With the recent lightning swift combat successes of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, there may be a tendency to view with awe the lethality of U.S. technology and training. Indeed, the U.S. military is unmatched in the raw combat power it is capable of unleashing in a conflict. This monograph, however, argues that the true strength of America's military might lies not in its hardware or high-tech equipment, but in its soldiers. Dr. Leonard Wong and his colleagues traveled to Iraq to see what motivated soldiers to continue in battle, to face extreme danger, and to risk their lives in accomplishing the mission. As a means of comparison, they began by interviewing Iraqi Regular Army prisoners of war to examine their combat motivation and unit dynamics. The researchers then interviewed U.S. combat troops fresh from the fields of battle to examine their views.
Summarizes a report on the planning and execution of operations in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM through June 2004. Recommends changes to Army plans, operational concepts, doctrine, and Title 10 functions.
Baghdad, 2003. The reign of Saddam Hussein is over. The Americans are in command. And no one is in control. Former cop turned military contractor Christopher Henry knows that better than anyone. He’s in the country to train up a new Iraqi police force, and one of his recruits has just been murdered. With civil authority in tatters and dead bodies clogging the streets, Chris is the only person in the Green Zone with any interest in finding out who killed him-and why. Chris’ inquiry brings him first to Sofia, an American-raised Iraqi who now sits on the governing council, and then to Nassir, a grizzled veteran of Saddam’s police force-and probably the last real investigator left in Baghdad. United by death but divided by conflicting loyalties, the three must help each other navigate the treacherous landscape of post-invasion Iraq in order to hunt down the killers. But are their efforts really serving justice-or a much darker agenda? Inspired by his real-life experiences as a CIA operations officer in Iraq, writer Tom King (BATMAN) teams with artist Mitch Gerads to deliver a wartime crime thriller like no other in THE SHERIFF OF BABYLON VOL. 1: BANG. BANG. BANG., collecting issues #1-6 of their groundbreaking Vertigo series.
General John A. Wickham, commander of the famous 101st Airborne Division in the 1970s and subsequently Army Chief of Staff, once visited Antietam battlefield. Gazing at Bloody Lane where, in 1862, several Union assaults were brutally repulsed before they finally broke through, he marveled, "You couldn't get American soldiers today to make an attack like that." Why did those men risk certain death, over and over again, through countless bloody battles and four long, awful years ? Why did the conventional wisdom -- that soldiers become increasingly cynical and disillusioned as war progresses -- not hold true in the Civil War? It is to this question--why did they fight--that James McPherson, America's preeminent Civil War historian, now turns his attention. He shows that, contrary to what many scholars believe, the soldiers of the Civil War remained powerfully convinced of the ideals for which they fought throughout the conflict. Motivated by duty and honor, and often by religious faith, these men wrote frequently of their firm belief in the cause for which they fought: the principles of liberty, freedom, justice, and patriotism. Soldiers on both sides harkened back to the Founding Fathers, and the ideals of the American Revolution. They fought to defend their country, either the Union--"the best Government ever made"--or the Confederate states, where their very homes and families were under siege. And they fought to defend their honor and manhood. "I should not lik to go home with the name of a couhard," one Massachusetts private wrote, and another private from Ohio said, "My wife would sooner hear of my death than my disgrace." Even after three years of bloody battles, more than half of the Union soldiers reenlisted voluntarily. "While duty calls me here and my country demands my services I should be willing to make the sacrifice," one man wrote to his protesting parents. And another soldier said simply, "I still love my country." McPherson draws on more than 25,000 letters and nearly 250 private diaries from men on both sides. Civil War soldiers were among the most literate soldiers in history, and most of them wrote home frequently, as it was the only way for them to keep in touch with homes that many of them had left for the first time in their lives. Significantly, their letters were also uncensored by military authorities, and are uniquely frank in their criticism and detailed in their reports of marches and battles, relations between officers and men, political debates, and morale. For Cause and Comrades lets these soldiers tell their own stories in their own words to create an account that is both deeply moving and far truer than most books on war. Battle Cry of Freedom, McPherson's Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Civil War, was a national bestseller that Hugh Brogan, in The New York Times, called "history writing of the highest order." For Cause and Comrades deserves similar accolades, as McPherson's masterful prose and the soldiers' own words combine to create both an important book on an often-overlooked aspect of our bloody Civil War, and a powerfully moving account of the men who fought it.
Den amerikanske hærs første officielle historiske beretning om operationerne i den anden Irakiske Krig, "Operation Iraqi Freedom", (OIF). Fra forberedelserne, mobiliseringen, forlægningen af enhederne til indsættelsen af disse i kampene ved Talil og As Samawah, An Najaf og de afsluttende kampe ved Bagdad. Foruden en detaljeret gennemgang af de enkelte kampenheder(Order of Battle), beskrives og analyseres udviklingen i anvendte våben og doktriner fra den første til den anden Golf Krig.
On 8 November 2004, the largest battle of the War on Terror began, with the US Army's assault on Fallujah and its network of tens of thousands of insurgents hiding in fortified bunkers, on rooftops, and inside booby-trapped houses. For Sgt. David Bellavia of 3rd Platoon, Alpha Company, it quickly turned into a battle on foot, from street to street and house to house. On the second day, he and his men laid siege to a mosque, only to be driven to a rooftop and surrounded, before heavy artillery could smash through to rescue them. By the third day, Bellavia charges an insurgent-filled house and finds himself trapped with six enemy fighters. One by one, he shoots, wrestles, stabs, and kills five of them, until his men arrive to take care of the final target. It is one of the most hair-raising battle stories of any age -- yet it does not spell the end of Bellavia's service. It would take serveral more weeks before the Battle of Fallujah finally came to a close, with Bellavia, miraculously, alive. In the words of the author: "HOUSE TO HOUSE holds nothing back. It is a raw, gritty look at killing and combat and how men react to it. It is gut-wrenching, shocking and brutal. It is honest. It is not a glorification of war. Yet it will not shy from acknowledging this: sometimes it takes something as terrible as war for the full beauty of the human spirit to emerge."
"What men will fight for seems to be worth looking into," H. L. Mencken noted shortly after the close of the First World War. Prior to that war, although many military commanders and theorists had throughout history shown an aptitude for devising maxims concerning esprit de corps, fighting spirit, morale, and the like, military organizations had rarely sought either to understand or to promote combat motivation. For example, an officer who graduated from the Royal Military College (Sandhurst) at the end of the nineteenth century later commented that the art of leadership was utterly neglected (Charlton 1931, p. 48), while General Wavell recalled that during his course at the British Staff College at Camberley (1909-1 0) insufficient stress was laid "on the factor of morale, or how to induce it and maintain it'' (quoted in Connell1964, p. 63). The First World War forced commanders and staffs to take account of psychological factors and to anticipate wideJy varied responses to the combat environment because, unlike most previous wars, it was not fought by relatively small and homogeneous armies of regulars and trained reservists. The mobilization by the belligerents of about 65 million men (many of whom were enrolled under duress), the evidence of fairly widespread psychiatric breakdown, and the postwar disillusion (- xiii xiv PREFACE emplified in books like C. E. Montague's Disenchantment, published in 1922) all tended to dispel assumptions and to provoke questions about mo tivation and morale.
