موضوع وجدته بعنوان لماذا العرب ينهزمون واستطعت ترجمة بعضه لكني لا استطيع ترجمته كله هل يوجد احد يستطيع ترجمته لانه واضح انه مهمة ويتكلم عن اسباب هزيمتنا كعرب ولا يتكلم من الجهة الاستراتيجية فقط لكن ايضا من جهة المجتمعات العربية وثقافتها

Why Arabs Lose Wars

Norvell De Atkine, a U.S. Army retired colonel with eight years
residence in Lebanon, Jordan, and Egypt, and a graduate degree in Arab
studies from the American University of Beirut, is currently instructing
U.S. Army personnel assigned to Middle Eastern areas. The opinions
expressed here are strictly his own.

Arabic-speaking armies have been generally ineffective in the modern
era. Egyptian regular forces did poorly against Yemeni irregulars in the
1960s.1 Syrians could only impose their will in Lebanon during the mid-1970s by the use of overwhelming weaponry and numbers.2
Iraqis showed ineptness against an Iranian military ripped apart by
revolutionary turmoil in the 1980s and could not win a
three-decades-long war against the Kurds.3 The Arab military performance on both sides of the 1990 Kuwait war was mediocre.4
And the Arabs have done poorly in nearly all the military
confrontations with Israel. Why this unimpressive record? There are many
factors—economic, ideological, technical—but perhaps the most important
has to do with culture and certain societal attributes which inhibit
Arabs from producing an effective military force.

It is a truism of military life that an army fights as it trains, and
so I draw on my many years of firsthand observation of Arabs in
training to draw conclusions about the ways in which they go into
combat. The following impressions derive from personal experience with
Arab military establishments in the capacity of U.S. military attaché
and security assistance officer, observer officer with the
British-officer Trucial Oman Scouts (the security force in the emirates
prior to the establishment of the United Arab Emirates), as well as some
thirty year's study of the Middle East.

False Starts


Including culture in strategic assessments has a poor legacy, for it
has often been spun from an ugly brew of ignorance, wishful thinking,
and mythology. Thus, the U.S. army in the 1930s evaluated the Japanese
national character as lacking originality and drew the unwarranted
conclusion that the country would be permanently disadvantaged in
technology.5 Hitler dismissed the United States as a mongrel society6
and consequently underestimated the impact of America's entry into the
war. As these examples suggest, when culture is considered in
calculating the relative strengths and weaknesses of opposing forces, it
tends to lead to wild distortions, especially when it is a matter of
understanding why states unprepared for war enter into combat flushed
with confidence. The temptation is to impute cultural attributes to the
enemy state that negate its superior numbers or weaponry. Or the
opposite: to view the potential enemy through the prism of one's own
cultural norms. American strategists assumed that the pain threshold of
the North Vietnamese approximated their own and that the air bombardment
of the North would bring it to its knees.7 Three days of aerial attacks were thought to be all the Serbs could withstand; in fact, seventy-eight days were needed.

It is particularly dangerous to make facile assumptions about
abilities in warfare based on past performance, for societies evolve and
so does the military subculture with it. The dismal French performance
in the 1870 Franco-Prussian war led the German high command to an overly
optimistic assessment prior to World War I.8 The tenacity
and courage of French soldiers in World War I led everyone from Winston
Churchill to the German high command vastly to overestimate the French
army's fighting abilities.9 Israeli generals underestimated the Egyptian army of 1973 based on Egypt's hapless performance in the 1967 war.10

Culture is difficult to pin down. It is not synonymous with an
individual's race nor ethnic identity. The history of warfare makes a
mockery of attempts to assign rigid cultural attributes to
individuals—as the military histories of the Ottoman and Roman empires
illustrate. In both cases it was training, discipline, esprit, and élan
which made the difference, not the individual soldiers' origin.11
The highly disciplined, effective Roman legions, for example, were
recruited from throughout the Roman empire, and the elite Ottoman
Janissaries (slave soldiers) were Christians forcibly recruited as boys
from the Balkans.

The Role of Culture


These problems notwithstanding, culture does need to be taken into
account. Indeed, awareness of prior mistakes should make it possible to
assess the role of cultural factors in warfare. John Keegan, the eminent
historian of warfare, argues that culture is a prime determinant of the
nature of warfare. In contrast to the usual manner of European warfare
which he terms "face to face," Keegan depicts the early Arab armies in
the Islamic era as masters of evasion, delay, and indirection.12
Examining Arab warfare in this century leads to the conclusion that
Arabs remain more successful in insurgent, or political warfare13—what T. E. Lawrence termed "winning wars without battles."14
Even the much-lauded Egyptian crossing of the Suez in 1973 at its core
entailed a masterful deception plan. It may well be that these seemingly
permanent attributes result from a culture that engenders subtlety,
indirection, and dissimulation in personal relationships.15

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."18
And yet it is precisely "all that is vague and intangible" which defines
low-intensity conflicts. The Vietnamese communists did not fight the
war the United States had trained for, nor did the Chechens and Afghans
fight the war the Russians prepared for. This entails far more than
simply retooling weaponry and retraining soldiers. It requires an
understanding of the enemy's cultural mythology, history, attitude
toward time, etc.—demanding a more substantial investment in time and
money than a bureaucratic organization is likely to authorize.

Mindful of walking through a minefield of past errors and present
cultural sensibilities, I offer some assessments of the role of culture
in the military training of Arabic-speaking officers. I confine myself
principally to training for two reasons. First, I observed much training
but only one combat campaign (the Jordanian Army against the Palestine
Liberation Organization in 1970). Secondly, armies fight as they train.
Troops are conditioned by peacetime habits, policies, and procedures;
they do not undergo a sudden metamorphosis that transforms civilians in
uniform into warriors. General George Patton was fond of relating the
story about Julius Caesar, who "In the winter time ... so trained his
legions in all that became soldiers and so habituated them to the proper
performance of their duties, that when in the spring he committed them
to battle against the Gauls, it was not necessary to give them orders,
for they knew what to do and how to do it."19

Information as Power


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 explains the commonplace hoarding of manuals, books,
training pamphlets, and other training or logistics literature. On one
occasion, an American mobile training team working with armor in Egypt
at long last received the operators' manuals that had laboriously been
translated into Arabic. The American trainers took the newly-minted
manuals straight to the tank park and distributed them to the tank
crews. Right behind them, the company commander, a graduate of the armor
school at Fort Knox and specialized courses at the Aberdeen Proving
Grounds ordnance school, collected the manuals from the crews.
Questioned why he did this, the commander said that there was no point
in giving them to the drivers because enlisted men could not read. In
point of fact, he did not want enlisted men to have an independent
source of knowledge. Being the only person who can explain the fire
control instrumentation or boresight artillery weapons brings prestige
and attention. In military terms this means that very little
cross-training is accomplished and that, for instance in a tank crew,
the gunners, loaders, and drivers might be proficient in their jobs but
are not prepared to fill in for a casualty. Not understanding one
another's jobs also inhibits a smoothly functioning crew. At a higher
level it means there is no depth in technical proficiency.

Education Problems


Training tends to be unimaginative, cut and dried, and not
challenging. Because the Arab educational system is predicated on rote
memorization, officers have a phenomenal ability to commit vast amounts
of knowledge to memory. The learning system tends to consist of on-high
lectures, with students taking voluminous notes and being examined on
what they were told. (It also has interesting implications for foreign
instructors; for example, his credibility is diminished if he must
resort to a book.) The emphasis on memorization has a price, and that is
in diminished ability to reason or engage in analysis based upon
general principles. Thinking outside the box is not encouraged; doing so
in public can damage a career. Instructors are not challenged and
neither, in the end, are students.

Head-to-head competition among individuals is generally avoided, at
least openly, for it means that someone wins and someone else loses,
with the loser humiliated. This taboo has particular import when a class
contains mixed ranks. Education is in good part sought as a matter of
personal prestige, so Arabs in U.S. military schools take pains to
ensure that the ranking member, according to military position or social
class, scores the highest marks in the class. Often this leads to
"sharing answers" in class—often in a rather overt manner or junior
officers concealing scores higher than their superior's.

American military instructors dealing with Middle Eastern students
learn to ensure that, before directing any question to a student in a
classroom situation, particularly if he is an officer, the student does
possess the correct answer. If this is not assured, the officer will
feel he has been set up for public humiliation. Furthermore, in the
often-paranoid environment of Arab political culture, he will believe
this setup to have been purposeful. This student will then become an
enemy of the instructor and his classmates will become apprehensive
about their also being singled out for humiliation—and learning becomes
impossible.

Officers vs. Soldiers


Arab junior officers are well trained on the technical aspects of
their weapons and tactical know-how, but not in leadership, a subject
given little attention. For example, as General Sa‘d ash-Shazli, the
Egyptian chief of staff, noted in his assessment of the army he
inherited prior to the 1973 war, they were not trained to seize the
initiative or volunteer original concepts or new ideas.20
Indeed, leadership may be the greatest weakness of Arab training
systems. This problem results from two main factors: a highly
accentuated class system bordering on a caste system, and lack of a
non-commissioned-officer development program.

Most Arab officers treat enlisted soldiers like sub-humans. When the
winds in Egypt one day carried biting sand particles from the desert
during a demonstration for visiting U.S. dignitaries, I watched as a
contingent of soldiers marched in and formed a single rank to shield the
Americans; Egyptian soldiers, in other words, are used on occasion as
nothing more than a windbreak. The idea of taking care of one's men is
found only among the most elite units in the Egyptian military. On a
typical weekend, officers in units stationed outside Cairo will get in
their cars and drive off to their homes, leaving the enlisted men to
fend for themselves by trekking across the desert to a highway and
flagging down busses or trucks to get to the Cairo rail system. Garrison
cantonments have no amenities for soldiers. The same situation, in
various degrees, exists elsewhere in the Arabic-speaking countries—less
so in Jordan, even more so in Iraq and Syria.

The young draftees who make up the bulk of the Egyptian army hate
military service for good reason and will do almost anything, including
self-mutilation, to avoid it. In Syria the wealthy buy exemptions or,
failing that, are assigned to noncombatant organizations. As a young
Syrian told me, his musical skills came from his assignment to a Syrian
army band where he learned to play an instrument. In general, the
militaries of the Fertile Crescent enforce discipline by fear; in
countries where a tribal system still is in force, such as Saudi Arabia,
the innate egalitarianism of the society mitigates against fear as the
prime motivator, so a general lack of discipline pervades.21

The social and professional gap between officers and enlisted men is
present in all armies, but in the United States and other Western
forces, the noncommissioned officer (NCO) corps bridges it. Indeed, a
professional NCO corps has been critical for the American military to
work at its best; as the primary trainers in a professional army, NCOs
are critical to training programs and to the enlisted men's sense of
unit esprit. Most of the Arab world either has no NCO corps or it is
non-functional, severely handicapping the military's effectiveness. With
some exceptions, NCOs are considered in the same low category as
enlisted men and so do not serve as a bridge between enlisted men and
officers. Officers instruct but the wide social gap between enlisted man
and officer tends to make the learning process perfunctory, formalized,
and ineffective. The show-and-tell aspects of training are frequently
missing because officers refuse to get their hands dirty and prefer to
ignore the more practical aspects of their subject matter, believing
this below their social station. A dramatic example of this occurred
during the Gulf war when a severe windstorm blew down the tents of Iraqi
officer prisoners of war. For three days they stayed in the wind and
rain rather than be observed by enlisted prisoners in a nearby camp
working with their hands.

The military price for this is very high. Without the cohesion
supplied by NCOs, units tend to disintegrate in the stress of combat.
This is primarily a function of the fact that the enlisted soldiers
simply do not trust their officers. Once officers depart the training
areas, training begins to fall apart as soldiers begin drifting off. An
Egyptian officer once explained to me that the Egyptian army's
catastrophic defeat in 1967 resulted from a lack of cohesion within
units. The situation, he said, had only marginally improved in 1973.
Iraqi prisoners in 1991 showed a remarkable fear and enmity toward their
officers.

Decision-making and Responsibility


Decisions are made and delivered from on high, with very little
lateral communication. This leads to a highly centralized system, with
authority hardly ever delegated. Rarely does an officer make a critical
decision on his own; instead, he prefers the safe course of being
identified as industrious, intelligent, loyal—and compliant. Bringing
attention to oneself as an innovator or someone prone to make unilateral
decisions is a recipe for trouble. As in civilian life, conformism is
the overwhelming societal norm; the nail that stands up gets hammered
down. Orders and information flow from top to bottom; they are not to be
reinterpreted, amended, or modified in any way.

U.S. trainers often experience frustration obtaining a decision from a
counterpart, not realizing that the Arab officer lacks the authority to
make the decision—a frustration amplified by the Arab's understandable
reluctance to admit that he lacks that authority. This author has
several times seen decisions that could have been made at the battalion
level concerning such matters as class meeting times and locations
requiring approval from the ministry of defense. All of which has led
American trainers to develop a rule of thumb: a sergeant first class in
the U.S. Army has as much authority as a colonel in an Arab army.
Methods of instruction and subject matter are dictated from higher
authorities. Unit commanders have very little to say about these
affairs. The politicized nature of the Arab militaries means that
political factors weigh heavily and frequently override military
considerations. Officers with initiative and a predilection for
unilateral action pose a threat to the regime. This can be seen not just
at the level of national strategy but in every aspect of military
operations and training. If Arab militaries became less politicized and
more professional in preparation for the 1973 war with Israel,22
once the fighting ended, old habits returned. Now, an increasingly
bureaucratized military establishment weighs in as well. A veteran of
the Pentagon turf wars will feel like a kindergartner when he encounters
the rivalries that exist in the Arab military headquarters.

Taking responsibility for a policy, operation, status, or training
program rarely occurs. U.S. trainers can find it very frustrating when
they repeatedly encounter Arab officers placing blame for unsuccessful
operations or programs on the U.S. equipment or some other outside
source. A high rate of non-operational U.S. equipment is blamed on a
"lack of spare parts"—pointing a finger at an unresponsive U.S. supply
system despite the fact that American trainers can document ample
supplies arriving in country and disappearing in a malfunctioning supply
system. (Such criticism was never caustic or personal and often so
indirect and politely delivered that it wasn't until after a meeting
that oblique references were understood.) This imperative works even at
the most exalted levels. During the Kuwait war, Iraqi forces took over
the town of Khafji in northeast Saudi Arabia after the Saudis had
evacuated the place. General Khalid bin Sultan, the Saudi ground forces
commander, requested a letter from General Norman Schwarzkopf, stating
it was the U.S. general who ordered an evacuation from the Saudi town.23
And in his account of the Khafji battle, General Bin Sultan predictably
blames the Americans for the Iraqi occupation of the town.24 In reality the problem was that the light Saudi forces in the area left the battlefield.25
The Saudis were in fact outgunned and outnumbered by the Iraqi unit
approaching Khafji but Saudi pride required that foreigners be blamed.

As for equipment, a vast cultural gap exists between the U.S. and
Arab maintenance and logistics systems. The Arab difficulties with U.S.
equipment are not, as sometimes simplistically believed, a matter of
"Arabs don't do maintenance," but something much deeper. The American
concept of a weapons system does not convey easily. A weapons system
brings with it specific maintenance and logistics procedures, policies,
and even a philosophy, all of them based on U.S. culture, with its
expectations of a certain educational level, sense of small unit
responsibility, tool allocation, and doctrine. Tools that would be
allocated to a U.S. battalion (a unit of some 600-800 personnel) would
most likely be found at a much higher level—probably two or three
echelons higher—in an Arab army. The expertise, initiative and, most
importantly, the trust indicated by delegation of responsibility to a
lower level are rare. The U.S. equipment and its maintenance are
predicated on a concept of repair at the lowest level and therefore
require delegation of authority. Without the needed tools, spare parts,
or expertise available to keep equipment running, and loathe to report
bad news to his superiors, the unit commander looks for scapegoats. All
this explains why I many times heard in Egypt that U.S. weaponry is "too
delicate."

I have observed many in-country U.S. survey teams: invariably, hosts
make the case for acquiring the most modern of military hardware and do
everything to avoid issues of maintenance, logistics, and training. They
obfuscate and mislead to such an extent that U.S. teams, no matter how
earnest their sense of mission, find it nearly impossible to help. More
generally, Arab reluctance to be candid about training deficiencies
makes it extremely difficult for foreign advisors properly to support
instruction or assess training needs.

Combined Arms Operations


A lack of cooperation is most apparent in the failure of all Arab
armies to succeed at combined arms operations. A regular Jordanian army
infantry company, for example, is man-for-man as good as a comparable
Israeli company; at battalion level, however, the coordination required
for combined arms operations, with artillery, air, and logistics
support, is simply absent. Indeed, the higher the echelon, the greater
the disparity. This results from infrequent combined arms training; when
it does take place, it is intended to impress visitors (which it
does—the dog-and-pony show is usually done with uncommon gusto and
theatrical talent) rather than provide real training.

This problem results from three main factors. First, the well-known
lack of trust among Arabs for anyone outside their own family adversely
affects offensive operations.26 Exceptions to this pattern
are limited to elite units (which throughout the Arab world have the
same duty—to protect the regime, rather than the country). In a culture
in which almost every sphere of human endeavor, including business and
social relationships, is based on a family structure, this orientation
is also present in the military, particularly in the stress of battle.
Offensive action, basically, consists of fire and maneuver. The maneuver
element must be confident that supporting units or arms are providing
covering fire. If there is a lack of trust in that support, getting
troops moving forward against dug-in defenders is possible only by
officers getting out front and leading, something that has not been a
characteristic of Arab leadership.

Second, the complex mosaic system of peoples creates additional
problems for training, as rulers in the Middle East make use of the
sectarian and tribal loyalties to maintain power. The ‘Alawi minority
controls Syria, East Bankers control Jordan, Sunnis control Iraq, and
Nejdis control Saudi Arabia. This has direct implications for the
military, where sectarian considerations affect assignments and
promotions. Some minorities (such the Circassians in Jordan or the Druze
in Syria) tie their well-being to the ruling elite and perform critical
protection roles; others (such as the Shi‘a of Iraq) are excluded from
the officer corps. In any case, the assignment of officers based on
sectarian considerations works against assignments based on merit.

The same lack of trust operates at the interstate level, where Arab
armies exhibit very little trust of each other, and with good reason.
The blatant lie Gamal Abdel Nasser told King Husayn in June 1967 to get
him into the war against Israel—that the Egyptian air force was over Tel
Aviv (when most of its planes had been destroyed)—was a classic example
of deceit.27 Sadat's disingenuous approach to the Syrians to
entice them to enter the war in October 1973 was another (he told them
that the Egyptians were planning total war, a deception which included
using a second set of operational plans intended only for Syrian eyes).28
With this sort of history, it is no wonder that there is very little
cross or joint training among Arab armies and very few command
exercises. During the 1967 war, for example, not a single Jordanian
liaison officer was stationed in Egypt, nor were the Jordanians
forthcoming with the Egyptian command.29

Third, Middle Eastern rulers routinely rely on balance-of-power techniques to maintain their authority.30
They use competing organizations, duplicate agencies, and coercive
structures dependent upon the ruler's whim. This makes building any form
of personal power base difficult, if not impossible, and keeps the
leadership apprehensive and off-balance, never secure in its careers or
social position. The same applies within the military; a powerful
chairman of the joint chiefs is inconceivable.

Joint commands are paper constructs that have little actual function.
Leaders look at joint commands, joint exercises, combined arms, and
integrated staffs very cautiously for all Arab armies are a double-edged
sword. One edge points toward the external enemy and the other toward
the capital. The land forces are at once a regime-maintenance force and
threat at the same time. No Arab ruler will allow combined operations or
training to become routine; the usual excuse is financial expense, but
that is unconvincing given their frequent purchase of hardware whose
maintenance costs they cannot afford. In fact, combined arms exercises
and joint staffs create familiarity, soften rivalries, erase suspicions,
and eliminate the fragmented, competing organizations that enable
rulers to play off rivals against one another. This situation is most
clearly seen in Saudi Arabia, where the land forces and aviation are
under the minister of defense, Prince Sultan, while the National Guard
is under Prince Abdullah, the deputy prime minister and crown prince. In
Egypt, the Central Security Forces balance the army. In Iraq and Syria,
the Republican Guard does the balancing.

Politicians actually create obstacles to maintain fragmentation. For
example, obtaining aircraft from the air force for army airborne
training, whether it is a joint exercise or a simple administrative
request for support of training, must generally be coordinated by the
heads of services at the ministry of defense; if a large number of
aircraft are involved, this probably requires presidential approval.
Military coups may be out of style, but the fear of them remains strong.
Any large-scale exercise of land forces is a matter of concern to the
government and is closely observed, particularly if live ammunition is
being used. In Saudi Arabia a complex system of clearances required from
area military commanders and provincial governors, all of whom have
differing command channels to secure road convoy permission, obtaining
ammunition, and conducting exercises, means that in order for a coup to
work, it would require a massive amount of loyal conspirators. Arab
regimes have learned how to be coup-proof.

Security and Paranoia


Arab regimes classify virtually everything vaguely military.
Information the U.S. military routinely publishes (about promotions,
transfers, names of unit commanders, and unit designations) is top
secret in Arabic-speaking countries. To be sure, this does make it more
difficult for the enemy to construct an accurate order of battle, but it
also feeds the divisive and compartmentalized nature of the military
forces. The obsession with security
can reach ludicrous lengths.
Prior to the 1973 war, Sadat was surprised to find that within two weeks
of the date he had ordered the armed forces be ready for war, his
minister of war, General Muhammad Sadiq, had failed to inform his
immediate staff of the order. Should a war, Sadat wondered, be kept
secret from the very people expected to fight it?31 One can
expect to have an Arab counterpart or key contact to be changed without
warning and with no explanation as to his sudden absence. This might
well be simply a transfer a few doors down the way, but the vagueness of
it all leaves foreigners with dire scenarios—scenarios that might be
true. And it is best not to inquire too much; advisors or trainers who
seem overly inquisitive may find their access to host military
information or facilities limited.

The presumed close U.S.-Israel relationship, thought to be operative
at all levels, aggravates and complicates this penchant for secrecy.
Arabs believe that the most mundane details about them are somehow
transmitted to the Mossad via a secret hotline.This explains why a U.S.
advisor with Arab forces is likely to be asked early and often about his
opinion of the "Palestine problem," then subjected to monologues on the
presumed Jewish domination of the United States.

Indifference to Safety


In terms of safety measures, there is a general laxness, a seeming
carelessness and indifference to training accidents, many of which could
have been prevented by minimal efforts. To the (perhaps overly)
safety-conscious Americans, Arab societies appear indifferent to
casualties and show a seemingly lackadaisical approach to training
safety. There are a number of explanations for this. Some would point to
the inherent fatalism within Islam,32 and certainly anyone
who has spent considerable time in Arab taxis would lend credence to
that theory, but perhaps the reason is less religiously based and more a
result of political culture. As any military veteran knows, the ethos
of a unit is set at the top; or, as the old saying has it, units do
those things well that the boss cares about. When the top political
leadership displays a complete lack of concern for the welfare of its
soldiers, such attitudes percolate down through the ranks. Exhibit A was
the betrayal of Syrian troops fighting Israel in the Golan in 1967:
having withdrawn its elite units, the Syrian government knowingly
broadcast the falsehood that Israeli troops had captured the town of
Kuneitra, which would have put them behind the largely conscript Syrian
army still in position. The leadership took this step to pressure the
great powers to impose a truce, though it led to a panic by the Syrian
troops and the loss of the Golan Heights.33

Conclusion


It would be difficult to exaggerate the cultural gulf separating
American and Arab military cultures. In every significant area, American
military advisors find students who enthusiastically take in their
lessons and then resolutely fail to apply them. The culture they return
to—the culture of their own armies in their own countries—defeats the
intentions with which they took leave of their American instructors.

When they had an influence on certain Arab military establishments,
the Soviets reinforced their clients' cultural traits far more than, in
more recent years, Americans were able to. Like the Arabs', the Soviets'
military culture was driven by political fears bordering on paranoia.
The steps taken to control the sources (real or imagined) of these
fears, such as a rigidly centralized command structure, were readily
understood by Arab political and military elites. The Arabs, too, felt
an affinity for the Soviet officer class's contempt for ordinary
soldiers and the Soviet military hierarchy's distrust of a
well-developed, well-appreciated, well-rewarded NCO corps.

Arab political culture is based on a high degree of social
stratification, very much like that of the defunct Soviet Union and very
much unlike the upwardly mobile, meritocratic, democratic United
States. Arab officers do not see any value in sharing information among
themselves, let alone with their men. In this they follow the example of
their political leaders, who not only withhold information from their
own allies, but routinely deceive them. Training in Arab armies reflects
this: rather than prepare as much as possible for the multitude of
improvised responsibilities that are thrown up in the chaos of battle,
Arab soldiers, and their officers, are bound in the narrow functions
assigned them by their hierarchy. That this renders them less effective
on the battlefield, let alone places their lives at greater risk, is
scarcely of concern, whereas, of course, these two issues are dominant
in the American military culture, and are reflected in American military
training.

Change is unlikely to come until it occurs in the larger Arab
political culture, although the experience of other societies (including
our own) suggests that the military can have a democratizing influence
on the larger political culture, as officers bring the lessons of their
training first into their professional environment, then into the larger
society. It obviously makes a big difference, however, when the
surrounding political culture is not only avowedly democratic (as are
many Middle Eastern states), but functionally so. Until Arab politics
begin to change at fundamental levels, Arab armies, whatever the courage
or proficiency of individual officers and men, are unlikely to acquire
the range of qualities which modern fighting forces require for success
on the battlefield. For these qualities depend on inculcating respect,
trust, and openness among the members of the armed forces at all levels,
and this is the marching music of modern warfare that Arab armies, no
matter how much they emulate the corresponding steps, do not want to
hear.


المصدر
http://www.meforum.org/441/why-arabs-lose-wars

اشكر مصطفي ودكتور عيسي وكريم للاهتمام والرد لكن المتحدث في المقال ليس اسرائيلي ولا حاجة ده عقيد سابق في الجيش الامريكي وعمل في منطقتنا العربية حوالي ثماني ستوات في لبنان والاردن ومصر واخذ شهادة عليا في دراسات عربية من الجامعة الامريكية في بيروت في الوقت الراهن يعمل مع الجيش الامريكي ويعطيهم تعليمات للقوات التي تعمل في الشرق الاوسط
يعني راجل مش اي كلام وعارف منطقتنا العربية كويس وعارف احنا العرب بنفكر ازاي
اما بخصوص كلامه عن العرب فقط لانه عمل في المنطقة العربية ولم يعمل في ايران وهو يقارن في بعض الاشياء ما بين العرب والاسرائليين وكيف يفكر كل منهم خصوصا في المسائل العسكرية
لو حد يقدر يترجمه حتي لو اخد اكثر من شهر ويعمل موضوع كامل عنه
هيبقي موضوع خرافة واكيد في معلومات كتيير