H-Net Review [H-War]: Thomas on Ayele, 'The Ethiopian Army: From Victory to Collapse, 1977-1991'

Prinisha Badassy Discussion

Fantahun Ayele.  The Ethiopian Army: From Victory to Collapse,
1977-1991.  Evanston  Northwestern University Press, 2014.  328 pp.
$79.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-8101-3011-1.

Reviewed by Charlie Thomas (Air University, eSchool of Graduate PME)
Published on H-War (October, 2016)
Commissioned by Margaret Sankey

Writing good postcolonial African military history is a daunting
endeavor. Beyond the commonplace challenges involved in writing
African history, such as translation issues, problematic
infrastructure, and high travel costs, researching the state's
military often adds an additional layer of bureaucratic obfuscation
and secrecy. Given this, Fantahun Ayele's comprehensive study of the
Ethiopian army from its triumph in the Ogaden War of 1977-78 to its
eventual ignominious collapse against a rebel coalition in 1991 is
extraordinarily impressive. Ayele has gathered a massive trove of
previously unseen information and synthesized it to produce a
singular volume that, although marred by some confusing editorial
issues, should find a home on the shelf of any military historian
with an interest in Africa or any Africanist who carries an interest
in the Horn of Africa.

Ayele's work takes little time to dive into the impressive research
he has marshalled. After a brief two-page introduction outlining a
few basic particulars of the research and the central question of how
the Ethiopians lost their wars of the late twentieth century, he
immediately plunges into a relatively meaty chapter on the late
imperial Ethiopian army of 1941-74. Serving primarily as background
material to discuss how the army of Haille Selassie's empire was
reformed and fractured during and after the Second World War, it does
an excellent job setting the table for a larger discussion of what
the army would become during the late 1970s under Communist
influence. Indeed, given the general rarity of any treatments of the
Ethiopian army during these earlier periods, even when it was an
actor on the world stage, such as during the Korean War or the Congo
Crisis, this chapter even serves as an excellent stand-alone study
for a pivotal case study of an independent, modern African military.

From here, Ayele develops a series of three painstakingly detailed
thematic chapters on the Ethiopian army from the reception of massive
Soviet and Cuban aid in 1977 to the eventual collapse of that same
force in 1991. These chapters cover topics as far ranging as the
massive expansion of the army from a smaller professional force to a
conscripted horde of over three hundred thousand soldiers, the
failures involved in developing an effective corps of military
leaders, the problems this new military encountered with supplying
the massive war efforts it was undertaking, and the paucity of
effective military intelligence structures within the Ethiopian
military during these years. Each of these chapters traces the
development of these themes over the whole of the covered period and
connects them to the eventual breakdown of the Ethiopian military
system during the long conflicts it waged. This is accompanied by
detailed descriptions of particular incidents throughout the
narrative as well as straightforward tables illustrating the initial
successes and then precipitous decline in all of these areas.

Ayele then follows these chapters with two narrative chapters
discussing the actual conflicts of the wars that would tear apart the
military of Ethiopia. The first is a discussion of what Ayele
discusses as "fighting on two fronts": Ethiopia's military had to
fight the increasingly strong insurgency of Eritrean secessionists in
the North while staving off the massive Somalian invasion of the
Ogaden in the East. The second is a more detailed study of the
Ethiopians' longer counterinsurgency campaign against the Eritreans
and other northern rebellions from a period of relative weakness in
1976 through their high-water mark in the early 1980s, and then to
the final collapse of the Ethiopians in 1991. Both of these are
presented well and include effective discussions of the challenges
that the multiethnic populations of Ethiopia offered to these
conflicts, the integration of massive Communist aid, the faltering of
Somali nationalist goals, and the explosion of northern rebel
support. While there is not necessarily much new in the general
narrative of these conflicts compared with older works, the detail
offered by Ayele's sources allows for a much more granular discussion
of these conflicts.

Ayele concludes the book with a brief discussion of how the Ethiopian
Revolution changed the army and then a formal conclusion, where he
again addresses the question of why the Ethiopian army ultimately
collapsed in 1991. The brief chapter on changes offers a quick
overview of how the revolutionaries changed the army and the
additional alterations caused by the influx of Soviet aid in 1977.
The latter delves more deeply into the root causes of the defeat,
which were engendered by the failings covered in the detailed
chapters, including weak command and control and a loss of public
support following the massive conscription and military failures. The
conclusion does yeoman's work tying together the massive research
Ayele has brought together into a concise and effective summation of
his thesis.

The research is laudable and the amount of information conveyed in
this volume is impressive, but these admirable aspects are somewhat
undermined by some confusing editorial decisions. While the main
question of the volume is why the Ethiopian army ultimately collapsed
despite winning an impressive victory in one of its two concurrent
conflicts, the overall narratives of those conflicts are not covered
until well past the halfway point of the book. What this means is
that a reader who is unfamiliar with the Eritrean insurgency or the
Ogaden War will spend well over a hundred pages reading in detail
about how events of these conflicts influenced the Ethiopian army
before actually learning anything about those events. Simply
switching the two conflict chapters to be ahead of the thematic
chapters would have been an easy fix for this problem and made the
volume far more useful for interested but not expert academics. The
same can be said for the short chapter on the effects of the
revolution of 1974 and Russian aid to the army. It simply makes no
sense as a final fragment before the conclusion, especially when its
contents are a natural bridge across the gap from the imperial army
to the military operations in 1977. Simply put, all the information
is there, but the order it is presented in makes engaging Ayele's
work far more difficult than it needs to be.

In terms of its coverage of the subject and the obvious efforts to
which the author went to attain his source material, _The Ethiopian
Army: From Victory to Collapse, 1977-1991_ is a triumph. While other
treatments have touched on these events from a number of viewpoints,
none has been as comprehensive or as well researched. Unfortunately,
due to the ordering of the chapters and the depth to which much of
the information depends on context that is not generally known, this
book will likely prove challenging for readers who are not already
familiar with the Ogaden War or the secessionist struggles of the
Eritreans. Therefore, this book is best read in tandem with something
along the lines of Gebru Tareke's _The Ethiopian Revolution: War in
the Horn of Africa _(2009) or Dan Connell's _Against All Odds: A
Chronicle of the Eritrean Revolution _(1993), which present
narratives and viewpoints that will offer additional context to this
vital and timely volume.

Citation: Charlie Thomas. Review of Ayele, Fantahun, _The Ethiopian
Army: From Victory to Collapse, 1977-1991_. H-War, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2016.
URL: https://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46205

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States
License.

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