In Armies of Sand, Kenneth M. Pollack’s powerful and riveting history of Arab armies from the end of WWII 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.
He then compares these experiences to the performance of the Argentine, Chadian, Chinese, Cuban, North Korean, and South Vietnamese armed forces in their own combat operations during the twentieth century.
The patterns of behavior derived from the dominant Arab culture “was the most important factor of all.”
