From the Publisher

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.

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.

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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Table of Contents

Read a Sample Chapter

The Iraq War: A Military History

Harvard University Press

Chapter One

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...)

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Excerpted from The Iraq War: A Military History
by Williamson Murray Robert H. Scales
Copyright © 2003 by Harvard University Press.
Excerpted by permission.
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