The Iraq War: A Military History / Edition 1 available in Paperback, eBook
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The Iraq War: A Military History / Edition 1
- ISBN-10:
- 0674019687
- ISBN-13:
- 9780674019683
- Pub. Date:
- 09/28/2005
- Publisher:
- Harvard University Press
- ISBN-10:
- 0674019687
- ISBN-13:
- 9780674019683
- Pub. Date:
- 09/28/2005
- Publisher:
- Harvard University Press
![The Iraq War: A Military History / Edition 1](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
The Iraq War: A Military History / Edition 1
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Overview
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.
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780674019683 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Harvard University Press |
Publication date: | 09/28/2005 |
Edition description: | New Edition |
Pages: | 368 |
Product dimensions: | 5.50(w) x 8.25(h) x 1.00(d) |
About the Author
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.
Read an Excerpt
The Iraq War: A Military History
By Williamson Murray Robert H. Scales
Harvard University Press
Copyright © 2003
Harvard University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0-674-01280-1
Chapter One
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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Iraq War: A Military History
by Williamson Murray Robert H. Scales
Copyright © 2003 by Harvard University Press.
Excerpted by permission.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.
Table of Contents
Prologue: The Gulf War, 1991
1. The Origins of War
2. The Opposing Sides
3. The Ground Campaign in Southern Iraq
4. The British War in the South
5. The Air War
6. The End of the Campaign
7. Military and Political Implications
Weapons of War
Notes
Acknowledgments and Sources
Index