasons for Arab armies’ perpetual ineffectiveness are rooted in Arab culture. Social factors that prohibit success include: secrecy and paranoia, pride, class structure, a lack of coordination on all levels, and little individual freedom or initiative.
Arabic-speaking armies have been
generally ineffective in the modern era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly
against Yemeni irregulars in the 1960s. (1) Syrians could only impose their will
in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers.
(2) Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by
revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a three-decades-long war
against the Kurds. (3) The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990
Kuwait war was mediocre. (3) And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the
military confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are
many factors--economic, ideological, technical--but perhaps the most important
has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit Arabs from
producing an effective military force.
It is a truism of military life that an army fights
as it trains, and so I draw on my many years of firsthand observation of Arabs
in training to draw conclusions about the ways in which they go into combat. The
following impressions derive from personal experience with Arab military
establishments in the capacity of U.S. military attaché and security
assistance officer, observer officer with the British-officer Trucial Oman
Scouts (the security force in the emirates prior to the establishment of the
United Arab Emirates), as well as some thirty years’ study of the Middle East.
FALSE
STARTS
Including culture in strategic assessments has a poor legacy, for it has
often been spun from an ugly brew of ignorance, wishful thinking, and mythology.
Thus, the U.S. army in the 1930s evaluated the Japanese national character as
lacking originality and drew the unwarranted conclusion that the country would
be permanently disadvantaged in technology. (5) Hitler dismissed the United
States as a mongrel society (6) and consequently underestimated the impact of
America’s entry into the war. As these examples suggest, when culture is
considered in calculating the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing
forces, it tends to lead to wild distortions, especially when it is a matter of
understanding why states unprepared for war enter into combat flushed with
confidence. The temptation is to impute cultural attributes to the enemy state
that negate its superior numbers or weaponry. Or the opposite: to view the
potential enemy through the prism of one’s own cultural norms. American
strategists assumed that the pain threshold of the North Vietnamese approximated
their own and that the air bombardment of the North would bring it to its knees.
(7) Three days of aerial attacks were thought to be all the Serbs could
withstand; in fact, seventy-eight days were needed.
It is particularly dangerous to make facile assumptions about abilities
in warfare based on past performance, for societies evolve and so does the
military subculture with it. The dismal French performance in the 1870
Franco-Prussian war led the German high command to an overly optimistic
assessment prior to World War I. (8) The tenacity and courage of French soldiers
in World War I led everyone from Winston Churchill to the German high command
vastly to overestimate the French army’s fighting abilities. (9) Israeli
generals underestimated the Egyptian army of 1973 based on Egypt’s hapless
performance in the 1967 war. (10)
Culture is difficult to pin down. It is not synonymous with an
individual’s race nor ethnic identity. The history of warfare makes a mockery
of attempts to assign rigid cultural attributes to individuals--as the military
histories of the Ottoman and Roman empires illustrate. In both cases it was
training, discipline, esprit, and élan which made the difference, not the
individual soldiers’ origin. (11) The highly disciplined, effective Roman
legions, for example, were recruited from throughout the Roman empire, and the
elite Ottoman Janissaries (slave soldiers) were Christians forcibly recruited as
boys from the Balkans.
THE
ROLE OF CULTURE
These problems notwithstanding, culture does need to be taken into
account. Indeed, awareness of prior mistakes should make it possible to assess
the role of cultural factors in warfare. John Keegan, the eminent historian of
warfare, argues that culture is a prime determinant of the nature of warfare. In
contrast to the usual manner of European warfare which he terms “face to
face,” Keegan depicts the early Arab armies in the Islamic era as masters of
evasion, delay, and indirection. (12) Examining Arab warfare in this century
leads to the conclusion that Arabs remain more successful in insurgent, or
political warfare (13)--what T. E. Lawrence termed “winning wars without
battles.” (14) Even the much-lauded Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973 at
its core entailed a masterful deception plan. It may well be that these
seemingly permanent attributes result from a culture that engenders subtlety,
indirection, and dissimulation in personal relationships. (15)
Along these lines, Kenneth Pollack concludes his exhaustive study of Arab
military effectiveness by noting that “certain patterns of behavior fostered
by the dominant Arab culture were the most important factors contributing to the
limited military effectiveness of Arab armies and air forces from 1945 to
1991.” (16) These attributes included over-centralization, discouraging
initiative, lack of flexibility, manipulation of information, and the
discouragement of leadership at the junior officer level.
The barrage of criticism leveled at Samuel Huntington’s notion of a
“clash of civilizations” (17) in no way lessens the vital point he made--that however much the grouping of peoples by religion and culture rather
than political or economic divisions offends academics who propound a world
defined by class, race, and gender, it is a reality, one not diminished by
modern communications.
But how does one integrate the study of culture into military training?
At present, it has hardly any role. Paul M. Belbutowski, a scholar and former
member of the U.S. Delta Force, succinctly stated a deficiency in our own
military education system: “Culture, comprised of all that is vague and
intangible, is not generally integrated into strategic planning except at the
most superficial level.” (18) And yet it is precisely “all that is vague and
intangible” which defines low-intensity conflicts. The Vietnamese communists
did not fight the war the United States had trained for, nor did the Chechens
and Afghans fight the war the Russians prepared for. This entails far more than
simply retooling weaponry and retraining soldiers. It requires an understanding
of the enemy’s cultural mythology, history, attitude toward time,
etc.--demanding a more substantial investment in time and money than a
bureaucratic organization is likely to authorize.
Mindful of walking through a minefield of past errors and present
cultural sensibilities, I offer some assessments of the role of culture in the
military training of Arabic-speaking officers. I confine myself principally to
training for two reasons. First, I observed much training but only one combat
campaign (the Jordanian Army against the Palestine Liberation Organization in
1970). Secondly, armies fight as they train. Troops are conditioned by peacetime
habits, policies, and procedures; they do not undergo a sudden metamorphosis
that transforms civilians in uniform into warriors. General George Patton was
fond of relating the story about Julius Caesar, who “In the winter time. . .
so trained his legions in all that became soldiers and so habituated them to the
proper performance of their duties, that when in the spring he committed them to
battle against the Gauls, it was not necessary to give them orders, for they
knew what to do and how to do it.” (19)
INFORMATION
AS POWER
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. This explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books,
training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature. On one occasion,
an American mobile training team working with armor in Egypt at long last
received the operators’ manuals that had laboriously been translated into
Arabic. The American trainers took the newly-minted manuals straight to the tank
park and distributed them to the tank crews. Right behind them, the company
commander, a graduate of the armor school at Fort Knox and specialized courses
at the Aberdeen Proving Grounds ordnance school, collected the manuals from the
crews. Questioned why he did this, the commander said that there was no point in
giving them to the drivers because enlisted men could not read. In point of
fact, he did not want enlisted men to have an independent source of knowledge.
Being the only person who can explain the fire control instrumentation or
boresight artillery weapons brings prestige and attention. In military terms
this means that very little cross-training is accomplished and that, for
instance in a tank crew, the gunners, loaders, and drivers might be proficient
in their jobs but are not prepared to fill in for a casualty. Not understanding
one another’s jobs also inhibits a smoothly functioning crew. At a higher
level it means there is no depth in technical proficiency.
EDUCATION
PROBLEMS
Training tends to be unimaginative, cut and dried, and not challenging.
Because the Arab educational system is predicated on rote memorization, officers
have a phenomenal ability to commit vast amounts of knowledge to memory. The
learning system tends to consist of on-high lectures, with students taking
voluminous notes and being examined on what they were told. (It also has
interesting implications for foreign instructors; for example, his credibility
is diminished if he must resort to a book.) The emphasis on memorization has a
price, and that is in diminished ability to reason or engage in analysis based
upon general principles. Thinking outside the box is not encouraged; doing so in
public can damage a career. Instructors are not challenged and neither, in the
end, are students.
Head-to-head competition among individuals is generally avoided, at least
openly, for it means that someone wins and someone else loses, with the loser
humiliated. This taboo has particular import when a class contains mixed ranks.
Education is in good part sought as a matter of personal prestige, so Arabs in
U.S. military schools take pains to ensure that the ranking member, according to
military position or social class, scores the highest marks in the class. Often
this leads to “sharing answers” in class--often in a rather overt manner or
junior officers concealing scores higher than their superior’s.
American military
instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students learn to ensure that, before
directing any question to a student in a classroom situation, particularly if he
is an officer, the student does possess the correct answer. If this is not
assured, the officer will feel he has been set up for public humiliation.
Furthermore, in the often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture, he
will believe this setup to have been purposeful. This student will then become
an enemy of the instructor and his classmates will become apprehensive about
their also being singled out for humiliation--and learning becomes impossible.
OFFICER
VS. SOLDIERS
Arab junior officers are well trained on the technical aspects of their
weapons and tactical know-how, but not in leadership, a subject given little
attention. For example, as General Sa‘d ash-Shazli, the Egyptian chief of
staff, noted in his assessment of the army he inherited prior to the 1973 war,
they were not trained to seize the initiative or volunteer original concepts or
new ideas. (20) Indeed, leadership may be the greatest weakness of Arab training
systems. This problem results from two main factors: a highly accentuated class
system bordering on a caste system, and lack of a non-commissioned-officer
development program.
Most Arab officers treat enlisted soldiers like sub-humans. When the
winds in Egypt one day carried biting sand particles from the desert during a
demonstration for visiting U.S. dignitaries, I watched as a contingent of
soldiers marched in and formed a single rank to shield the Americans; Egyptian
soldiers, in other words, are used on occasion as nothing more than a windbreak.
The idea of taking care of one’s men is found only among the most elite units
in the Egyptian military. On a typical weekend, officers in units stationed
outside Cairo will get in their cars and drive off to their homes, leaving the
enlisted men to fend for themselves by trekking across the desert to a highway
and flagging down busses or trucks to get to the Cairo rail system. Garrison
cantonments have no amenities for soldiers. The same situation, in various
degrees, exists elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking countries--less so in Jordan,
even more so in Iraq and Syria.
The young draftees who make up the bulk of the Egyptian army hate
military service for good reason and will do almost anything, including
self-mutilation, to avoid it. In Syria the wealthy buy exemptions or, failing
that, are assigned to noncombatant organizations. As a young Syrian told me, his
musical skills came from his assignment to a Syrian army band where he learned
to play an instrument. In general, the militaries of the Fertile Crescent
enforce discipline by fear; in countries where a tribal system still is in
force, such as Saudi Arabia, the innate egalitarianism of the society mitigates
against fear as the prime motivator, so a general lack of discipline pervades.
(21)
The social and professional gap between officers and enlisted men is
present in all armies, but in the United States and other Western forces, the
noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps bridges it. Indeed, a professional NCO corps
has been critical for the American military to work at its best; as the primary
trainers in a professional army, NCOs are critical to training programs and to
the enlisted men’s sense of unit esprit. Most of the Arab world either has no
NCO corps or it is non-functional, severely handicapping the military’s
effectiveness. With some exceptions, NCOs are considered in the same low
category as enlisted men and so do not serve as a bridge between enlisted men
and officers. Officers instruct but the wide social gap between enlisted man and
officer tends to make the learning process perfunctory, formalized, and
ineffective. The show-and-tell aspects of training are frequently missing
because officers refuse to get their hands dirty and prefer to ignore the more
practical aspects of their subject matter, believing this below their social
station. A dramatic example of this occurred during the Gulf war when a severe
windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi officer prisoners of war. For three days
they stayed in the wind and rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners
in a nearby camp working with their hands.
The military price for this is very high. Without the cohesion supplied
by NCOs, units tend to disintegrate in the stress of combat. This is primarily a
function of the fact that the enlisted soldiers simply do not trust their
officers. Once officers depart the training areas, training begins to fall apart
as soldiers begin drifting off. An Egyptian officer once explained to me that
the Egyptian army’s catastrophic defeat in 1967 resulted from a lack of
cohesion within units. The situation, he said, had only marginally improved in
1973. Iraqi prisoners in 1991 showed a remarkable fear and enmity toward their
officers.
DECISIONMAKING
AND RESPONSIBILITY
Decisions are made and delivered from on high, with very little lateral
communication. This leads to a highly centralized system, with authority hardly
ever delegated. Rarely does an officer make a critical decision on his own;
instead, he prefers the safe course of being identified as industrious,
intelligent, loyal--and compliant. Bringing attention to oneself as an
innovator or someone prone to make unilateral decisions is a recipe for trouble.
As in civilian life, conformism is the overwhelming societal norm; the nail that
stands up gets hammered down. Orders and information flow from top to bottom;
they are not to be reinterpreted, amended, or modified in any way.
U.S. trainers often experience frustration obtaining a decision from a
counterpart, not realizing that the Arab officer lacks the authority to make the
decision--a frustration amplified by the Arab’s understandable reluctance to
admit that he lacks that authority. This author has several times seen decisions
that could have been made at the battalion level concerning such matters as
class meeting times and locations requiring approval from the ministry of
defense. All of which has led American trainers to develop a rule of thumb: a
sergeant first class in the U.S. Army has as much authority as a colonel in an
Arab army. Methods of instruction and subject matter are dictated from higher
authorities. Unit commanders have very little to say about these affairs. The
politicized nature of the Arab militaries means that political factors weigh
heavily and frequently override military considerations. Officers with
initiative and a predilection for unilateral action pose a threat to the regime.
This can be seen not just at the level of national strategy but in every aspect
of military operations and training. If Arab militaries became less politicized
and more professional in preparation for the 1973 war with Israel, (22) once the
fighting ended, old habits returned. Now, an increasingly bureaucratized
military establishment weighs in as well. A veteran of the Pentagon turf wars
will feel like a kindergartner when he encounters the rivalries that exist in
the Arab military headquarters.
Taking responsibility for a policy, operation, status, or training
program rarely occurs. U.S. trainers can find it very frustrating when they
repeatedly encounter Arab officers placing blame for unsuccessful operations or
programs on the U.S. equipment or some other outside source. A high rate of
non-operational U.S. equipment is blamed on a “lack of spare parts”--pointing a finger at an unresponsive U.S. supply system despite the
fact that American trainers can document ample supplies arriving in country and
disappearing in a malfunctioning supply
system. (Such criticism was never caustic or personal and often so indirect and
politely delivered that it wasn’t until after a meeting that oblique
references were understood.) This imperative works even at the most exalted
levels. During the Kuwait war, Iraqi forces took over the town of Khafji in
northeast Saudi Arabia after the Saudis had evacuated the place. General Khalid
bin Sultan, the Saudi ground forces commander, requested a letter from General
Norman Schwarzkopf, stating it was the U.S. general who ordered an evacuation
from the Saudi town. (23) And in his account of the Khafji battle, General Bin
Sultan predictably blames the Americans for the Iraqi occupation of the town.
(24) In reality the problem was that the light Saudi forces in the area left the
battlefield. (25) The Saudis were in fact outgunned and outnumbered by the Iraqi
unit approaching Khafji but Saudi pride required that foreigners be blamed.
As for equipment, a vast cultural gap exists between the U.S. and Arab
maintenance and logistics systems. The Arab difficulties with U.S. equipment are
not, as sometimes simplistically believed, a matter of “Arabs don’t do
maintenance,” but something much deeper. The American concept of a weapons
system does not convey easily. A weapons system brings with it specific
maintenance and logistics procedures, policies, and even a philosophy, all of
them based on U.S. culture, with its expectations of a certain educational
level, sense of small unit responsibility, tool allocation, and doctrine. Tools
that would be allocated to a U.S. battalion (a unit of some 600-800 personnel)
would most likely be found at a much higher level--probably two or three
echelons higher--in an Arab army. The expertise, initiative and, most
importantly, the trust indicated by delegation of responsibility to a lower
level are rare. The U.S. equipment and its maintenance are predicated on a
concept of repair at the lowest level and therefore require delegation of
authority. Without the needed tools, spare parts, or expertise available to keep
equipment running, and loathe to report bad news to his superiors, the unit
commander looks for scapegoats. All this explains why I many times heard in
Egypt that U.S. weaponry is “too delicate.”
I have observed many in-country U.S. survey teams: invariably, hosts make
the case for acquiring the most modern of military hardware and do everything to
avoid issues of maintenance, logistics, and training. They obfuscate and mislead
to such an extent that U.S. teams, no matter how earnest their sense of mission,
find it nearly impossible to help. More generally, Arab reluctance to be candid
about training deficiencies makes it extremely difficult for foreign advisors
properly to support instruction or assess training needs.
COMBINED
ARMS OPERATIONS
A lack of cooperation is most apparent in the failure of all Arab armies
to succeed at combined arms operations. A regular Jordanian army infantry
company, for example, is man-for-man as good as a comparable Israeli company; at
battalion level, however, the coordination required for combined arms
operations, with artillery, air, and logistics support, is simply absent.
Indeed, the higher the echelon, the greater the disparity. This results from
infrequent combined arms training; when it does take place, it is intended to
impress visitors (which it does--the dog-and-pony show is usually done with
uncommon gusto and theatrical talent) rather than provide real training.
This problem results from three main factors. First, the well-known lack
of trust among Arabs for anyone outside their own family adversely affects
offensive operations. (26) Exceptions to this pattern are limited to elite units
(which throughout the Arab world have the same duty--to protect the regime,
rather than the country). In a culture in which almost every sphere of human
endeavor, including business and social relationships, is based on a family
structure, this orientation is also present in the military, particularly in the
stress of battle. Offensive action, basically, consists of fire and maneuver.
The maneuver element must be confident that supporting units or arms are
providing covering fire. If there is a lack of trust in that support, getting
troops moving forward against dug-in defenders is possible only by officers
getting out front and leading, something that has not been a characteristic of
Arab leadership.
Second, the complex mosaic system of peoples creates additional problems
for training, as rulers in the Middle East make use of the sectarian and tribal
loyalties to maintain power. The ‘Alawi minority controls Syria, East Bankers
control Jordan, Sunnis control Iraq, and Nejdis control Saudi Arabia. This has
direct implications for the military, where sectarian considerations affect
assignments and promotions. Some minorities (such the Circassians in Jordan or
the Druze in Syria) tie their well-being to the ruling elite and perform
critical protection roles; others (such as the Shi‘a of Iraq) are excluded
from the officer corps. In any case, the assignment of officers based on
sectarian considerations works against assignments based on merit.
The same lack of trust operates at the interstate level, where Arab
armies exhibit very little trust of each other, and with good reason. The
blatant lie Gamal Abdel Nasser told King Husayn in June 1967 to get him into the
war against Israel--that the Egyptian air force was over Tel Aviv (when most of
its planes had been destroyed)--was a classic example of deceit. (27) Sadat’s
disingenuous approach to the Syrians to entice them to enter the war in October
1973 was another (he told them that the Egyptians were planning total war, a
deception which included using a second set of operational plans intended only
for Syrian eyes). (28) With this sort of history, it is no wonder that there is
very little cross or joint training among Arab armies and very few command
exercises. During the 1967 war, for example, not a single Jordanian liaison
officer was stationed in Egypt, nor were the Jordanians forthcoming with the
Egyptian command. (29)
Third, Middle Eastern rulers routinely rely on balance-of-power
techniques to maintain their authority. (30) They use competing organizations,
duplicate agencies, and coercive structures dependent upon the ruler’s whim.
This makes building any form of personal power base difficult, if not
impossible, and keeps the leadership apprehensive and off-balance, never secure
in its careers or social position. The same applies within the military; a
powerful chairman of the joint chiefs is inconceivable.
Joint commands are paper constructs that have little actual function.
Leaders look at joint commands, joint exercises, combined arms, and integrated
staffs very cautiously for all Arab armies are a double-edged sword. One edge
points toward the external enemy and the other toward the capital. The land
forces are at once a regime-maintenance force and threat at the same time. No
Arab ruler will allow combined operations or training to become routine; the
usual excuse is financial expense, but that is unconvincing given their frequent
purchase of hardware whose maintenance costs they cannot afford. In fact,
combined arms exercises and joint staffs create familiarity, soften rivalries,
erase suspicions, and eliminate the fragmented, competing organizations that
enable rulers to play off rivals against one another. This situation is most
clearly seen in Saudi Arabia, where the land forces and aviation are under the
minister of defense, Prince Sultan, while the National Guard is under Prince
Abdullah, the deputy prime minister and crown prince. In Egypt, the Central
Security Forces balance the army. In Iraq and Syria, the Republican Guard does
the balancing.
Politicians actually create obstacles to maintain fragmentation. For
example, obtaining aircraft from the air force for army airborne training,
whether it is a joint exercise or a simple administrative request for support of
training, must generally be coordinated by the heads of services at the ministry
of defense; if a large number of aircraft are involved, this probably requires
presidential approval. Military coups may be out of style, but the fear of them
remains strong. Any large-scale exercise of land forces is a matter of concern
to the government and is closely observed, particularly if live ammunition is
being used. In Saudi Arabia a complex system of clearances required from area
military commanders and provincial governors, all of whom have differing command
channels to secure road convoy permission, obtaining ammunition, and conducting
exercises, means that in order for a coup to work, it would require a massive
amount of loyal conspirators. Arab regimes have learned how to be coup-proof.
SECURITY
AND PARANOIA
Arab regimes classify virtually everything vaguely military. Information
the U.S. military routinely publishes (about promotions, transfers, names of
unit commanders, and unit designations) is top secret in Arabic-speaking
countries. To be sure, this does make it more difficult for the enemy to
construct an accurate order of battle, but it also feeds the divisive and
compartmentalized nature of the military forces. The obsession with security can
reach ludicrous lengths. Prior to the 1973 war, Sadat was surprised to find that
within two weeks of the date he had ordered the armed forces be ready for war,
his minister of war, General Muhammad Sadiq, had failed to inform his immediate
staff of the order. Should a war, Sadat wondered, be kept secret from the very
people expected to fight it? (31) One can expect to have an Arab counterpart or
key contact to be changed without warning and with no explanation as to his
sudden absence. This might well be simply a transfer a few doors down the way,
but the vagueness of it all leaves foreigners with dire scenarios--scenarios
that might be true. And it is best not to inquire too much; advisors or trainers
who seem overly inquisitive may find their access to host military information
or facilities limited.
The presumed close U.S.-Israel relationship, thought to be operative at
all levels, aggravates and complicates this penchant for secrecy. Arabs believe
that the most mundane details about them are somehow transmitted to the Mossad
via a secret hotline. This explains why a U.S. advisor with Arab forces
is likely to be asked early and often about his opinion of the “Palestine
problem,” then subjected to monologues on the presumed Jewish domination of
the United States.
INDEFERENCE
TO SAFETY
In terms of safety measures, there is a general laxness, a seeming
carelessness and indifference to training accidents, many of which could have
been prevented by minimal efforts. To the (perhaps overly) safety-conscious
Americans, Arab societies appear indifferent to casualties and show a seemingly
lackadaisical approach to training safety. There are a number of explanations
for this. Some would point to the inherent fatalism within Islam, (32) and
certainly anyone who has spent considerable time in Arab taxis would lend
credence to that theory, but perhaps the reason is less religiously based and
more a result of political culture. As any military veteran knows, the ethos of
a unit is set at the top; or, as the old saying has it, units do those things
well that the boss cares about. When the top political leadership displays a
complete lack of concern for the welfare of its soldiers, such attitudes
percolate down through the ranks. Exhibit A was the betrayal of Syrian troops
fighting Israel in the Golan in 1967: having withdrawn its elite units, the
Syrian government knowingly broadcast the falsehood that Israeli troops had
captured the town of Kuneitra, which would have put them behind the largely
conscript Syrian army still in position. The leadership took this step to
pressure the great powers to impose a truce, though it led to a panic by the
Syrian troops and the loss of the Golan Heights. (33)
CONCLUSION
It would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gulf separating American
and Arab military cultures. In every significant area, American military
advisors find students who enthusiastically take in their lessons and then
resolutely fail to apply them. The culture they return to--the culture of their
own armies in their own countries--defeats the intentions with which they took
leave of their American instructors.
When they had an influence on certain Arab military establishments, the
Soviets reinforced their clients’ cultural traits far more than, in more
recent years, Americans were able to do. Like the Arabs’, the Soviets’
military culture was driven by political fears bordering on paranoia. The steps
taken to control the sources (real or imagined) of these fears, such as a
rigidly centralized command structure, were readily understood by Arab political
and military elites. The Arabs, too, felt an affinity for the Soviet officer
class’s contempt for ordinary soldiers and the Soviet military hierarchy’s
distrust of a well-developed, well-appreciated, well-rewarded NCO corps.
Arab political culture is based on a high degree of social
stratification, very much like that of the defunct Soviet Union and very much
unlike the upwardly mobile, meritocratic, democratic United States. Arab
officers do not see any value in sharing information among themselves, let alone
with their men. In this they follow the example of their political leaders, who
not only withhold information from their own allies, but routinely deceive them.
Training in Arab armies reflects this: rather than prepare as much as possible
for the multitude of improvised responsibilities that are thrown up in the chaos
of battle, Arab soldiers, and their officers, are bound in the narrow functions
assigned them by their hierarchy. That this renders them less effective on the
battlefield, let alone places their lives at greater risk, is scarcely of
concern, whereas, of course, these two issues are dominant in the American
military culture, and are reflected in American military training.
Change is unlikely to come until it occurs in the larger Arab political
culture, although the experience of other societies (including our own) suggests
that the military can have a democratizing influence on the larger political
culture, as officers bring the lessons of their training first into their
professional environment, then into the larger society. It obviously makes a big
difference, however, when the surrounding political culture is not only avowedly
democratic (as are many Middle Eastern states), but functionally so. Until Arab
politics begin to change at fundamental levels, Arab armies, whatever the
courage or proficiency of individual officers and men, are unlikely to acquire
the range of qualities which modern fighting forces require for success on the
battlefield. For these qualities depend on inculcating respect, trust, and
openness among the members of the armed forces at all levels, and this is the
marching music of modern warfare that Arab armies, no matter how much they
emulate the corresponding steps, do not want to hear.
This article is reprinted with permission from Middle East Quarterly, Vol. 4, No. 4 (December 1999)
NOTES
1)
Saeed M. Badeeb, The Saudi-Egyptian Conflict over North Yemen
1962-1970, (Boulder, Westview Press: 1986), pp. 33-42.
2)
R. D. McLaurin, The Battle of Zahle (Aberdeen Proving Grounds,
Md.: Human Engineering Laboratory, Sept. 1986), pp. 26-27.
3)
Anthony Cordesman and Abraham Wagner, The Lessons of Modern War,
Volume II: The Iran-Iraq War, (Boulder, Colo.: Westview Press, 1990), pp.
89-98; Phebe Marr, The Modern History of Iraq (Boulder Colo.: Westview
Press, 1985), pp. 22-223, 233- 234.
4)
Kenneth M. Pollack, “The Influence of Arab Culture on Arab Military
Effectiveness” (Ph.d. diss., Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 1996), pp.
259-261 (Egypt); pp. 533-536 (Saudi Arabia); pp. 350-355 (Iraq). Syrians did not
see significant combat in the 1991 Gulf war but my conversations with U.S.
personnel in liaison with them indicated a high degree of paranoia and distrust
toward Americans and other Arabs.
5)
David Kahn, “United States Views of Germany and Japan,” Knowing
One’s Enemies: Intelligence Before the Two World Wars, ed., Ernest R. May
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), pp. 476-503.
6)
Gerhard L. Weinberg, The Foreign Policy of Hitler’s Germany:
Diplomatic Revolution in Europe, 1933-1936 (Chicago: University of Chicago,
1970), p. 21.
7)
Stanley Karnow, Vietnam: A History (New York: Penguin Books,
1984), p. 18.
8)
Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers (New York: Random
House, 1987), pp. 186-187. The German assessment from T. Dodson Stamps and
Vincent J. Esposito, eds., A Short History of World War I (West Point,
N.Y.: United States Military Academy, 1955), p. 8.
9)
William Manchester, Winston Spencer Churchilll: The Last Lion Alone,
1932-1940 (New York: Dell Publishing, 1988), p. 613; Ernest R. May
“Conclusions,” Knowing One’s Enemies, pp. 513-514. Hitler thought
otherwise, however.
10)
Avraham (Bren) Adan, On the Banks of the Suez (San Francisco:
Presideo Press, 1980), pp. 73-86. “Thus the prevailing feeling of security,
based on the assumption that the Arabs were incapable of mounting an overall war
against us, distorted our view of the situation,” Moshe Dayan stated. “As
for the fighting standard of the Arab soldiers, I can sum it up in one sentence:
they did not run away.” Moshe Dayan: Story of My Life (New York:
William Morrow and Company, 1976), p. 510.
11)
John Keegan, A History of Warfare (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1993), p. 18.
12)
Ibid., p. 387
13)
John Walter Jandora, Militarism in Arab Society: A
Historiographical and Bibliographical Sourcebook (Westport, Ct.: Greenwood
Press, 1997), p. 128.
14)
T. E. Lawrence, The Evolution of a Revolt (Ft. Leavenworth Kans.:
CSI, 1990), p. 21.( A reprint of article originally published in the British
Army Quarterly and Defense Journal, Oct. 1920.)
15)
Author’s observations buttressed by such scholarly works as Eli Shouby,
“The Influence of the Arabic Language on the Psychology of the Arabs,” Readings
in Arab Middle Eastern Societies and Culture, ed. Abdullah M. Lutfiyya and
Charles Churchill (The Hague: Mouton Co., 1970), pp. 688-703; Hisham Shirabi and
Muktar Ani, “Impact of Class and Culture on Social Behavior: The
Feudal-Bourgeois Family in Arab Society,” Psychological Dimensions of Near
Eastern Studies, ed. L. Carl Brown and Norman Itzkowitz (Princeton: The
Darwin Press, 1977), pp. 240-256; Sania Hamady, Temperament and Character of
the Arabs (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1960), pp. 28-85; Raphael Patai, The
Arab Mind (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1973), pp. 20-85.
16)
Pollack, “The Influence of Arab Culture,” p. 759.
17)
Samuel P. Huntington, “The Clash of Civilizations,” Foreign
Affairs, Summer 1993, pp. 21-49.
18)
Paul M. Belbutowski, “Strategic Implications of Cultures in
Conflict,” Parameters, Spring 1996, pp. 32-42.
19)
Carlo D’Este, Patton: A Genius for War (New York:
Harper-Collins, 1996), p. 383.
20)
Saad el-Shazly, The Crossing of the Suez (San Francisco: American
Mideast Research, 1980), p. 47.
21)
Jordan may be an exception here; however, most observers agree that its
effectiveness has declined in the past twenty years.
22)
Pollack, “The Influence of Arab Culture,” pp. 256-257.
23)
H. Norman Schwarzkopf, It Doesn’t Take A Hero (New York: Bantam
Books, 1992), p. 494.
24)
Khaled bin Sultan, Desert Warrior: A Personal View of the War by the
Joint Forces Commander (New York: Harper-Collins, 1995), pp. 368-69.
25)
Based on discussions with U.S. personnel in the area and familiar with
the battle.
26)
Yesoshat Harkabi, “Basic Factors in the Arab Collapse During the Six
Day War,” Orbis, Fall 1967, pp. 678-679.
27)
James Lunt, Hussein of Jordan, Searching for a Just and Lasting Peace:
A Political Biography (New York: William Morrow, 1989), p. 99.
28)
Patrick Seale, Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), pp. 197-99; Shazly, Crossing
of the Suez, pp. 21, 37.
29)
Samir A. Mutawi, Jordan in the 1967 War (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1987), p. 161.
30)
James A. Bill and Robert Springborg, Politics in the Middle East, 3rd
Ed. (New York: Harper-Collins, 1990), p. 262.
31)
Anwar el-Sadat, In Search of Identity (New York: Harper and Row,
1978), p. 235.
32)
Hamady, Temperament and Character of the Arabs, pp. 184-193;
Patai, The Arab Mind, pp.147-150.
33)
Joseph
Malone, “Syria and the Six-Day War,” Current Affairs Bulletin, Jan.
26, 1968, p. 80.
Norvell De Atkine is a retired U.S. army colonel. He currently instructs U.S. army personnel assigned to Middle Eastern areas.