Operation Iraqi Freedom
What Went Right, What Went Wrong, and Why
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- $12.99
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
From the New York Times bestselling author of Weapons of Desert Storm comes Walter J. Boyne's Operation Iraqi Freedom.
No war has ever had the intensive media coverage of the 2003 war in Iraq, and none has ever had such monumental second-guessing. Months before the war began, domestic and international pundits painted a gloomy picture of a new Vietnam or of a nuclear Armageddon that would see Israel reduced to ruins.
The war started with a brilliant series of pre-emptive bangs that shattered Iraqi leadership and seized the most valuable areas of Iraq. How did the US military machine, assumed to have insufficient air power, too few troops, and little momentum take a country the size of California within three weeks?
In the 1991 victory in the Gulf War, the United States lead a much larger coalition force into a heavy air campaign followed by a lightening quick ground campaign. In the years that followed, the United States military experienced a continuing series of reductions in the national defense budget.
What was left unrecorded was the incredible degree of competence with which the US military leadership managed the reduction in resources, balancing force structures against personnel requirements against procurement needs and logistic realities.
Any one considering the great military victory achieved in Iraq must ask the following questions: Who was bright enough to plan to have the weapons systems in the right place at the right time? Who orchestrated this vast complex array of sophisticated military machinery-ships, submarines, missiles, armor, and soldiers-all needing fuel, ammunition and water?
The answer is the much-maligned civil and military leaders of the American defense establishment, working in concert with the most advanced defense-based corporations in the world. While there were those anxious to parade the iniquities of a two-billion dollar bomber, most often failed to appreciated the genius required to conceive of, much less create a system which can use a satellite to send signals to a B-1B to program a precision guided missile to take out a Soviet T-72 tank parked in a mosque-without damaging the mosque!
Admittedly, there were lapses in the Iraqi war, such as the looting of museums by members of the Ba'ath party just a day after many had declared Baghdad liberated and the raids on hospitals, another problem that could have easily been remedied by a show of U.S. presence and force. And there were technological complications as well, including the aching misfortune of death by friendly fire. The author deals with these shortcomings in a straightforward manner.
Operation Iraqi Freedom: What Went Right and Why; What Went Wrong and Why gives intimate insight into the way in which the armed services, particularly the United States Air Force, managed to overcome genuine budgetary, political, and military difficulties to create the finest military force in the world, one that operated with the most extreme care to avoid collateral damage and to prevent loss of life.
At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
This hastily assembled after-action report illustrates the pitfalls of writing military history before the dust has settled. A big one is that, lacking the necessary time to discern the forest from the trees, the author's narrative remains a clutter of disconnected events, organized into somewhat arbitrary three or four day increments covering mostly the period up to the fall of Baghdad. Boyne (Weapons of Desert Storm; On Clash of Titans)is a retired Air Force colonel, and his bird's-eye-view account sometimes relegates the Army to the task of flushing the Iraqi defenders into the open to be detected and annihilated by"Olympian" air power. The resulting turkey-shoot, he feels, vindicates the American military's futuristic"Revolution in Military Affairs" doctrine, combining omniscient satellite and aerial surveillance systems, precision-guided bombs and missiles, and elite special forces, the whole organized by all-encompassing computer and communications networks. In Boyne's estimate, what went right was the high-tech, computerized hardware; what went wrong was mostly the occasional shortage of it (especially modernized helicopters, tankers and transport planes); and the war's unsung heroes are Pentagon procurement officials, whose decades-long struggle to defend big-ticket weapons systems like the B-1 bomber and the AWACS radar plane against media nay-sayers and Congressional cost-cutters he recounts at length. Embedded in the jumble of acronyms and military jargon is a wealth of data, including a 65-page appendix listing the technical specifications of every plane, ship and tank in the war. But Boyne's starry-eyed vision of what gold-plated weaponry can achieve seems a premature lesson to draw from a conflict that's far from over.