Military Review

A Cause for Hope: Economic Revitalization in Iraq

Many presumed that UN sanctions imposed from 1991 to 2003 had negatively impacted this position, yet there was a widely held opinion among Western leaders that Iraq had the potential to become a unique nation in the Middle East-not simply a model for democratic government, but also a model for a diversified economy in a region too long dependent strictly on oil for revenue. An operating model for interagency collaboration that leverages the industrial expertise of the Department of Defense, ...

Surrounded: Seeing the World From Iran's Point of View

The crux of the current matter is ostensibly this: the Islamic Republic of Iran (IRI) insists on its right as a sovereign nation to acquire nuclear technology for peaceful use, while the Bush administration asserts that the IRI really wants the technology in order to produce nuclear weapons with which it can threaten its neighbors and dominate the oil-rich Middle East.1 Because the United States and much of Western Europe depend on the region for energy, the Bush administration claims that Ir...

The Agile-Leader Mind-Set: Leveraging the Power of Modularity in Iraq

The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, 2005(1) OPERATIONS LIKE the one described above (see figure 1 below) are common in Iraq for a modular brigade that trains to develop agile and adaptive leaders in a climate that demands empowered decision-making at all levels. Successful commanders have learned to exploit the power of information not by increasing centralized control of operations, but by decentralizing information flow so that those at the tip of the spear can access information direc...

Toward Strategic Communication

U.S. Department of State1 A NUMBER OF ARTICLES in the press this past year have reported that political and military leaders are frustrated because the government does not have an integrated process for delivering "strategic communication" on issues of national importance, particularly the War on Terrorism. Writing in London's Al-Hayat Arabic newspaper, columnist Jihad al-Khazin commented, This was all great news, so great that it was reported by all American and international media outlets ...

Peace in the Posavina, or Deal with Us!

Richard Holbrooke's self-serving To End a War aside, the contesting parties-Milosevic and the Bosnian Serbs, in particular-agreed to the Dayton Accords for three reasons: force employed by the United Kingdom and France on the ground and NATO fighters in the air, the successful Bosnian Croat spring offensive, and exhaustion.1 The embarrassment and outrage stemming from Srebrenica, where the Serbs humiliated UN troops and slaughtered Bosnian Muslims in a supposed UN safe haven, galvanized NATO.

Focusing Training: The Big Five for Leaders

Based on personal experience, observation, and countless discussions and interviews with returning Soldiers, we believe these are the five areas leaders must master to enable their units to execute successful sustained combat operations. Every mobilizing battalion executes a minimum 10-day Army Training and Evaluation Program (ARTEP) exercise during which we not only emphasize these leader focus areas, but also create opportunities for multiple applications in as realistic and time-constrain...

The Art and Aggravation of Vetting in Post-Conflict Environments

The joint Department of Defense (DOD) and DOS inspector general (IG) report on vetting for the new Iraqi Police Service (IPS) states that recruitment and vetting procedures [were] faulty, resulting in incompetents, criminals, and insurgents joining the IPS, a problem not easily undone.6 The report also reveals that the IG Team was told that, especially early in 2003, only a cursory background check, if even that, was conducted before policemen were trained or entered the force. 7 The vetting...

The Maras: A Menace to the Americas

Underemployment, a deficient education system, little social emphasis on staying in school, declining moral values brought on by scarce family and religious orientation, an increase in deportations of illegal immigrants from the United States, and in some measure, the abolition of obligatory military service have all contributed to the crime surge. Nor can we ignore public criticism of the region's justice systems, whose police, prosecutors, and judges seem unable or unwilling to control dai...

We the People Are Not the Center of Gravity in an Insurgency

The Navy and Marine Corps believe that they are weaknesses to attack and exploit.4 Carl von Clausewitz defined center of gravity as the "hub of all power and movement," but some military thinkers debate whether his theories are relevant to today's battlefield.5 Recent writers on the topic define COG in ways that reflect the changing environment in which our military operates. In an insurgency, the people (a tactical decisive point) protect the insurgency's organization (the operational COG) ...

A Synchronized Approach to Population Control

In the population control arena, the critical systems needing development and oversight at the strategic level are a national identification card system, a census collection and biometrics registration program, a weapons registration program, border points of entry control procedures, strict rule-of-law enforcement policies, a public assembly permit policy, and economic programs that facilitate long-term employment opportunities. Critical actions at the operational level include senior-leade...

The Surge Can Succeed

During 2003, infantry battalions of the reinforced 2d Brigade Combat Team, 101 st Airborne Division, conducted operations from platoon and company combat outposts and patrol bases inside Mosul's neighborhoods to pacify the city and secure its population. In 2003, two U.S. Army battalions worked closely with the local police and civil defense corps units to help a reinforced Army BCT secure Mosul.8 Unfortunately, due to the troop reduction in 2004, the U.S. ability to partner with and advise ...

The Bundeswehr's New Media Challenge

About 2.8 billion phones with built-in cameras, sound recording capabilities, and text-messaging are in use already, and 1.6 million are registered every day.1 In the 1990s, reporters had a near-monopoly on war coverage; today, soldiers alone publish approximately 1,700 blogs on the Internet, and civilians in war zones publish a fair number of online diaries as well.2 During General Norman Schwarzkopf's war, CNN and the BBC were the only providers of moving images; today, Internet video-shari...

Counterterrorism Strategies: Successes and Failures of Six Nations

Operations are coordinated at the ministerial and national level, but the police and magistrate functions for counterterrorism are centralized, with the Ministry of the Interior taking the lead for policy and strategy. In the remaining essays we find a legal discussion from the Egyptian contributor, who is an international-law professor; a history of negotiations, conferences, and talks by a former Sri Lankan ambassador who directs his country's diplomatic training institute; and a descripti...

Insurgency and Counter-Insurgency in Iraq

Transforming European Militaries: Coalition Operations and the Technology Gap

Furthermore, competing national defense priorities among NATO members, shrinking defense budgets, and restrictive dual-purpose usage requirements, technology transfer regulations, and interoperability concerns are complicating the challenge of synchronizing and synergizing collaborative research, technology investments, and capability and systems procurement.

What Was Asked of Us: An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It

Trish Wood, a Canadian reporter working with Iraqi war veterans, asserts that the media, the military, the White House, and political biases are filtering the facts about the war. An Oral History of the Iraq War by the Soldiers Who Fought It, is an unvarnished, unfiltered, uncensored history of the Iraq war straight from the mouths of the men and women who are fighting it.

The Tet Offensive: A Concise History

Given his position as a military historian on the U.S. Army's Command and General Staff College faculty, it is not surprising that Willbanks effectively condemns what he deems slanted and overzealous American media coverage for translating a major tactical defeat of Communist forces into ultimate strategic victory for North Vietnam.

Hitler's Soldier in the U.S. Army: An Unlikely Memoir of Ww Ii

Not surprisingly, memoirs are among the oldest forms of historical writing and range from Caesar's Commentaries to Sam Watkins' Company Aych: A Confederate Memoir of the Civil War (Touchstone, New York, 2003) to today's blog entries written by Soldiers deployed to Kabul and Baghdad. The son of a petty Prussian nobleman-cum-bureaucrat, the author studied law and was admitted to the bar in Germany, met the deposed Kaiser, and cheered the news of Hitler's rise to power.

Portrait of War: The U.S. Army's First Combat Artists and the Doughboys' Experience in Wwi

Written in an accessible style, Portrait of War is the story of eight U.S. Army Soldier-artists recruited as captains to accompany the combat troops of the American Expeditionary Force (AEF) during World War I. Both the French and American high commands gave them passes to allow maximum access to occupied zones, battlefields, and trenches.

Book Reviews

The Utility of Force: The Art of War in the Modern World

Since the end of the cold war, Martin van Creveld, Ralph Peters, and other scholars and defense experts have written extensively on the rise of nonstate actors, and this discourse has influenced the U.S. Army and Marine Corps' new FM 3-24, Counterinsurgency, which specifically addresses the challenges of asymmetric warfare. To gain this outcome, Smith urges national (and multinational) leaders to widen then- horizons, better appreciate and anticipate the inevitable connections between milita...

Military Organizations for Homeland Defense and Smaller-Scale Contingencies: A Comparative Approach

Stringer's "specialty brigades" would be assigned key stability missions such as domestic authority support, humanitarian assistance and disaster relief, counter-drug operations, arms control, noncombatant evacuation, peacekeeping, peace enforcement, show of force, counterinsurgency support, and even the more traditional attacks and raids.

Rumsfeld: His Rise, Fall, and Catastrophic Legacy

Cockbum then explores Rumsfeld's ventures into the business world, first in pharmaceuticals with G.D. Scale (where he successfully lobbied for FDA approval of the artificial sweetener aspartame, a suspected carcinogen), then later in technology with General Instrument Corporation and in construction with the Swiss company ABB (where, as a member of the board of directors, he approved the sale of light-water nuclear reactors to North Korea in 1991).

Army 101: Inside Rotc in a Time of War

[...] the dialogue is replete with F-bombs, the training events are clarified with allusions to Jean-Claude Van Damme movies, and the central thesis is a recurring conclusion: the chain of command, from the senior cadets learning to lead their peers to the noncommissioned officers running the rappel tower to the president of the United States of America, is all screwed up.

History of the Office of the Secretary of Defense: Volume 5, the Mcnamara Ascendancy, 1961-1965

The authors begin with a mundane but necessary discussion of McNamara's organizational changes, to include the creation of various joint organizations (Defense Intelligence Agency, Defense Logistics Agency, et al.) and the implementation of the Planning-Programming-Budgeting System, McNamara's attempt to eliminate duplication between the military services by budgeting along functional lines-general war offensive forces, general purpose forces, sealift, and airlift forces, etc.

Letters

Mr Letters

Army IO is PSYOP Lieutenant Colonel Carmine Cicalese, USA, Assistant Chief of Staff, G7, MultiNational Division-Baghdad(MND-B), Iraq-As an information operations (IO) officer, I appreciated Colonel Curtis D. Boyd's May-June 2007 Military Review article "Army IO is PSYOP-Influencing More with Less."