TL;DR
Arab armies keep losing not because of bad equipment or Soviet doctrine, but because of a culture that puts obedience and face-saving ahead of fighting.
In the small hours of 5 June 1967, Egypt's President Nasser got good news from his commanders: the air force had destroyed three quarters of the enemy's planes. Syria, Jordan and Iraq joined in, expecting to divide the spoils.
Nothing in that cable was a lie. It was just the wrong way round — three quarters of Egypt's own air force was gone, 298 of its 420 combat aircraft bombed before they took off. Six days later the Arab coalition had lost 70,000 square kilometres.
Officers who freeze
Experts offer two explanations. The first is copied Soviet doctrine: plans written in advance, command held at the very top, and paralysis the moment the battlefield changes. In 1973 Syrian troops broke through on the Golan Heights, then stopped on schedule to wait — which is how the Israeli reserves arrived in time.
The second is politicisation: leaders feared their own armies more than the enemy, so promotions tracked loyalty and experienced officers were purged. Saddam Hussein at one point ran sixteen separate security services, all busily spying on each other.
Pollack thinks neither explanation is enough. Cuba and North Korea also followed Soviet doctrine and fought respectably; Egypt depoliticised substantially in the 1970s and its soldiers still performed just as badly.
From the classroom to the battlefield
He points at the family and the school: a large patriarchal household where the father's word is final, plus teaching methods inherited from Quranic schools, where knowledge comes down from above and learning means memorisation rather than problem solving. When mass public schooling arrived in the 1950s and 60s, the syllabus changed and the method did not.
That habit moves straight into the military. An American trainer working with Egypt's elite F-16 pilots said that before an exercise they already knew where to turn, where to pretend to fire, and who was going to win — and that they got extremely upset when anyone did something he was not supposed to do.
In one study of Egyptian, Saudi and Sudanese bureaucracies, 90 percent of senior officials called their subordinates unqualified to innovate. Hezbollah and Islamic State are the exceptions that prove it: both kept only the small minority who would not play by those rules.
In one line: an army that will not let a lieutenant make his own decision is just saving the enemy ammunition, however good its equipment looks.
Curated from high-quality sources, with concise summaries and key takeaways.
