Baghdad at Sunrise

Baghdad at Sunrise
Author: Peter R. Mansoor
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 2008-10-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300142633

An on-the-ground commander describes his brigade's first year in Iraq after the U.S. forces seized Baghdad in the spring of 2003, and explains what went right and wrong as the U.S. military confronted an insurgency, in a firsthand analysis of success and failure in Iraq.

Surge

Surge
Author: Peter R. Mansoor
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 395
Release: 2013-10-29
Genre: History
ISBN: 0300199163

“The definitive account . . . A fascinating combination of grand strategy and personal vignettes” (Max Boot, The Wall Street Journal). Finalist for the 2013 Guggenheim-Lehrman Prize in Military History Surge is an insider’s view of the most decisive phase of the Iraq War. After exploring the dynamics of the war during its first three years, the book takes the reader on a journey to Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, where the controversial new US Army and Marine Corps counterinsurgency doctrine was developed; to Washington, DC, and the halls of the Pentagon, where the joint chiefs of staff struggled to understand the conflict; to the streets of Baghdad, where soldiers worked to implement the surge and reenergize the flagging war effort before the Iraqi state splintered; and to the halls of Congress, where Amb. Ryan Crocker and Gen. David Petraeus testified in some of the most contentious hearings in recent history. Using newly declassified documents, unpublished manuscripts, interviews, author notes, and published sources, Surge explains how President George W. Bush, Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki, Ambassador Crocker, General Petraeus, and other US and Iraqi political and military leaders shaped the surge from the center of the maelstrom in Baghdad and Washington. “This is one of the best books to emerge from the Iraq War. I expect it will be remembered as one of the most insightful accounts from an insider of the key ‘surge’ phase of that conflict. The chapter on the Sunni Awakening especially stands out as a terrific overview of that critical development.” —Thomas E. Ricks, author of Fiasco

Sunrise Over Fallujah

Sunrise Over Fallujah
Author: Walter Dean Myers
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
Total Pages: 220
Release: 2010-02-01
Genre: Young Adult Fiction
ISBN: 0545232023

Robin "Birdy" Perry, a new army recruit from Harlem, isn't quite sure why he joined the army, but he's sure where he's headed: Iraq. Birdy and the others in the Civilian Affairs Battalion are supposed to help secure and stabilize the country and successfully interact with the Iraqi people. Officially, the code name for their maneuvers is Operation Iraqi Freedom. But the young men and women in the CA unit have a simpler name for it:WAR

Reconstructing Iraq

Reconstructing Iraq
Author: Gordon W. Rudd
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 478
Release: 2011-05-30
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700617795

When President George W. Bush stood on the decks of the U.S.S. Lincoln in May 2003 and announced the victorious end to major combat operations in Iraq, he did so in front of a huge banner that proclaimed "Mission Accomplished." American forces had successfully removed the regime of Saddam Hussein with "rapid decisive operations"-and yet the United States was unprepared to effectively replace that regime. Gordon Rudd's excellent history reveals why in stark detail. Between the invasion of Iraq in March 2003 and the creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) that May, the Allied forces struggled to plug the governance gap created by the removal of Saddam Hussein's regime. Plugging that gap became the job of the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance. Cobbled together with staff from diverse federal agencies and military branches, ORHA was led by Jay Garner, a key figure in assisting Kurdish refugees following Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Garner and ORHA were given mere weeks to stabilize a nation that had come completely apart at the seams. Iraq's infrastructure was in such a shambles-thanks to years of poor maintenance, international sanctions, and massive looting-that the mission was doomed to fail from the start. Rudd, field historian for ORHA and CPA, offers a critical look at this impossible effort. He shows that, while military planning for the invasion of Iraq had been conducted for over a decade, planning for regime replacement was haphazard at best. The result was an unnecessarily large loss of lives, treasure, time, and American prestige, despite the inspired efforts of Garner and his staff. Based on nearly 300 interviews and time on the ground in Iraq, Rudd's account also provides an unsettling look at the awkward transition from ORHA to CPA, revealing how Ambassador Paul Bremer managed to make things even worse. Garner here emerges as both heroic and tragic, a charismatic leader of great enthusiasm who took on a task of grand proportions but was poorly served by those who chose him for the mission. As Rudd makes clear, the key lesson of this experience is that regime removal solves nothing without effective regime replacement. That lesson, learned the hard way, serves as a cautionary tale for our engagement in future foreign conflicts.

A Revolution in Military Adaptation

A Revolution in Military Adaptation
Author: Chad C. Serena
Publisher: Georgetown University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2011-09
Genre: Business & Economics
ISBN: 1589017838

During the early years of the Iraq War, the US Army was unable to translate initial combat success into strategic and political victory. Iraq plunged into a complex insurgency, and defeating this insurgency required beating highly adaptive foes. A competition between the hierarchical and vertically integrated army and networked and horizontally integrated insurgents ensued. The latter could quickly adapt and conduct networked operations in a decentralized fashion; the former was predisposed to fighting via prescriptive plans under a centralized command and control. To achieve success, the US Army went through a monumental process of organizational adaptation—a process driven by soldiers and leaders that spread throughout the institution and led to revolutionary changes in how the army supported and conducted its operations in Iraq. How the army adapted and the implications of this adaptation are the subject of this indispensable study. Intended for policymakers, defense and military professionals, military historians, and academics, this book offers a solid critique of the army’s current capacity to adapt to likely future adversary strategies and provides policy recommendations for retaining lessons learned in Iraq.

The Wolf of Baghdad

The Wolf of Baghdad
Author: Carol Isaacs
Publisher: Myriad Editions
Total Pages: 209
Release: 2020-01-30
Genre: Comics & Graphic Novels
ISBN: 1912408716

'Enthralling and moving. It is magical.'— Claudia Roden In the 1940s a third of Baghdad's population was Jewish. Within a decade nearly all 150,000 had been expelled, killed or had escaped. This graphic memoir of a lost homeland is a wordless narrative by an author homesick for a home she has never visited. Transported by the power of music to her ancestral home in the old Jewish quarter of Baghdad, the author encounters its ghost-like inhabitants who are revealed as long-gone family members. As she explores the city, journeying through their memories and her imagination, she at first sees successful integration, and cultural and social cohesion. Then the mood turns darker with the fading of this ancient community's fortunes. This beautiful wordless narrative is illuminated by the words and portraits of her family, a brief history of Baghdadi Jews and of the making of this work. Says Isaacs: 'The Finns have a word, kaukokaipuu, which means a feeling of homesickness for a place you've never been to. I've been living in two places all my life; the England I was born in, and the lost world of my Iraqi-Jewish family's roots.'

The Gardener of Baghdad

The Gardener of Baghdad
Author: Ahmad Ardalan
Publisher: Ahmad Ardalan
Total Pages: 281
Release:
Genre: Fiction
ISBN:

Two people, one city, different times; connected by a memoir. Can love exist in a city destined for decades of misery? Adnan leads a weary existence as a bookshop owner in modern-day, war-torn Baghdad, where bombings, corruption and assault are everyday occurrences and the struggle to survive has suffocated the joy out of life for most. But when he begins to clean out his bookshop of forty years to leave his city in search of somewhere safer, he comes across the story of Ali, the Gardener of Baghdad, Adnan rediscovers through a memoir handwritten by the gardener decades ago that beauty, love and hope can still exist, even in the darkest corners of the world.

Iron Sunrise

Iron Sunrise
Author: Charles Stross
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 452
Release: 2005-06-28
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 9780441012961

“[Stross] has the ability to superimpose an intriguing take on contemporary events over an imaginative story peopled by bizarre characters.” – The Kansas City Star A G2 star doesn’t just explode—not without outside interference. So the survivors of the planet Moscow, which was annihilated in just such an event, have launched a counterattack against the most likely culprit: the neighboring system of New Dresden. But New Dresden wasn’t responsible, and as the deadly missiles approach their target, Rachel Mansour, agent for the interests of Old Earth, is assigned to find out who was. Opposing her is an unknown—and unimaginable—enemy. At stake is not only the fate of New Dresden but also the very order of the universe. And the one person who knows the identity of that enemy is a disaffected teenager who calls herself Wednesday Shadowmist. But Wednesday has no idea what she knows…

Hybrid Warfare

Hybrid Warfare
Author: Williamson Murray
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 335
Release: 2012-07-09
Genre: History
ISBN: 1107026083

Hybrid warfare has been an integral part of the historical landscape since the ancient world, but only recently have analysts - incorrectly - categorised these conflicts as unique. Great powers throughout history have confronted opponents who used a combination of regular and irregular forces to negate the advantage of the great powers' superior conventional military strength. As this study shows, hybrid wars are labour-intensive and long-term affairs; they are difficult struggles that defy the domestic logic of opinion polls and election cycles. Hybrid wars are also the most likely conflicts of the twenty-first century, as competitors use hybrid forces to wear down America's military capabilities in extended campaigns of exhaustion. Nine historical examples of hybrid warfare, from ancient Rome to the modern world, provide readers with context by clarifying the various aspects of conflicts and examining how great powers have dealt with them in the past.

The GI Offensive in Europe

The GI Offensive in Europe
Author: Peter R. Mansoor
Publisher: University Press of Kansas
Total Pages: 360
Release: 1999-06-06
Genre: History
ISBN: 0700612262

The German Wehrmacht was one of the most capable fighting forces the world has ever known, but in the end it was no match for the Allies. Some historians contend that the Allies achieved victory through brute force and material superiority. But, as Peter Mansoor argues, all of the material produced by U.S. industry was useless without trained soldiers to operate it, a coherent doctrine for its use, and leaders who could effectively command the formations into which it was organized. This book provides a comprehensive study of America's infantry combat performance in Europe during World War II, showing that the Army succeeded by developing combat effective divisions that could not only fight and win battles, but also sustain that effort over years of combat. While American industry admittedly enabled the U.S. to sustain its overseas armies, the effectiveness of those forces ultimately rested on their organizational capabilities and ability to adapt to combat in a variety of lethal environments and to learn from their mistakes. Mansoor analyzes the impact of personnel and logistical systems on the Army's strength, explaining how leaders used these systems to keep a small number of divisions at a high state of combat effectiveness. During the critical battles of 1944-45, American divisions were able to sustain this high level while their Wehrmacht counterparts disintegrated, demonstrating that the Army's endurance in extended combat was the most critical factor in its ultimate success. Mansoor also takes a close look at the personalities and capabilities of division commanders, infantry tactics and operations, logistics, and the benefits and weaknesses of stateside training. The American army won, asserts Mansoor, because unit for unit at the division level it was more effective than its adversaries. By showing how U.S. infantry developed more quickly and fought better than commonly believed, The GI Offensive in Europe contributes significantly to the history of the U.S. Army in the European theater and to our overall understanding of military effectiveness.