This article reaches pretty much the same conclusions as Kenneth Pollack's seminal work Arabs at War: Arab Military Effectiveness, 1948-91. His main takeaway is that while Arab militaries often have fierce fighters at an individual level and are capable of maintaining complex logistics, the junior command levels are universally atrocious. There's also the huge problem for Arab general staffs of attaining accurate battlefield knowledge, as attacking enemy forces are often hugely exaggerated (in order to avoid blame for losses), and major successes are often falsely reported by Arab units even when they are suffering defeats.

I think both of these things are on display in Syria. You can see the lack of effectiveness in responding to a developing situation in Idlib, where there was such complete chaos when faced with the assault that no sector of the city was able to organize a successful defence or counterattack, with the possible exception of the local counterattacks on the first night of the assault. Judging the informational chain of command in regime forces is more difficult, but it's not hard to imagine such a distortion of the real situation being reported at, say, Tabqa airbase, where the general consensus among outside observers (based on state news reports from there and other pro-regime sources) was that the base was in no danger of falling. There was a SANA broadcast from inside the base showing the troops and aircraft there the day before it fell. It seems entirely plausible that the Syrian high command in Damascus had a similar view of the base as impregnable before it was lost in the ensuing ISIS assault.

I can also envision such a distortion of the facts on the ground leading to the disastrous SAA attempt to link up with Nubbol and Zahra north of Aleppo last month. Something had to convince them to launch such an assault in the face of poor weather conditions that prevented air support, the Syrian military's #1 advantage over rebel forces, and to expend valuable men and materiel to attack in a direction that was tangential to the SAA's primary goal of completing the siege of Aleppo. It's entirely possible, if not likely, that the operation was the result of the misreporting of battlefield conditions, enemy force dispositions and/or progress of the assault and intelligence on potential enemy counterattacks once the offensive was underway.

It's always difficult to discuss such topics where the temptation is present to simply point to the vast, indefinable field of 'culture' as the reason for deficiencies, and neither I nor Kenneth Pollack are making assumptions as to WHY these problems with information and junior command are so pervasive among Arab militaries. Nevertheless, they do exist, and I think they can explain a lot of the seemingly unprecedented regime military failures in recent weeks.