Yes and No. They had massive stockpiles but no way compare to what the US has used, especially after 1973 when US reduced military aid. The guns/bombers still there but they cannot fire unlimitedly like the Americans!
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Yes and No. They had massive stockpiles but no way compare to what the US has used, especially after 1973 when US reduced military aid. The guns/bombers still there but they cannot fire unlimitedly like the Americans!
Yes, the Assyrian Levies certainly did a good job with defending against the Iraqi army, unless by British garrison you mean the 3 RAF guys that were actually flying the biplanes....
It's a shame too, because if the locals, when under British administration (in terms of pay, organization, training, etc) can be turned into good soldiers and hold out against such odds, the 'lazy/spoiled Middle East!' theory kind of falls apart, which sounds suspiciously like the old idiotic 'northern protestant Europeans are rich and thrifty, lazy southern Catholics only lie in the sun and get fat' stereotypes.
There are cultural differences, sure (ie, like when training the Afghan army, all the Afghans had to get a certificate. The ones that actually passed had that written on them, the ones that failed said that they attended and made no mention of whether they failed or not), but those continue because it's more convenient for everyone to continue them or pretend they don't exist, not because it's not possible to overcome them and turn out good soldiers.
Likewise, comparing the Iraqi army of 1991, 2003 and 2011 to anything is kind of silly, considering no army except another superpower's (maybe) would've survived in 1991 and 2003. And the 2011 situation was exactly like ARVN in the respect that the American politicians got tired of the war and needed a way to pull out the American troops as soon as possible.
The Vietnamization program was designed to shift responsibility to the ARVN by providing them the training and tools to do the job. Begun shortly before U.S. withdrawal, it was in reality a thinly disguised effort for the U.S. to save face. Nevertheless, there were some in U.S. military circles that believed if it had been done sooner and with more enthusiasm it might have made a difference.
This rather proves the point of it not being the raw material committed, rather the lack of good leadership both political and military being the issue. One could extend the example to any of the colonial units raised by the British/French/Germans/etc... in Africa, which generally performed rather well, and certainly showed a higher relative competence than many modern day African units. Unfortunately I can't think of many Arab units that really contribute to this. However, I will note the role of Lawrence and co in the First World War, and the relatively high effectiveness of the British advised Jordanian troops in the '48 Arab-Israeli War.
Said's book provides substantial evidence that Westerners have often interpreted Arab societies in a way that justified Western interests by othering and belittling people in the Middle East. Said seems to see this as some sort of conspiracy, whereas I think it was a tragedy: we can all make mistakes with tragic consequences out of ignorance. It's good to be aware of this before you damn millions of people in a single paper or forum post.
I don't think our views are necessarily far apart, but you seem focused on condemning people rather than trying to understand them.
'Power distance' is a standard concept in understanding how cultural differences affect organizational performance. Geert Hofstede came up with the concept based on a huge survey of tens of thousands of IBM employees in the 60s. If you'd like to see the evidence and theoretical justification, then there are tens of thousands of academic articles on it. I think Hofstede's work has major flaws (for example, why should we expect soldiers to behave like salespeople?), which is why I didn't name him in my earlier post, but I think that the power distance concept has been stood up quite well to subsequent scrutiny. Basically, it says that in some cultures (Israel, Netherlands, UK) it is not socially acceptable to publicly display and exploit your power, while in others (Arab countries are the paradigmatic example) it is. So in a high power distance culture, it is expected that the insane wealth of a country will be used for the benefit of the elite. In a low power distance culture, that is seen as a very negative thing (it doesn't mean that society is equal, but that the inequality carries some social stigma). So my suggestion did not ignore the fact that some very wealthy Arab countries have poor militaries; it offered an explanation: the ordinary infantryman is not well-trained or well-lead because officers are expected to use their power for their own benefit.
Racism is the view that certain ethnic/racial/cultural groups are inherently inferior/superior. Can you please explain how your views differ from racism? As stated they are straightforwardly racist, but I realize a single forum post can give a rather distorted perspective!
Your argument here seem to be that resource-based economies and/or low industrial exports are linked by some common factor with poor military performance. What do you think that common factor is: race/ethnicity, or something else?
It would seem to be the case that Russia is now a resource-based economy with quite good military performance (they have come off quite well in several recent conflicts). The UK in the early 1980s was also an economy which was heavily reliant on its oil and gas sector, but had good military performance in the Falklands. 'Dutch disease' is a real problem, but I think it's hard to prove it has military effects.
I imagine we'd all agree that industrial exports will usually be correlated with better military performance. There's no doubt that Western military dominance in the 19th and 20th centuries was driven by industrial success.
The replies above are also to @ramius3443
If you've not come across his work before, you'd love Hofstede. In his model, these are the individual/collective and masculine/feminine dimensions and his interpretation of his data puts the Arab countries in the middle of the pack on both issues. You're right that tribalism and machismo would certainly seem to be barriers to good military performance in Iraq, though I can think of examples where they have been overcome (the Indian Army and Red Army respectively in WWII). Neither would explain the ARVN.
These paragraphs would seem to be a good description of US strategic decision-making in both Iraq and Vietnam, so I'm not convinced that it gets us very far with understanding why ARVN and ISF performance was relatively poorer. Why didn't they have the knowledge they needed? The Dunning-Kruger effect is about individuals; surely we need a social explanation.
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ARVN as a whole is not good. Many of them are not even conscripts but captured in the streets and forced into Army. But they have around 3-4 good selected and volunteered divisions (marine, ranger and airborne troops) and probably stronger than almost all South East Asia armies. Their opponent is just too powerful and by 1975 the best divisions already get heavy casualties.
Eh? I was merely agreeing with Gordy that it should come as no suprise that Arab armies are corrupt and dysfunctional when the country as a whole is often corrupt and dysfunctional. As was South Vietnam. I'm not proofering an explanation (nor agreeing or disagreeing with yours) as to WHY they are dysfunctional.
They don't even necessarily have to be poorly trained: the individual soldiers could individually be very good soldiers. However, without leadership or any unit cohesion (thanks to said rent seeking officers), that counts for nothing; the "unit" becomes little more than an armed gang at that point, and it should come as no surprise when they run. And if everyone knows thats the case, then even the well led units will run as well because they can't trust the men to their left or right not to run.
I'd suspect thats why our advising has had precious little success outside of the "elite" units (ie functional): we can train the troops as much as we want, but without a reform of the officer corp its all for naught.
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Have you ever played a game of WoT with 14 "reds" (bad players) on your team? Or rather, with one or two more "reds" than the enemy team?
Your team's performance relies almost solely on the well performing individuals (green to purple) since they make the difference by performing equal to four or five (if not more) "red" players., while your reds do at least something almost equal to the opposition, maybe. This lifts the entire group. When there is a platoon of "greens", you can easily get to influence matches by killing 12 out of 15 enemy players. In some cases one of these can take put 9-12 alone (!).
A society filled with "reds" is going to perform worse in everything. So yes, Dunning-Kruger is an individual effect, but it destroys group performance. Especially in numbers. All it takes is a little organisation and planning on the other team.
Like can be seen from the Israeli wars.
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"Bingo" was a rather cryptic comment - thank you for clarifying. That's a generalization that could be made about all armies, not just Arab ones, so there's no taint of racism at all.
Good points.
It seems that your illustration could be summarized as "incompetent individuals lower the performance of the whole group." This is certainly true, but I don't think we need the Dunning-Kruger effect to explain this. I haven't played this game (World of Tanks??), but your description indicates that players actually see an on-screen indication of their performance level, so the system specifically excludes the Dunning-Kruger effect.
To return this to the OP, let's assume that the ISF is full of officers who think they're Saladin, but actually have the performance of Saddam. If their Coalition trainers/allies know this, and the Iraqi political leadership adjust their expectations accordingly, then I would have thought that it is possible to partially compensate for the Dunning-Kruger effect, just like any other military weakness.
In my experience poorly performing individuals often have some kind of excuse ready in games like that (I haven't played WoT specifically for years) that takes the ultimate agency away from them. E.g. random shot dispersion causes them to miss, they get bad teams all the time, or that people with good stats are doing something unfair (using ammo bought with money, platooning up, even hacking). These explanations tend to be outright false or grossly insufficient.
I'm not so sure if the reason for poor performance in online games is D-K, but I don't think open performance stats rule it out as contributing factor. They are easy to ignore as non-representive.
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We don't need it to explain the claim you describe. However, my assertion goes a step further: when a society rigs itself to induce Dunning-Kruger in people to higher levels, where it starts to affect the general level of training and cooperation in society and discourages that, instead stimulating intrigue and internal strife for personal gain, then it will be more prone to failure than others where coordination, teamwork and training are highly regarded social values.
That's not quite true. People start to explain their red ratings (and your good ratings) by "Alternative Facts". For instance, you get wild conspiracy theories like:
- "The game rigs the game in favour of some people to keep them playing"; "Random Number Generator favours some players, while it disadvantages me" (not understanding the word random, nor how you can compensate for minimizing randomness with good aim, distance and position management and well... proper lead timing and hitting weak spots with ammo racks over basic empty areas; ie applying terrain and unit knowledge + strategy + tactics);
- "You cheated!" / "h4x";
- "Stop singling me out!";
- "The game hates me cause I don't pay enough" / "You premium n00b using gold ammo";
- "No I know how to best play this shut the &&&& up" / "Don't tell me how to play" / "You're not my boss" / "Who made you leader?"
- "This is all your fault"
- "Killstealer!" (in a team game: subsequently targets team mate in some cases)
- "Getting a good rating is not indicative of your performance, just that you get better teams";
- "This team will lose" -> quit match before dieing or doing something utterly foolish that kills an entire flank "because it won't matter anyway and I want to go to the next match with a better team";
- "Our team will win cause we have these people in it" -> overconfidence -> charging into red team thinking it is safe -> die immediately due to being out in the open as clay pidgeon, with no clue why they died -> rest get surrounded / outnumbered -> loss -> "you idiots made us fail because you didn't charge with us!"
These people will make up reasons to not listen to sane proposals, teamwork, nor will pass on information required for the team to operate optimally (like relaying enemy positions, knowing how to setup an ambush or where).
etc.
It's always the same thing. Ratings wern't always known, personally I'd prefer them to not be known because it influences targeting priorities, instills fear, paralyzes players or makes them extremely cocky to the point they believe the enemy somehow lost the basic ability to aim (rather than realise the enemy probably lacks the ability to properly position and scout enemies throughout a match). I've had it where my team of yellows (moderate players) started rushing into a red tomato team, thinking the enemy would panic and subsequently got destroyed by an invisible enemy because they forgot about the camouflage / scouting system of WoT: they were visible due to their rash movements, their enemies were not because they were cowering. Or in some cases, people prioritisting the wrong target, because "hey that's a purple, kill him first", ignoring the easier red target that would lead to purple being outnumbered and surrounded and taking far more damage than needed from the red next to purple.
It so happens that the Arab world LOVES to explain everything in conspiracy theories to scapegoat on others. That IMO is an examplary effect of Dunning-Kruger being the norm of society. The majority of individuals in such a society thinks much higher of themselves and itself in any way possible, leading to its people wanting to believe alternate explanations than the most straightforward one that includes critique on themselves as individuals and society.
The problem is when they start to produce falls achievement results to cover their own arse and send these to the bureaucrats making decisions. You now get a systemic information disconnect between what happens in the field and what the top brass and politicians know and have to make decisions on. Since the top politicians don't have the ability to know better, they will simply use the information at their disposal. Alternatively, they'll have to make due with other sources of information (like American or Iranian info) and create a new dependency there.
This has happened in the past and happens whenever insecurity about someone's own position arises. Apparently it happened during the Quwait war with the Saudi army to the point they insisted the Americans took the blame willingly for their own troop's failures, because they could not handle the loss of face if it were known how their troops actually faired and had left their positions as that would have cost those officers their positions.
Think also of Stalin's food shortages, which was due to unrealistic expectations set, which were of course consecutively failed to meet, yet reported as "bestestest results evah, even better than expected" and mistaken for real by the people above them who had no idea how to recognise if these reports could be true due to their own incompetence and information disconnect, being fed false information and believing this must be the right information, because how could their supreme system fail or require scrutiny?
I should also note that in a lot of countries (arguably most of them historically) the military isn't really there to fight outsiders but to protect the ruling class. Corruption etc. is a way to keep the military tied to the regime.