Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999) | Hacker News Reader

Why Arabs Lose Wars (1999)

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37 pointsseverine34 comments

A very interesting essay - but it works better if you substitute 'arabic nations' with 'dictatorships'. Most of what he's talking about has far more to do with the mechanics of maintaining a dictatorship than arabic culture.

He probably missed this because he's both unwilling to acknowledge that he's been training the troops of dictatorships for his adult career, but also, that the US is generally involved in the propping-up of such dictatorships.

US forces tend to spend a lot of time training extremely demoralized and unenthusiastic conscripts, surrounded by officers who see their own soldiers as the enemy, and don't trust eachother - and that's exactly what you expect of the army of a unpopular dictatorship, and it's exactly what such armies have looked like throughout most of history. The problems that mysteriously vanish when he talks about the 'elite units' are vanishing because the elites actually like the regimes they're in.

They also seem to vanish when they worked with the Kurds, for instance.

>it works better if you substitute 'arabic nations' with 'dictatorships'.

You are correct this applies to dictatorships in general, and in fact the article mentions the similarities to the Soviet military.

But then you have to ask why the Arab nations are almost all dictatorships, and that brings you back to culture, at least considerably.

Well, most countries are not particularly democratic, but countries with lucrative primary industries, especially strategically important ones, are often dictatorships. Which makes sense, because if you're a big nation, and you want to make sure your access to strategically vital resources is safe, you want to have a friendly government in charge - and a client dictatorship is dependably friendly, since they need you for the weapons they need to stay in power.

I'd say there's also the compounding influence of the colonial legacy. A colony usually has no culture of the 'citizen', since the people of the colony are basically a resource exploited by the colonist. Without a deep culture of citizenship, it's kinda hard to get a robust democracy going.

>Well, most countries are not particularly democratic

And that is due to a great extent to culture, which is what the article is about

> A colony usually has no culture of the 'citizen', since the people of the colony are basically a resource exploited by the colonist.

But Arab culture prior to the relatively brief period of Western colonization also did not have a concept of citizen, at least not in the democratic sense.

>But Arab culture prior to the relatively brief period of Western colonization also did not have a concept of citizen, at least not in the democratic sense.

This sent me down a bit of a rabbit hole, and I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottomanism, which is kinda interesting. I'm thinking the Ottoman thinking is probably the most relevant, since most of the middle east was part of the Ottoman empire.

There's more commonalities than just "dictatorship". Saudi Arabia, Iraq, Jordan and Syria are all made up of multiple competing groups (tribes, religious sects, etc.) and the dictator is carrying out a delicate balancing act where the various groups are played off one another.

Germany, South Korea, Taiwan, Japan, and Singapore at one point all had dictators, but they also had a strong sense of national identity. The dictators didn't have to worry about military coups led by ethnic/religious/tribal minorities, so they could allow their militaries to be powerful and independent enough to overthrow the state (because they wouldn't).

You've picked some of the most coherent nations to make your case - but they're absolutely the exception. Rule by minority ethnic group is the classic tactic of the British empire - they did it all over the world, from Ireland to India. Part of the reason why it works is because you don't actually need pre-existing divisions to make it work. If you take a country (say germany) and start treating a minority group far better than the rest (say, east germans), it wouldn't matter how arbitrary the division is before minor cultural and social differences start to really matter. Even something as 'small' as having government jobs open only to the minority group is usually enough to create massive divides in social and cultural norms.

Part of the genius of the strategy is because even if you see it happening, and don't believe in it, you have to play along. If you're the hypothetical 'east german', you have to support the dictator, because the dictator losing power would, at the very least, lose you your good position - and at the worst, could have you killed in a pogrom.

The dictator and the minority group have a symbiotic relationship - the minority group give the dictator enough support to draw loyal officers, government officials, police and so on from. The minority group in turn get kickbacks and privileges.

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 information hoarding behavior also occurs in large enterprises. I know one programmer who got to sit in a cafe reading a book, because she was the only one who understood how a particular subsystem worked. (She had written it in a particularly diabolical way, and only she understood the underlying system of objects only existed as adjacent entries in long arrays, which then underwent merge sort-like "merge" operations involving 4 array indexes, of which there were dozens of variations which called each other recursively. The company that had produced the system was defunct, and no manuals for the format could be found.)

One way to counteract this, is to require all groups within the company to provide a standardized API for accessing their systems, and to evaluate each group by how useful it is to the rest of the company.

Another variation of this behavior is information-based management, where business information is given (or not) to the various team members, usually because of internal politics/power struggles. (at least it's how my boss in my second internship explained it to me, I never directly witnessed it)

"refucktering"

random thought: maybe if enough wars are lost, they'll stop practicing war and try to get their needs met by other means.</randomthought>

I think Norvell B. De Atkine might have missed out on some key details due to his status as an outsider. Especially if every Arab with whom he interacted truly suspected he was a zionist spy. It's difficult to overcome that kind of paranoia and the skills for doing so are not taught in the U.S. military. Also, it sounds like a lot of these people are being forced to participate in the wars, and that's just a recipe for failure. Guns are scary it takes a lot more than a draft to convince someone to stick around for that shit.

Another thing to consider is that the rituals used to build loyalty in the U.S. military are kind of a secret. Generally, only the ones participating in the rituals get to know what they are. The content is not entirely intuitive either: imagine being told to sleep in a 1-meter wooden cube in the woods; ants crawl into the cube and bite you; at bedtime, human chanting is played from speakers inside your cube, alternating between quiet and deafening over five minute intervals until the sun comes up. This is meant to build unit cohesion. It's weirdo shit devised by psychos to break human minds.

Also, the article is called "Why Arabs Lose Wars" but half of the examples he initially cites are wars in which both sides were arab: Egypt v Yemen, Syria v Lebanon, Iraq v Kuwait. Arabs won those wars... but I guess that wasn't worth noting because the losing side was arab?

Those were just some details which stuck out to me while I was reading the article. I acknowledge that about half of this article is objective, fact-based observation and those observations were genuinely interesting. I think that his evidence is inconclusive simply because of the context in which his observations were gathered.

That's not really how the US military works.

You're attempting to describe a training event that has nothing to do with a "loyalty ritual", it's not a good description and has nothing to do with unit cohesion, loyalty, or breaking anyone's mind.

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.

I was expecting a dull write-up but this essay is extremely insight full and deep.

The problems and issues are probably not restricted to the military apparatus. Many organizational inefficiencies in e.g. Turkish political/private organizations are due same reasons.

TLDR: Arab armies are ineffective because of the all the internal, external and ethnic politics which hinders all kinds of cooperation and unity at the battalion-level, otherwise on the unit and soldier-level they are comparable to Israeli units.

The article is pretty clear that on the small unit and soldier level the Arab forces are less effective, too. Specialists horde information, soldiers don't train for multiple roles, junior officers mistreat their soldiers, no one shows initiative, etc. There are good reasons for all of this -- it's not an Arab character defect, but a rational response to soldiers' circumstances -- but the author states quite explicitly that an Israeli tank crew can better absorb casualties than an Arab tank crew can because the Israelis are encouraged to share information and train for multiple tasks.

Previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10830172

Jan 3, 2016 | 41 comments

I think the author is describing a symptoms of an ill organization structure rather than the root causes. The reason why there is no trust, sharing of information and centralized authority in modern Arab state armies because Arab societies never really transitioned successfully into a functional nationalistic countries. Arabs never really believed in nation state and in the absence of strong bonding narrative, there is no common ground for the group to collaborate and fight thus you end up with individuals seeking their self interest and subsequently the symptoms which the author observed.

Modern nation state concepts were forced into a region that is predominantly tribal and religious in culture therefore the resulted states, governments, armies and other national institutions are merely a superficial layer on top of a largely religious, ethinic and tribal societies. The west had a long and painful (400 years plus and two major wars) transition from societies dominated by religion to a national secular societies and eventually a capitalistic global societies. That transition never really took place in the Arab region, instead what happened is that western society tried to force national borders and proxy presidents after the world wars on societies that didn’t have the cultural foundation for it and the region has not really managed to reconcile, unify and agree on it’s identity ever since.

So why do arabs lose war? Because really there is no state or reason to fight for it. This was very clear in Iraq when fighting ISIS, the men of the country only mobilized after a religious greenlight from a senior clerk despite the fact that ISIS were at the border of the country's capital.

> 400 years plus and two major wars

More like a dozen of major war.

But what you are describing is close to the idea of nation-state, which has been blamed as the cause of the war of the XXth century.

Yeah indeed it cauased a new set of global conflicts, but it also allowed western societies to raise above the tribal, relgious and ethinic devisions (for better or worst) something I'd argue no Arab nation managed to do so successfully.

In fact it seems that western societies are currently undergrowing new trasnision beyond the nation and local bordres, which could be why they're having new make x great again movements and raise of local populist.

> More like a dozen of major war.

That could also be another reason why western armies are better organized, they simply have more experience waging nation wide global wars.

Mostly because there is no Arab or Muslim empire left after Europeans killed off the Ottoman empire and it's easy to beat down tyrants with few allies. What's the reasons for these tyrants, dictators, and terrorists. Insecurity. What's the reason for insecurity? Lack of empire... so you always end up becoming someone's bitch... which leads to feelings of insecurity and inferiority.

The only way to deal with this is to become a vassal of an existing empire and good examples of this are Kuwait, Saudi Arabia, etc.

If you were to actually read the article you might find it to be a thoughtful meditation on Arab military (and, more generally, male) culture by someone who has broad and deep firsthand knowledge of the topic.

Having advised the Iraqi army, and having tried to prepare beforehand by reading Lawrence, Patai, Nydell, etc, I would say that this short essay was by far the best of the bunch.

I think de Atkine also makes insightful points about how good people can create toxic organizations when they feel insecure about their status within the organization.

Well to me it reeks of Orientalism in that most of these countries are run by tribal syndicates which are more or less a result of social engineering and destruction of Arab nationalism. So obviously there are no stable power structures which would lead to some sort of successful organization of a military. And that's all by design. After you have created a disaster you can go in there point your finger at their culture and say see, this is why the native is stupid. And all the bigots buy it... because that's the situation you have created.

When corruption is the norm, how do you think it would be expressed in society?

I have no doubt as to the value of the social engineering, knowledge of American values and norms are spread by American media, for the price of an armored division and hiring from the Arab emigre population in the United States, an Arabic movie and TV studio could be created. More people throughout the world are familiar with Miranda rights than with the US constitution, partially because the US constitution is dead words, while what Hollywood produces are reenactments.

I mostly agree with your point of view.

This comment has nothing to do with de Atkine's essay, which I recommend you actually read.

> 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."

You don't. You change the culture by socially engineering it. That's how the West has always done things. But we must understand the savage and his culture... and understand his brute nature so that we may deal with him.

>it works better if you substitute 'arabic nations' with 'dictatorships'.

But that begs the question of why the Middle East, which for thousands of years had ruled western eurasia, was conquered by the West. I say it was because the West developed a form of culture, politics and military that is simply more powerful. And the article is giving some of the particulars here.

>Well to me it reeks of Orientalism

So is it your view that the Middle East would be a wonderful, just, egalitarian, materially comfortable place if it weren't for the evil West?

> Mostly because there is no Arab or Muslim empire left after Europeans killed off the Ottoman empire

Can you describe the Ottoman's as Arabs? Without resorting to sources I seem to recall their origins were in Scythia. In any case, I do think there is some value in looking back at the history, even though it is pretty orthogonal to the analysis in the post (there may be some cultural touch points). Also, isn't it more accurate to say that the Ottomans chose the wrong (German) side in a war, and that this is the cause of their final dissolution?

The Ottomans start as one of the beyliks in the ruins of the Sultanate of Rum, which is Seljuk (Turkic) Anatolia wrested from the Byzantines. The Ottomans use the late Byzantine instability to expand Turkic control into Thrace, Macedonia, and the Balkans, as well as conquering the other remnant beyliks of Anatolia. Later, they expanded into other ruins of the Ilkhanate (modern-day Iraq, predominantly), and resoundingly defeated the Mamluk Sultanate, giving them control over Egypt, Palestine, and the Hejaz (including the holy cities).

For much of its existence, the Ottoman Empire combined both Turkish and Arabian as prestige languages within its empire. It was only in the latter part of its existence, the last century or so, that the modernization effort focused on a narrow, Turkish identity that alienated the Arab populations within its borders.

> Also, isn't it more accurate to say that the Ottomans chose the wrong (German) side in a war, and that this is the cause of their final dissolution?

Ehh, picking the wrong side in WWI was only the coup de grace. It was the fourth war in 4 years that the Ottomans had fought--the Italian war for Libya, the First Balkan War (Serbia, Bulgaria, and Greece team up to wrest Macedonia), the Second Balkan War (Serbia, Romania, the Ottomans, and Greece team up to force Bulgaria to give up the land it just won), followed by WWI. The Ottoman Empire was deeply unstable from the Greek independence through its final collapse, and the very start of WWI has its roots in the instability of the Ottoman Empire and the Christian states attempting to peel Christian statedoms out of the Muslim Ottoman Empire.

I think the Ottoman empire was already failing at the time of WW1. Perhaps choosing the winning side would have allowed them to survive a little longer, but I think the empire was doomed at the time.

Ottomans were not Arab by any-means. Ottoman State is founded by Osman Bey, leader of the Kayi Tribe which is a sub-tribe of Oghuz Turks, who migrated from Khorasan. The official language in Ottoman empire was Ottoman Turkish, which is basically Turkish with many many Persian and Arabic words, while the structure and grammer was Turkish. Ottoman Turkish mainly used in Istanbul by a limited-number of people who are closed to state affairs or some educated people like poets or government officials in the federal states. Common people was speaking plan Turkish, which don't have much Persian and Arabic influence, and this language was the language of the Ottoman Army. Ottoman state and army culture, discipline and structure was a classical Turkish state structure, of course with differences from previous Turkish states.

The problem Arabs faced after dissolution of Ottoman Empire is similar in a sense to Turkish people faced, in regards to the national awareness.

Ottoman Empire didn't dissolved because they chose the wrong side, instead it was huge empire consisting of many nation and spans over an enourmous area (East Europe, Anatolia, Syria-Iraq, Egypt, Arabia, North Africa), while the army and many government offices couldn't keep up with the developments of the time. Basically, Ottoman Empire dissolved because of the wrong politics and failure to renew itself. After the French Revolution, nationalism started to spread over whole Europe and this affected the Ottoman Empire most, not only consisting of different nations, but also different religions. Being a religious state (Islamic), main subjects were Muslims and non-Muslims, separated by Millet system according to religious affiliation. Government officials were either Turkish or Devshirmes (Christian boys converted to Islam and trained to be gov. officials), being Muslim even wasn't a qualification to be an official.

When nationalism sweeps Europe, Christian Balkan nations like Greeks, Serbians, Bulgars etc. started to rebel against the empire to found their own independent nation states, feeling comfortable as the empire was loosing power every day. In that situation, Ottoman government was trying to cope with "the problem" by supporting the empire-identity of Ottomanism, and only small number of educated people were following the idea of Turkish nationalism and to create a Turkish nation-state. This was all happening at the last decades of 1800s, and Ottomans lost Balkan region, latery Ottomans also lost Middle East, Egypt, Iraq, Arabia, North Africa. British Empire also supported Arab nations to rebel against Ottoman Empire, promising their own land (British Mandates).

Empire was already dissolved when most of the nations declared their independence. WW1 was just nail in the coffin, that officially surrendered Ottoman Empire and Istanbul to British Empire. After the end of WW2, Allied forces (British, Greek, French, Italian, Armenian) shared the remnants of the empire with Treaty of Sevres, but Ottoman Army generals and irregular Turkish armed forces rebelled against the invading forces and this resulted in the victory for the Turkish side in the War of Independence, and ultimately resulted in the foundation of the Turkish national state.

TL;DR: Empire didn't dissolved because of choosing the German side. And also Arab nations didn't share "ottoman" ideals as Turkish and even many non-Muslim millet did and finally rebelled against Ottomans with the British support. Saying Ottoman Empire was an Arab Empire is simply ignoring the historical facts. This is not so different than saying all the Christian nations in Europe are descending of the Jews because Jesus was one. Having words from a language and having the same religious affiliation doesn't make two different states, nations or cultures one.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decline_and_modernization_of_t... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rise_of_nationalism_in_the_Ott... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turkish_War_of_Independence

Thanks so much for the insights.

> Ottoman Empire didn't dissolved because they chose the wrong side, instead it was huge empire consisting of many nation and spans over an enourmous area (East Europe, Anatolia, Syria-Iraq, Egypt, Arabia, North Africa), while the army and many government offices couldn't keep up with the developments of the time.

Not an uncommon pattern.

Multicultural empires couldn't survive the onslaught of nationalism that came in the 19th century. The modernization attempts of the Ottoman Empire (unlike Austria-Hungary or Russia, the other two major multicultural empires of Europe) rested very heavily on a very narrow Turkish nationalism movement that alienated the Armenian, Arab, and Balkan peoples in the country. But Austria-Hungary, which was somewhat successfully trying to force an inclusive, multicultural modernization process still imploded, as did Russia, which was somewhat in the middle between Austria-Hungary and the Ottomans.

Even the multicultural aspects of the British Empire would come flying apart in the 20th century--Irish nationalism was successful in splitting from Britain in the inter-war period, and Indian nationalism would end the British Raj shortly after WW2. And Britain was consistently the most modern, liberal, and inclusive country in this period. The only countries that could successfully survive multiculturally were those that received multiple countries from the sheer immigration of the period and channeled them into a melting pot of immigrant cultures (most notably the US, but many of the large American countries went through similar experiences).

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