In the sunset years of Britain’s imperial role in the Gulf, British officials—some on the ground in the area but more often than not penny-pinching planners back in the home country—increasingly toyed with the idea of establishing local militaries. Their desire was to replace thinly spread British troops with indigenous forces to provide the means of securing London’s interests in the area.1 By the 1950s, these interests, of course, were overwhelmingly oil related. But these hydrocarbon interests—not least Kuwaiti production and the fact that the emirate held its oil revenues in Sterling—depended on political stability. In practice, this meant conserving monarchical rule against the headwinds of Arab nationalism, socialist republicanism, and Marxist revolutionary ideology—for example, in Oman’s southern province of Dhofar—blowing through the region.The fledgling forces Britain established in collaboration with the local rulers were never really intended to protect the Gulf states from foreign aggression after British withdrawal in 1971. Rather, their original raison d’etre was internal security. They were heavily composed of non-Gulf Arabs. British officials designing these early forces were skeptical of the martial qualities of locals and routinely recruited soldiers from abroad: Baluchistan, Yemen, Somalia, and elsewhere. Officers and senior NCOs supervising these forces were often brought in from abroad as well, with British military officers with colonial experience playing an oversized role. However, many of the most senior roles in the militaries were intentionally preserved for members of the ruling families, largely regardless of whether they were fit for such positions.Far from being resigned to the past, some features of the Gulf militaries will sound familiar to observers of Middle Eastern affairs today. There are important differences today, however, not least the size of these military enterprises and the vast sums of money spent on equipping them. Despite being some of the world’s largest spenders per capita on military hardware, there have been few detailed studies that delve deeply into the factors that shape their militaries’ composition. Zoltan Barany, Frank C. Erwin Jr. Centennial Professor of Government at the University of Texas at Austin, fills this lacuna with a major new contribution. His new book, Armies of Arabia, greatly advances not only our knowledge of defense politics in Arabia but adds to the growing number of works about non-Western militaries and their relationship with the political systems in which they exist.The study of Arab militaries is nothing especially new. Since the 1960s, area studies specialists have devoted much attention to the oft-pernicious role that military organizations—and especially armies but not exclusively so—played, and still play, in the political life of Arab states. Nonetheless, it remained a niche field in subsequent decades with only a handful of works dedicated to this topic. Other analysts have sought to investigate the debilities of Arab militaries’ combat performance in various wars in the region, especially those between Arab states and Israel.2 The Arab Spring prompted a small swell of renewed interest in the politico-military issues of the Arab World and particularly military action or inaction in the face of mass demonstrations and political change in some countries in North Africa, the Levant, and some quarters of the Arabian Peninsula.3Much prior scholarly work on the militaries of Arab states purports to be comprehensive, when in fact a good portion of the Arab world—namely the states of the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC)—have hitherto been, with a few notable exceptions,4 excluded from the analysis. In some respects, this is understandable. Until recently, the militaries of the Arab Gulf monarchies have been relatively small affairs and have not had the same impact inside and outside their polities as elsewhere in the region. To be sure, the money these largely hydrocarbon-endowed states furnished on their militaries had grown steadily in the latter decades of the twentieth century, vacillating depending on the price of oil. Yet there seemed little call among scholars of civil-military relations or Middle East experts interested in the shifting military balance of the region to give much thought to what the Gulf monarchies were doing with their armed forces.Barany makes a good case for why the six Gulf monarchies should be treated differently from other Middle Eastern countries, citing disparities between them and the Arab republics. Moving past differences in political systems, the author also believes these “armies”—he is really studying the armed forces and wider defense bureaucracies of these states—deserve collective but comparative treatment because they are united by dint of being uniformly ineffective. Indeed, getting to the root causes of why they are, with very minor exceptions, so ineffective is one of the stated aims of Barany’s project.Reaching any real-word conclusions about the relative effectiveness (or otherwise) of the GCC states’ militaries encounters measurement challenges. Few of these militaries have been tested on the battlefield. If effectiveness is judged by the standard of how well a military stands up in a clash of arms against an opposing force, then there are few examples for Barany to draw upon when it comes to the contemporary Gulf militaries. As Barany concedes: “estimating the effectiveness of the armies of Arabia is difficult due to the absence of reliable empirical data” (238). As a workaround, Barany pays close attention to high-intensity training by the Gulf militaries and provides an in-depth analysis of the UAE and Saudi Arabia’s comparative performance in the Yemen War since 2015. These sections, which arrive toward the work’s end, represent, in this reviewer’s knowledge, the most comprehensive attempt yet to empirically examine the capabilities of these well-endowed militaries. In pursuit of answering this question, Barany draws upon extensive in-region fieldwork. No easy undertaking in a region where military matters are considered state secrets. The book’s findings will not be a surprise to many readers: with the exception of the UAE,5 and, to a lesser extent, Oman, these states spend huge amounts on their armed forces but possess very limited combat power.Examining these armies’ ability to conduct modern conventional military operations starts from the presupposition that this is the only salient performance standard to test them against. Yet the states that foot the bill for them may have different ideas about what criteria to use to measure performance. Indeed, in looking into plausible reasons for their ineffectiveness, Barany identifies perhaps a candidate purpose for their existence: organizations for the protection of the monarchical regime from domestic challengers. If true, why should adequate performance of this task not be the marker to measure effectiveness?That GCC militaries are largely structured and postured for domestic contingencies while capabilities for meeting foreign aggression are neglected, remains true to some degree. For this reason, high-ranking military positions and other senior roles in the defense bureaucracies are occupied by ruling family members. Loyalty over competency is the key. This, Barany writes, entails something of a lottery. Some of these commanders are competent and diligent while others are not. At any rate, promotion is not based on any form of meritocracy, and this clearly has grave consequences for the professionalism of these militaries.The book also makes the claim—a claim that has applicability beyond the Gulf states—that these forces have been, and are to this day, organized to mitigate military coups. One need only think of the continuing existence of Saudi Arabia’s National Guard—a force recruited from among tribes loyal to the Al Saʿud ruling dynasty and designed as a counterweight to the regular military. In other parts of the Gulf, specific units are trained and equipped in case they have to deal with a putsch from armored units. Such “coup-proofing” undoubtedly creates inefficiencies. Separation between components of the military to guard against coup-making is not ideal when the need arises for coordinated large-scale action, as the Saudis have learned in Northern Yemen these past few years. But the point that the Gulf militaries—and others in the Arab World and elsewhere in the non-Western world—are designed for regime survival can be overplayed. In the past, the Gulf rulers may have thought in terms of dynastic survival when it came to establishing their armies, but they now have internal security apparatus for this purpose. Furthermore, emerging surveillance technology is viewed by the Gulf monarchies as a better bulwark for preserving the political status quo than setting up their militaries—or a good portion of them—as a praetorian guard for their protection.Where Armies of Arabia really excels is in the systematic exploration of other candidate variables touted for producing ineffectiveness. These are parsed into a series of political and sociocultural factors. On the former, the book goes over some familiar ground about the political systems of the Gulf states—systems with an extended ruling family at the political apex with elite families in support. What is more novel in this book is its demonstration that countries that are run like a large family enterprise have a significant effect on military affairs—mostly negative from an effectiveness standpoint. First, in such systems, decisions are made by a small number of figures on issues in which they may have limited information and that should be delegated. Moreover, the book makes a cogent argument that high levels of power distance between principals and subordinates makes the latter fearful of demonstrating initiative lest they be blamed for poor results, or worse, if they do something commendable that shows up a superior. Deference to authority is not unique to the Gulf scene but Barany builds up a good case as to why it plays an outsized role there.On how change occurs in military affairs, there is some inconsistency in this reviewer’s reading of the book about its claims to utilize theories of historical institutionalism, particularly the idea that institutional change is often path dependent (13). Such a theory does not chime with how power is centralized and so very personal in the Gulf monarchies. Indeed, the author goes on to acknowledge “the power individuals have to make weighty decisions without much interference” on the same page as introducing historical institutionalism. Key leaders in the region can, with little consultation, make rapid and swift movements at the helm, decreeing that state institutions are to move in new directions. If leaders take a sustained and personal interest, change can be radical.Sociocultural factors feature prominently in Barany’s analysis of why the Gulf militaries look the way they do. The book makes the point that anything other than an officer is not seen as something that a Gulf Arab should be doing. As a consequence, he notes that there are high numbers of non-nationals in the lower ranks of the militaries. It is certainly true that junior ranks in the military have little appeal—either financially or because of prestige—to jobseekers in the Gulf states. Indeed, many of these positions are filled by non-nationals recruited from abroad, especially in the wealthier Gulf states. However, the book’s description of work-shy, overweight Arabs unwilling to do unglamorous jobs sometimes borders on caricature. Moreover, there is more nuance when we look at differences between the various states.The book is a well-organized compendium of most of the main ingredients that go into making what the Gulf militaries have come to be. Though there is one potential factor that the book might have considered: the importance of imitation. Previous scholarship has identified the importance of isomorphism in influencing how military organizations take shape. There is some evidence that states often try to mimic the leaders of the international system. Countries may partly base the design of their militaries not entirely on their own needs but on how the most significant powers in the world structure theirs. Thus, possessing a military with all the expected “standard” elements becomes a marker that the state is in fact a modern state. In this way, decisions about force structure and weapons acquisition are taken for intersubjective reasons, that is, what such things communicate to other states.Ultimately, the book should be judged on how well it tackles its purported main aim: explaining the ineffectiveness of the Gulf militaries. Barany brings a considerable amount of primary source information to bear in his analysis as for the reasons why they perform so poorly—or would perform so poorly if ever put to the test in combat. But starting from the premise that they are ineffective begs the follow-on question: Why do Gulf states bother lavishing so much money on their armies? This seems to be a more interesting question than why they are unable to translate large budgets into military prowess. Threaded through the various sections of this book are answers to this second query. The hundreds of billions of dollars the Gulf monarchies have spent on some of the most high-tech military weaponry may not have produced capable militaries, but it has other perceived benefits. Gulf leaders likely calculate that spending vast sums on military hardware with multiyear follow-on contracts ties exporting states such as the United States, France, and Britain into the security affairs of the buyer. Often poorly absorbed by the region’s militaries, these arms purchases might not contribute much to protection of these states, but they are believed to buy something more important, the economic and political investment of the sellers in the perceived and actual success of the buyer. Moreover, the ineffectiveness of these forces in conducting military operations abroad or for defending against external aggression may be true, but it may also be necessary for inward-facing reasons. As Barany notes: “These attributes [the compartmentalization of the different parts of the military], however, all have a crucially important upside for the monarchy: they make staging a successful coup extraordinarily difficult” (73).The publication of Armies of Arabia makes a specific contribution to our understanding of defense dynamics in the Gulf. But it does much more than this too. It forensically examines how social, cultural, economic, and political factors shape how these states function and the policy outcomes they arrive upon—all through the lens of military policy. It should be read alongside recent country-level studies of the evolution of other armed forces in the region.6