Modernizing China's Military: Progress, Problems, and Prospects Book

Arab-Israeli Military Forces in an Era of Asymmetric Wars by Anthony H. Cordesman is an interesting, but dated book. It also has some great strengths. Unfortunately, it has some severe weaknesses as well.

The book reviews the countries of Israel and its immediate neighbors, including the "The Palestinians" (In quotes because, unlike the other subjects in the book, the Palestinians comprise multiple different organizations with multiple different objectives and methods for achieving those objectives). Each country is analyzed on several basis. There is a fairly rigorous quantitative analysis of each country's military potential and a fairly declarative statement of its qualitative capability. (Ie the capability is declared "to be", with little discussion of how that was reached.) Finally, there is a discussion on the strategic and tactical issues facing that country/subject.

The material is dated for several reasons. First, the data is largely over a decade old. Second, there have been a number of significant changes since the book was written. Examples include "The Arab Spring", The Hizballah-Israeli war, and the ongoing Syrian Civil War.

There were three major weaknesses that I found.

First, of course, was the dated nature of the material.

Second, was the tendency to simply declare that a military is capable or incapable with an absence of methodology and the underlying reasoning. I must note that, based upon my own research, I agreed with the author in many cases. In many other cases, however, I saw no basis for his claims and instead found only absence of information to support it.

The third weakness was the failure to carefully proofread the freaking manuscript. Just a few examples: On page 188, is Jamaat Islamiyya (Islamic Group) mentioned paragraph 2 the same organization as Gama'a al-Islamiyya (IG) mentioned in paragraph 8? The identification on page 334 (para 3) of the SLA as "The Symbionese Liberation Army" provided a few chuckles.

The book's strengths were also very apparent. It was extremely detailed, and as far as I could tell, reasonably thorough. It seemed reasonably accurate, as far as I could tell.

I did find the report interesting, and even with its faults, interesting. However, because of the dated nature of the material, the rapidly changing situation, and the prolific nature of the author, I would recommend reading one of his later reports rather than this particular one.