Troops you can’t trust are a liability — and a common one:
This was the case in Tunisia, Egypt and Yemen, where the soldiers would not kill for the cause of prolonging the dictatorship. The same thing is starting to happen in Syria, and the Libyan dictator was smart enough to keep the army really small and poorly trained.
During the Cold War, Russia (the Soviet Union) was the main source of military equipment and advice for Arab armies. The Soviet style of leadership was designed for dictators. That is, sergeants had much less authority and responsibility than they do in Western forces. The Soviet style of military leadership stressed the use of carefully selected (and well taken care of) officers for everything, including supervisory tasks performed by sergeants in the West. To take the place of Western sergeants “keeping in touch with what the troops were thinking”, each Soviet company sized (100-200 troops) unit had a political officer (Zampolit) who recruited informers among the troops, and reported directly to the secret police, not the company commander. Most Arab dictators adopted a system of spies and informers in the ranks, and troops that said the wrong thing were either beaten up, or disappeared, never to be seen again. But when the population gets unruly all at once, all the soldier spies can do is report is that the troops are restless and ask for a transfer.
This isn’t a problem just for dictators:
During the American Revolution (1775-83) and the Civil War (1861-64), there were some serious morale and discipline problems in some units. Many units fell apart in the early stages of the Korean War (1950-53) and the Vietnam War (1964-72) witnessed the largest ever outbreak of assaults by troops on their officers and NCOs. These were the “fragging” incidents, so called because they were often carried out by tossing a fragmentation grenade into the tent of a sleeping officer. There were 239 fragging attempts 1969, 386 in 1970, 333 in 1971, and 58 in 1972, nearly all in Vietnam. This was one reason why the army got rid of the draft, and by the 1980s, the risk of fragging was nearly gone (although there have been a few incidents in the last two decades.) But Arab armies still have to worry about fragging, as do the dictators that depend on these troops for protection.
This post opens up a whole area of speculation for me — the extent to which the (highly effective) organization of Western armies is a matter of the psychology (intelligence, personality, and perhaps culture) of the troops.
To simplify: When the officers have an IQ of 115, NCOs of 105, and troops of 95, certain things are possible that are not possible when you subtract 10 or 15 IQ points.
The basic problem of all armies is discipline among a crowd of fit, aggressive, young men — stopping them doing what comes naturally — killing each other and their officers; stopping the officers from forming private armies, etc.
Only when this has been solved are armies useful, rather than a liability.
In The West among selected elites it proved possible to have a reasonably disciplined military hierarchy among children – that is how the English Public Schools were run, after the reforms of Arnold at Rugby. Some boys were given disciplinary power as Prefects’ – more or less akin to NCOs.
Before this, the Public Schools were prone to typical teenage boy mob behaviour, and would attack and sometimes kill their teachers (and each other.
But this was in England, and among a highly selected group of boys (and of course there were horrible abuses, even then) – I wonder whether this kind of three tier hierarchy (officers, NCOs, men; masters, prefects, boys) would work everywhere and with all populations. Probably, sometimes only two tier hierarchies could be managed.
The old classic, Why Arabs Lose Wars, touches on some of these problems while side-stepping the whole issue of IQ.
Thanks for the de Atkine link — fascinating.
It all makes sense if you recognize 1SD lower national average IQ (c. 85 compared with c. 100 by Lynn’s data), so that when de Atkine says, “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,” it is probable that the average IQ of a US Army sergeant first class (110?) is about the same as an Arabic colonel — who at IQ 110 would be 1 2/3 SD above the population mean, equivalent to an IQ of 125 in the US Army.
This would also explain the amount of rote learning and the narrow and inflexible specialization and the inability to maintain equipment and the inability to execute complex maneuvers. This is not a cultural preference but cognitive inability.