The Iraq War: A Military History FROM THE PUBLISHER
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.
FROM THE CRITICS
The New York Times
… The Iraq War is an excellent overview of the American military campaign itself. Operation Iraqi Freedom was an extremely complicated and fast-moving campaign -- one that did not lend itself to being understood in bite-size pieces, as most Americans experienced it from television news reports. For this reason, while the embedded journalists provided a wealth of tactical color that helped the average American understand certain aspects of the war, they did little to help the viewer comprehend the operational maneuvering of American forces and the rationale behind those actions.
Murray and Scales make sense of the various events of the war and put them in their proper context -- spatially, chronologically and thematically. In a way that the disconnected reports of the embedded journalists could not, they are able to convey just how remarkable this military campaign was -- and why.
— Kenneth M. Pollack
Publishers Weekly
The practice of "embedding" journalists in combat units provided a good deal of spectacular, timely footage, but tended to restrict insight to the frontline perspective of riflemen and vehicle crews. Murray and Scales provide a lucid and leavened look at the larger-scale forces shaping the war. Murray (A War to Be Won), currently a fellow at the Institute of Defense Analysis, is an eminent military historian, and Scales (Yellow Smoke), a retired major general and former commandant of the Army War College, is a familiar commentator on security issues. In this operational history, they eschew discussion of such abstractions as whether the war was a "revolution in military affairs." Instead, they show how, since the Gulf War of 1991, each of the services (army, air force, navy and marines) improved its mastery of the craft of war: individually integrating technology, training, and doctrine while at the same time cultivating a "jointness" that eroded, if it did not quite eliminate, traditional rivalries at the operational level. The result, they argue, was a virtuoso performance in 2003 that did not depend on Iraqi ineffectiveness, a model exercise in maneuver warfare at the operational level that stands comparison with any large-scale operation in terms of effectiveness and economy. The authors complement their work with competent surveys of Iraq's history and of how the U.S. armed forces recovered from the Vietnam debacle, and with an excellent appendix describing the weapons systems that dominated America's television screens. While the short duration of the war's main push-three weeks from start to finish-works against systematic analysis, and there will be much more material to surface and be sifted in the coming years, Murray and Scales set the standard for future works. (Oct.) Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information.
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