Can I read Armies of Sand : The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness on EtoBox?

Armies of Sand : The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness by Kenneth Michael Pollack is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is Armies of Sand : The Past, Present, and Future of Arab Military Effectiveness about?

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 for

Author

Kenneth Michael Pollack

Publisher

Oxford University Press, Incorporated; Oxford University Press

Published

2019

Language

EN

ISBN

9780190906986

Subjects

Science, Political Science, Military

Rating

4.6 / 5 (108 ratings)

Updated

2026-03-14