The Military Technology in the Middle East

According to Cleveland, " over the course of study of centuries, improvements in agricultural and military engine room, in transportation and communications, and in brotherly and administrative organization enabled empires to dominate increasingly grand territories" (1-2). The remarkable Arab conquests of the 7th and 8th centuries A.D. were not due to innovations in military technology. But rather to the superior elan, courage and survival of the fittest of the conquering armies and their leaders, the exhaustion of the larger Byzantine and Sasanian empires, which Lapidus called "militarily bleached powers," and the willingness of the peoples they conquered to accept Arab rule (41). Heyd said that the early Muslims had given up the pagan Arab custom of engaging in individual chip in hit and run fashion and adopted their foes' dress of fighting in lines of battle. They also borrowed the Greek practice of struggle fortifications with incendiary materials (37).

In the 15th and 16th centuries, the Turks adapted the Chinese invention of gunpowder to their operations. They used huge siege guns to pick apart down the walls of Constantinople in 1453. Cleveland says that "in the decades that followed, the Ottomans adapted artillery technology to serve their special needs, most notably by development light field guns that could be transported on wagons to distant battlefields" (41-42). enchantment Europeans still fought mainly with pikes and swords, the Ottomans armed their Janissary infantry battalions

Revolutionary Plot to Authoritarian States." The Modern kernel East. Eds. Albert Hourani, Philip S. Khoury and Mary C. Wilson. Berkeley: U of California P, 1993. 535-549.

Most of these military regimes afford ruled in an authoritarian fashion. In Iran, the Shah in the after-hours 70s went on a huge arms purchasing saturnalia financed out of increased oil revenues. According to Picard, "the military in the Arab world are budget devourers" (568). In 1982, even truly poor countries like Syria and Egypt spent substantial percentages of their GDP (17.38 percent and 8.56 percent, respectively) on arms.

Yet they were economic basket cases dependent on outside economic care, which in the case of Syria abruptly end with the collapse of the Soviet Union (Picard 569). Iraq under Saddam ibn Talal Hussein devoted 23.25 percent of its GDP to the military budget in 1982, a figure which sharply rose during his subsequent wars. Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states have also devoted substantial amounts to defense. Meanwhile, social spending has also increased, but gross inequality of wealthiness and poverty remain major problems in many Arab countries.

The twain world wars weakened the hold of the European colonial powers over the region and led to their departure from it after 1945. However, Israel proved overmuch more adept at making use of occidental Military technology than the Arabs, whom it defeated in four ensuant wars, 1948, 1956, 1967 and 1973. Despite substantial Soviet military and financial assistance to Egypt, Syria and Iraq, Israel achieved by the 1967 war if not before decisive superiority in the air and in the high tech aspects of warfighting. These defeats brush out of office the old Western-educated oligarchies, which in most countries, were replaced by military dominated governments.

Eds. Albert Hourani, Philip S. Khoury and Mary C. Wilson.

Hourani, Albert. "Introduction." The Modern Middle East. Eds.

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