The actual article:
Why are Arab armed forces so ineffective?
Governments are splashing the cash, but that may do little to burnish their armies’ reputations
Governments are splashing the cash, but that may do little to burnish their armies’ reputations
www.economist.com
When arab air-defence crews helped fend off
Iran’s attack on Israel in April, they drew much praise. And yet Arab states are not usually lauded for their martial prowess; many have lousy military reputations. They have been repeatedly humiliated in wars with Israel. They proved ineffective during the 1991 Gulf war; Egypt deployed two armoured divisions but America quickly sidelined them when they struggled to overcome even limited Iraqi resistance. Other Gulf countries, such as Saudi Arabia, provided only a handful of troops. More recently, despite considerable American military support, the Saudi-led intervention in Yemen descended into a quagmire.
map: the economist
The problem is not lack of money or hardware. Combined military spending across the six Gulf Co-operation Council (gcc) countries plus Egypt and Jordan reaches just over $120bn a year (nato’s European members spent $380bn in 2023). Together they can marshall 944,000 troops (see map), 4,800 tanks and 1,000 fighter aircraft. Egypt and Jordan are among the largest recipients of American military aid, getting around $1.7bn a year between them.
Much of that cash is squandered. Arab armed forces often splurge on vanity equipment like fighter jets that are ill-suited to the asymmetric threats they face, argues Paul Collins, a former British defence attaché in Cairo. Flashy purchases are generally used to
gain influence with Western governments, suggests Andreas Krieg of King’s College London. Qatar’s purchases of F-15s, Rafales and Typhoons have bought favour in Washington, Paris and London respectively. The business of buying, arming and maintaining combat jets is a cash-guzzler. Over the past ten years in Saudi Arabia, 54% of arms imports by value were lavished on aircraft. An obsession with air power generally comes at the expense of other service branches, such as the army and navy.
Indeed, for states whose prosperity depends on access to commercial shipping, many pay remarkably little attention to their navies. Fleets are small and usually focused on coastal defence. They also lack the bulky early-warning sensors and interceptors that are useful for advanced seaborne air-defence. They have played a limited role fending off the
Houthi attacks in the Red Sea. For decades, many states saw little reason to invest given American and British naval protection, notes David Roberts, also of King’s College London. Even those that have begun investing face serious manpower shortages. Qatar’s navy has ordered seven new ships from Italy. It will need 660 additional sailors to operate them, equivalent to a quarter of its current naval personnel.
More important, however, Arab armies generally reflect the authoritarian neuroses of their rulers. Military commanders are loth to provide rank-and-file soldiers with the
independence and agency needed for combined-arms operations, as is common in the West. Training exercises are often highly scripted and bear little resemblance to the reality of combat, notes Mr Krieg. Arab armies are also treated as praetorian guards. Saudi Arabia’s 130,000-strong National Guard is the ruling family’s personal protection force. In Egypt, the army runs a
sprawling commercial empire that dabbles in everything from holiday resorts to construction firms.
Some hope that Arab armies could provide a peacekeeping force in Gaza, but experts are sceptical that their forces have the operational wherewithal to engage in high-end combat. More often than not, they even struggle to work with each other. “They are all very suspicious, they still don’t trust one another,” argues Kenneth Pollack of the American Enterprise Institute, a think-tank, author of a book on Arab military underperformance. Proposals in 2014 and 2018 to establish a joint gcc military structure rapidly fizzled out as smaller states fretted about ceding control to bigger neighbours.
For many Arab leaders, securing America’s commitment to the region is a higher priority than creating a multilateral bloc. Few would envisage fighting a war with another state without American backing. The Gulf countries continue to rely largely on America’s intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance capabilities, its command-and-control centres and its refuelling platforms in the region. The Saudis are doggedly pursuing a defence pact with America.
There are pockets of martial excellence. The uae and Jordan possess capable and professional armies, especially their special forces and pilots. In 2015 Emirati special forces carried out a complex amphibious assault on the port city of Aden that impressed Western observers. Jordan has been conducting regular
airdrops of aid over Gaza, a difficult mission over the dense strip. Smaller, well-trained elite forces have allowed motivational
esprit de corps to flourish. But specialist expertise is often imported: the uae’s presidential guard and special forces have brought in scads of foreign advisers, most of them former Western officers, and are commanded by an expatriate Australian general.
Moreover, there does seem to be some piecemeal co-operation. The thwarting of Iran’s attack on Israel, though marshalled by America, would not have been possible without a significant degree of Arab co-ordination, reckons Mr Collins. Since 2019, when a drone attack, probably by Iran, halted nearly half of Saudi oil production, Gulf and other Arab states have started integrating their air-defence systems. Some experts suggest that many Gulf air-defence units are more adept than their European counterparts. In 2022 a handful of undisclosed Arab nations even joined Israel as part of a loose, American-led regional air-defence alliance focused on stitching disparate radar detection systems together.
Some are still cautious: “There is nothing in the technical realm that is preventing integration of things like air defence,” notes Mr Pollack. “It’s all about the politics.” But big political changes at home could set the stage for military reform. Conscious of the looming energy transition, Gulf monarchies want to reshape their economies and societies. They are shifting their money towards advanced military technology, including artificial-intelligence research centres, instead of just expensive conventional platforms. Governments hope that spending on whizzy military kit will create spillover effects in the civilian economy. But it may not do much to improve their martial reputations.
