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.

This study provides a picture of the US Army's performance during the Gulf War. It begins by chronicling the Army's regeneration in the two decades after Vietnam - the foundation of the Desert Storm victory. Each chapter starts with a personal combat story that puts the conflict into a human perspective. The book brings the civilian reader into battle alongside individual soldiers. It is a comprehensive account that allows individual conclusions, including accounts by Iraqi soldiers, about the largest armour battle since World War II.

This Revised Anthology is about the future of military operations in the opening decades of the 21st Century. Its purpose is not to predict the future, but to speculate on the conduct of military operations as an instrument of national policy in a world absent massive thermonuclear and conventional superpower confrontation characteristic of the Cold War. Also absent are indirect constraints imposed by that confrontation on virtually all political-military relationships, not solely those between superpower principals. It is likely not possible to predict the future. Its uncertainties increase the number of assumptions that need to be made and taken as fact in order to think ahead. So, all futures investigations are really speculation. Further, looking ahead, it is necessary to accommodate the past. For the present is the leading edge of the past, as well as the line of departure to the future. With us are legacies of the past; we struggle with them daily in problems of the present.