Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999)

meforum.org

100 pointsTomte40 comments

So, I served in the military and happen to have studied Arabic and Arab culture quite a bit. Furthermore, I am kind of a military history buff.

The core strength of our military is that we put a lot of power in the hands of career NCOs, who are literate and often carry more knowledge in their heads than the boot lieutenants nominally in charge. We even have a Warrant Officer track for technically minded NCOs.

The no-career-NCO Soviet Union style military which most of the Arab nations have embraced is a serious hindrance, and it's notable that Russia did away with it in 2008, leading to better military unit performance in recent conflicts.

I would guess that the Soviet military system was originally adopted to balance the need to utilize an illiterate uneducated peasantry while at the same time denying them any real power or opportunity to move up the social ladder.

It is interesting to me that the system persists in many of the U.S.' allies today.

The US isn't very concerned that its literate, educated NCOs will get together and overthrow the government (although with the current political situation I'd say the risk is higher than it used to be). In Vietnam, they tried to assassinate the president [1].

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1962_South_Vietnamese_Independ...

No idea why you got downvoted. The author of the article definitely agrees with the basic thrust of you argument, although maybe not your speculation in the parentheses. If you look at arab militaries as existing in-of and for themselves, they appear to be incredibly inefficient and badly organized and should be reformed. But if you look at them from a political perspective, they're still inefficient and badly organized, but there's a lot of solid political logic as to why.

In the case of many arab regimes, having an ineffectual and divided military isn't a bug, it's a feature.

It's my understanding that the Soviet style organization is basically a continuation of the normal Soviet ultra-centralization-of-everything policies that extended from the military organization to centralized hot water boilers in Soviet cities. The Soviet education system was pretty good, by WW2 it had turned a territory with <28% literacy (for Women it was ~13%) into an empire with >75% literacy. In later years the number was no doubt near 100%.

It works to a point for command and control, but greatly reduces tactical flexibility and decision making. As we've also learned from the GWoT is that centralization makes it easier to disable an organization and that distribution of concerns can enable forces to be much more resilient to losses.

> The Soviet education system was pretty good, by WW2 it had turned a territory with <28% literacy (for Women it was ~13%) into an empire with >75% literacy.

Note that it was fairly easy to improve literacy by a lot, because the starting point was so low, after the reactionary and eventually dysfunctional rule in Russia proper.

But of course the progress during Soviet rule was still quite remarkable.

But already before that, Finland, where I live - what was a Grand Duchy under the tsar, a part of the empire but not part of Russia - had literacy rate 98 % in 1880. The duchy was self-governing within the empire, the central government just taking care of foreign and military policy.

The tool to reach this was religious/church control of sexual lives: here you couldn't get a marriage permission unless you'd acquired enough literacy to read religious texts.

  WW2 it had turned a territory with <28% literacy (for
  Women it was ~13%) into an empire with >75% literacy

Sure, but I'm guessing that most of the tens of millions who died from starvation under Stalin were illiterate. That skews the counters a bit.

It's a bit silly that the author doesn't make a link to an obvious parallel: South Vietnam's completely dysfunctional military. Mistrust at all levels? Check. Lack of consideration for the lives of conscripts? Check. Lack of cooperation between units? Check. Rampant corruption, disappearing supplies? Check. Legitimate fear of military coups? Check. Promotion based on contacts, not competence. Check.

Essentially this is a pathology of the militaries in countries were the government lacks legitimacy, where survival of the most paranoid is the rule. The paramount example of this is Saddam Hussein, who would deliberately promote incompetent idiots to the highest positions to protect his own ass and surrounded himself with sycophants.

Mussolini's Italy is another good example, and so is the Iran of Mohammad Reza Shah.

But before being too smug about these "stupid" regimes, it is shocking that American leadership could not see these problems. That you can't win a war with a weak colonial puppet regime. So many American policies have blown up because one tried to prop up regimes with zero legitimize whether South Vietnam, the Shah of Iran or leader of Cuba before Castro.

I also keep wondering why a tyrant like Hitler seemed to have an awful lot of talented people running stuff. Why did Hitler not replace brilliant military commanders with loyal idiots?

It is one of the ironies, that the Nazi regime seen as as being built on cadaver decipline had a lot of independent decision making at the lower levels.

Hitler did start to replace/subvert his highest ranking military staff, and it's a big reason why he lost the war. Early on he did not micromanage the various theaters, which is partly why the Wermacht did so well early on. As the war went on, several of Hitler's best commanders were removed for railing against his out of touch orders.

Perhaps the best example of a promotion which detracted from the war effort was putting Hermann Goring in charge of the Luftwaffe.

You are right though that at the lower levels, the Wermacht could think flexibly.

Hitler owed a lot to Ludendorff, who created the stab-in-the-back legend just as soon as he asked for the armistice. He was also taking power in a somewhat democratic way, adding to his legitimacy, and he was able to keep the Army as an ally by doing stuff like getting rid of the brownshirts.

So for the first few years of the war he was able to avoid the classic dictator syndrome, especially after the early successes. But later on, as another poster notes, he started to turn on his better officers and vice-versa.

American hubris is quite awesome. The US establishment really has a thing for picking the worst losers and assholes for allies.

For those interested in a historical example of a dysfunctional military, I recommend reading: http://militera.lib.ru/research/suvorov12/07.html

Small passage to whet your interest:

>It is also essential to mix all the nationalities together in divisions, regiments and battalions. If one regiment contains too many Lithuanians and another too many Tatars, this must result from a slip-up by some military bureaucrat. The punishment for such mistakes is harsh. The movement of such colossal numbers of men takes up two whole months. Surprisingly, the machine works extremely smoothly, rather like a sausage machine-all sorts of pieces of meat, some onions, some rusks, and some garlic are put in at one end and out of the other come solidly compressed rolls of well-mixed human material.

The author is an excellent writer and the rest of this book is worth a read. Some facts are a little iffy, but I believe that's mostly it was published prior to the Soviet Union opening up its archives/making primary sources readily available.

The classic comment on the Soviet military was that units improve markedly after they've been banged around a bit in combat. This is typical of militaries that don't train as they fight. When they actually do fight, they get pounded into something that works. WWII was a long, slow slog for the Soviet army, so they had time for that to happen.

There are a few Arab military organizations that work. Hezbollah is respected by US special ops organizations. They're tactically innovative; they've deployed squads with three RPG gunners and one rifleman, which gave them enough firepower to take on Israeli armor.

Using RPG's in threes is classic ww2 tactics - your best shot hangs back whist the first two engage simutaiously.

The idea is your best shot has a chance of rescuing the situation if the first two don't get a Kill.

In what way does that sound dysfunctional? It definitely functioned, it just had very different goals and priorities.

> Nevertheless, if war with the West should break out, Soviet soldiers would surrender by the million. Disciplinary or penal battalions would not prevent this from happening. And the Politburo has no illusions about this.

From the author, who is admittedly biased since he was a dissident officer who eventually received political asylum in the west. Dysfunctional does not necessarily mean non-functioning, just that it's operating in a way that will eventually impede its operations. Perhaps a similar example of dysfunction in the U.S. military would be the ridiculous sums we give to contractors.

The Red Army wasn't really designed for a long-term general war with the west, since the thinking on both sides was that it would immediately escalate to nuclear arms. Rather, the Red Army was for internal security, a force that would be capable of putting down individual nations/nationalities without ever having the logistical-political ability to carry out a successful coup.

And that sense it was very successful: they certainly had the ability to stop countries from leaving the Warsaw Pact and republics from leaving the USSR but Gorbachev ordered them to stand down. Even the coup attempt at the very end of the Soviet Union, (which involved high-ranking elements of the CP, KGB, and the military, not just the military) collapsed almost immediately. And if the KGB and the party hardliners had not been involved, it never would've even been attempted.

Suvorov is a very interesting author, however, he is being known for twisting historical facts and producing various conspiracy theories not accepted by majority of historians. For example in one his most famous books "Icebreaker", he claims that USSR was about to invide Germany and Hitler attacked USSR only for defensive reasons.

IIRC the claim of the book is much weaker than that; his theory is that Stalin and Hitler were both building up to attack each other, each refusing to believe reports from the frontline that the other side is readying to attack first. Then Hitler attacked first, literally by weeks or days, and the Soviet side, prepared for an attack, found itself utterly unprepared to defend - thus the initial success, to put it mildly, of the Third Reich.

It seems dubious that an army gearing up to invade another country would be so grossly unprepared to fight.

I've no experience with Arab militaries, but have worked in the Middle East and with Arab telecoms companies. Quite a few of the anecdotes and observations in the article ring true, in particular as they relate to attitudes to training, power hierarchies and sharing information. In particular the politics of test scores in technical training for trainees of different ranks for a Saudi company was a difficult issue which meant in the end we had to fudge it completely. So while I can't verify much of what is said here, enough of it matches my own experiences that it seems pretty credible.

Author wrote a follow up in 2013.

https://www.ciaonet.org/attachments/23981/uploads

Knowing nearly nothing about military culture in the US, let alone other countries, it would be interesting to hear a similarly well thought-out argument from the Egyptian side. I'm sure through their eyes our military culture must seem inferior. Otherwise they would have changed?

What is the political line of this website ? I've read different articles and it seems to lean towards far-right opinions

What would that matter? It's the arguments which count, not what the person who wrote them "really thinks".

Understanding the typical biases of a given source can allow you to better watch for certain flaws in their arguments.

And also prompts reader biases and red herrings.

Watch for — yes. But this often leads to prejudice instead.

Usually it only leads to a reader reading what they already believe into the text, instead of engaging with what's actually written.

Right, it's the "ad hominem" logical fallacy:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem

In a context like global politics, where you can never even hope to have any access to any actual "facts", there are no arguments - only manipulation of "opinions". So the agenda of the author is the ONLY thing that matters.

And how do you know author's agenda? From what other people with their own agendas write about him? Also, any information that's closer to political labels ("a communist", "a right-wing somethingsomething") than to actual details about him ("spent 20 years publishing anti-soviet writings, focusing on corruption in the government", etc.) is of negative utility - political labels are bullshit and only lead you to assume things about people that are not true.

There's some info on the article's author here http://www.usni.org/author/colonel-norvell-b-de-atkine

Seems quite reasonable and very different from Pipes, the website owner.

Well, you have to confirm they are of your same political party before you give any consideration to their arguments. If they are from the other party, even reading the piece would clearly be a waste of time because they are wrong.

Their line is reminiscent of the Cheney era, a lot of neocon bs like working with Saudi Arabia and Turkey for geopolitical reasons (e.g. containing iran) under the guise of 'democracy & human rights'. It's pretty much garbage to me but that's just my opinion.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middle_East_Forum

It's ran by Pipes, here's a piece on just one of his many silly positions:

> Pipes notes that many in the Muslim world believe Barack Obama is or was a Muslim. Pipes alleged that Obama falsely claims that he had never been a Muslim, and his "the campaign appears to be either ignorant or fabricating when it states that Obama never prayed in a mosque." Pipes wrote an article for FrontPage Magazine entitled "Confirmed: Barack Obama Practiced Islam." According to Pipes, "this matters" because Democratic presidential candidate Obama "is now what Islamic law calls a murtadd (apostate), an ex-Muslim converted to another religion who must be executed", and as president this would have "large potential implications for his relationship with the Muslim world." Ben Smith, in an article on Politico responded to these accusations claiming that they amounted to a "template for a faux-legitimate assault on Obama's religion" and that Daniel Pipes' work "is pretty stunning in the twists of its logic".

I mean it's just ridiculous, and it's pretty indicative of his well known fetish for all things muslim or arab, which shines through the 'middle east forum'.

This seems to be the third HN post of this article, previous ones: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8976227 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8476130

It's an interesting article of course, and now it seems to generate more discussion (I read it at one of the previous times.)

Third time?!! This makes me wonder about the reasons for the interest in Arabs specifically. This is propaganda meant to be shoved down the throats of the gullible western citizen and many fall for it. It is spread by people with Zionist inclination to keep these citizens, specifically in the US and in the general western nations (I am a Canadian from an Arab Palestinian background), in the service of the Zionists. Many would be laughing to read this but I consider, especially the US citizens, as much occupied by Zionism as my people in Palestine.

Back to the topic: "Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern era." Well you can stop right after this sentence, the rest is uninteresting as it is talking about "armies" which went into war in 1973. But if we scratch the word army and ask the question in the title "Why Arabs Lose Wars" and look back just at the recent wars Arabs, the people not the armies, fought, you would have a completely different picture and get a completely different answer. Like myself, you don't have to be a military expert, to reach that conclusion. Just go back to the war against Lebanon in 2006. The effectiveness of the guerrilla fighter of Hizbolla would make the Navy Seals envious. Look back at the wars against the besieged Gaza strip - the largest prison in the world. Just watch the progress in the effectiveness of the fighter of Hamas (who are besieged by the Zionists as well as the Camp David regime in Egypt). Just look at the map and see how arduous it is for them to smuggle their rockets for thousands of miles and still they succeed. How did they fight in 2008? 2012? 2014? Go and look at Youtube and compare the effectiveness of the Arab fighter with the Zionist one.

Why Arabs Lose Wars? The only way to win against Arabs is complete destruction of their cities from afar just like the Americans did to the city of Fallujah, the Zionists to the Shujayia neighbourhood in Gaza, to the city of Bent Jbeil in South Lebanon. If you put techologies aside and just compare soldier to soldier, courage to courage, there is no match. Do you know any nation in history or across the planet that had so many people ready to pull a trigger and sacrifice himself or herself for his nations freedom? You might say that's terrorism but that's beside the point. Actually the majority of those sacrificed themselves (from ISIS, to ALQEDA) to the service of Saudi Arabia (the tool of the US) and for it's own wars in Afganistan, Serbia, Iraq, Syria (all wars orchestrated by the US).

---------------- these armies are just tools of governments all of whom from Morocoo to Iraq are friends the western governments.

An amazingly detailed record of military operations. Very well researched and well written. The objectivity of the overall tone adds credence.

For those interested, Ken Pollack's "Arabs at War" contains a lot of good material. He picks a number of nations in the region and discusses how well they've done in various regional wars over the latter half of the 20th century (right up until the first gulf war).

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