Because the Second World War, Arab armed forces have consistently punched below their weight. They have dropped many wars that by all rights they should have won, and within their best performances just ever attained quite modest achievements. Over time, soldiers, scholars, and armed service experts have provided various explanations because of this design. Reliance on Soviet armed service methods, the poor civil-military relations of the Arab world, the underdevelopment of the Arab states, and patterns of behavior about Armies of Sand: The Past, Present, and Long term of Arab Military Effectiveness derived from the wider Arab lifestyle, have got all been recommended as the ultimate source of Arab military difficulties.

Armies of Sand, Kenneth M. Pollack’s effective and riveting history of Arab armies from the finish of World War Two to the present, assesses these differing explanations and isolates the most important causes. During the period of the book, he examines the fight overall performance of fifteen Arab armies and air flow forces in virtually every Middle Eastern battle, in the Jordanians and Syrians in 1948 to Hizballah in 2006 and the Iraqis and ISIS in 2014-2017. Then compares these experiences to the efficiency from the Argentine, Chadian, Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, and South Vietnamese armed forces in their own combat operations through the twentieth century.