Description: Since the Second World War, Arab armed forces have consistently punched below their weight. They have lost many wars that by all rights they should have won, and in their best performances only ever achieved quite modest accomplishments. Over time, soldiers, scholars, and military experts have offered various explanations for this pattern. Reliance on Soviet military methods, the poor civil-military relations of the Arab world, the underdevelopment of the Arab states, and patterns of behavior derived from the wider Arab culture, have all been suggested as the ultimate source of Arab military difficulties.
Armies of Sand, Kenneth M. Pollack's powerful and riveting history of Arab armies from the end of World War Two to the present, assesses these differing explanations and isolates the most important causes. Over the course of the book, he examines the combat performance of fifteen Arab armies and air forces in virtually every Middle Eastern war, from the Jordanians and Syrians in 1948 to Hizballah in 2006 and the Iraqis and ISIS in 2014-2017. He then compares these experiences to the performance of the Argentine, Chadian, Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, and South Vietnamese armed forces in their own combat operations during the twentieth century.Brief description: Kenneth M. Pollack has been an expert on Middle Eastern military and political affairs for over thirty years. He has served as a Persian Gulf Military analyst at the CIA and Director for Persian Gulf Affairs at the NSC. A longtime Senior Fellow of the Brookings Institution, where he ran the Saban Center for Middle East Policy, he is currently a Resident Scholar of the American Enterprise Institute. His books on the politics and military of the Middle East include the bestsellers The Threatening Storm, Arabs at War, and its sequel The Persian Puzzle.