In this unprecedented account of the intensive air and ground operations in Iraq, two of America’s most distinguished military historians bring clarity and depth to the first major war of the new millennium. Reaching beyond the blaring headlines, embedded videophone reports, and daily Centcom briefings, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales analyze events in light of past military experiences, present battleground realities, and future expectations.
The Iraq War puts the recent conflict into context. Drawing on their extensive military expertise, the authors assess the opposing aims of the Coalition forces and the Iraqi regime and explain the day-to-day tactical and logistical decisions of infantry and air command, as British and American troops moved into Basra and Baghdad. They simultaneously step back to examine long-running debates within the U.S. Defense Department about the proper uses of military power and probe the strategic implications of those debates for America’s buildup to this war. Surveying the immense changes that have occurred in America’s armed forces between the Gulf conflicts of 1991 and 2003—changes in doctrine as well as weapons—this volume reveals critical meanings and lessons about the new “American way of war” as it has unfolded in Iraq.
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The Iraq War: A Military History
In this unprecedented account of the intensive air and ground operations in Iraq, two of America’s most distinguished military historians bring clarity and depth to the first major war of the new millennium. Reaching beyond the blaring headlines, embedded videophone reports, and daily Centcom briefings, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales analyze events in light of past military experiences, present battleground realities, and future expectations.
The Iraq War puts the recent conflict into context. Drawing on their extensive military expertise, the authors assess the opposing aims of the Coalition forces and the Iraqi regime and explain the day-to-day tactical and logistical decisions of infantry and air command, as British and American troops moved into Basra and Baghdad. They simultaneously step back to examine long-running debates within the U.S. Defense Department about the proper uses of military power and probe the strategic implications of those debates for America’s buildup to this war. Surveying the immense changes that have occurred in America’s armed forces between the Gulf conflicts of 1991 and 2003—changes in doctrine as well as weapons—this volume reveals critical meanings and lessons about the new “American way of war” as it has unfolded in Iraq.
In this unprecedented account of the intensive air and ground operations in Iraq, two of America’s most distinguished military historians bring clarity and depth to the first major war of the new millennium. Reaching beyond the blaring headlines, embedded videophone reports, and daily Centcom briefings, Williamson Murray and Robert Scales analyze events in light of past military experiences, present battleground realities, and future expectations.
The Iraq War puts the recent conflict into context. Drawing on their extensive military expertise, the authors assess the opposing aims of the Coalition forces and the Iraqi regime and explain the day-to-day tactical and logistical decisions of infantry and air command, as British and American troops moved into Basra and Baghdad. They simultaneously step back to examine long-running debates within the U.S. Defense Department about the proper uses of military power and probe the strategic implications of those debates for America’s buildup to this war. Surveying the immense changes that have occurred in America’s armed forces between the Gulf conflicts of 1991 and 2003—changes in doctrine as well as weapons—this volume reveals critical meanings and lessons about the new “American way of war” as it has unfolded in Iraq.
Williamson Murray was Professor Emeritus of History at The Ohio State University. He served as a Minerva Fellow in the Strategy and Policy Department at the U.S. Naval War College and most recently was the Ambassador Anthony D. Marshall Chair of Strategic Studies at Marine Corps University.
Major General Robert H. Scales, Jr., U.S. Army (Ret.), brings perspective as head of the army’s team of Gulf War historians and chief author of Certain Victory, the army’s official postwar analysis of that conflict. He has also served as Commandant of the Army War College and is author of Yellow Smoke: The Future of Land Warfare for America’s Military.
In retrospect, the Iraqis were in a hopeless position before the first shot was fired. The military forces of the United States and the United Kingdom operated according to a professional military ethos that it had taken the West five centuries to develop. The technologies that those forces deployed were frighteningly effective in their lethality and precision, but the chief factor in the victory that occurred in spring 2003 was a combination of training, discipline, and mental preparation at every level that Coalition forces brought to the battlefield.
Thus, a number of obvious factors help explain the success of Coalition arms: technological superiority, complete air supremacy, the incompetence of Saddam and his military commanders when confronted with an external enemy, and, not least, the unwillingness of most Iraqis to fight and die for a regime they feared and despised in equal measure. But the most important reason for the Coalition's victory lies in the secret of Western military effectiveness first discovered by the Romans and then rediscovered by the Europeans in the seventeenth century: the disciplining of young men into combat formations characterized by cohesion, interdependency, and trust in one another and in commanding officers. The result is a military unit that is obedient and responsive not only to its commanders but to civil authorities as well. Of all the revolutions that have taken place in Western warfare, this was undoubtedly the most important, for on those disciplined formations-disciplined in both a civil and a military sense-the Western state was created. In that sense, the ground formations that drove through ill-disciplined armed mobs of Iraqis were the direct lineal descendants of Roman legionnaires and the pike men and musketeers of Gustavus Adolphus's Swedish armies.
Since World War I the modern battlefield has increasingly isolated the soldier and marine as well as his combat leaders. Thus, the initiative of individuals and junior leaders has become an important component of success, because it allows the soldier or marine to take advantage of fleeting opportunities. From the outset of their military careers, the British and American soldiers and marines who fought in Iraq had received an intensive and effective regimen of combat training that instilled in them not only the discipline to obey orders under extraordinarily difficult and dangerous situations but also the willingness to take the initiative and act on their own in the absence of orders. That combination of discipline and initiative allowed Coalition soldiers and marines to fight as teams and to do the grim business their nation paid them to do. The Coalition victory in Iraq had little to do with any advantage American and British soldiers may have enjoyed in bravery over their Iraqi opponents. It had everything to do with their cohesion and discipline on the battlefield. The Iraqi military, however brave individuals might have been-and many were extraordinarily brave-had none of these qualities.
That difference was something Saddam's military with its Baathist stooges at the top could not begin to comprehend. What is astonishing is that virtually none of the senior Iraqi leadership, especially Saddam, appears to have recognized the danger they were confronting as the Americans and British began deploying to the Middle East. The corruption of absolute power within his own realm ensured that Saddam would not understand the forces gathering outside its borders. Iraqi resistance would prove short-lived and largely ineffective, and the Iraqis would quickly throw away what few advantages they actually possessed.
1. The Origins of War 15 2. The Opposing Sides 45 3. The Ground Campaign in Southern Iraq 88 4. The British War in the South 129 5. The Air War 154 6. The End of the Campaign 184 7. Military and Political Implications 234
