Why They Fight Combat Motivation In The Iraq War Book in PDF, ePub and Kindle version is available to download in english. Read online anytime anywhere directly from your device. Click on the download button below to get a free pdf file of Why They Fight Combat Motivation In The Iraq War book. This book definitely worth reading, it is an incredibly well-written.
Why They Fight by Leonard Wong,Thomas a. Kolditz,Raymond a. Millen Pdf
With the recent lightning swift combat successes of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM, there may be a tendency to view with awe the lethality of U.S. technology and training. Indeed, the U.S. military is unmatched in the raw combat power it is capable of unleashing in a conflict. This monograph, however, argues that the true strength of America's military might lies not in its hardware or high-tech equipment, but in its soldiers. Dr. Leonard Wong and his colleagues traveled to Iraq to see what motivated soldiers to continue in battle, to face extreme danger, and to risk their lives in accomplishing the mission. As a means of comparison, they began by interviewing Iraqi Regular Army prisoners of war to examine their combat motivation and unit dynamics. The researchers then interviewed U.S. combat troops fresh from the fields of battle to examine their views.
Author : Leonard Wong Publisher : Strategic Studies Institute U. S. Army War College Page : 44 pages File Size : 55,7 Mb Release : 2003 Category : Biography & Autobiography ISBN : 1584871334
"What men will fight for seems to be worth looking into," H. L. Mencken noted shortly after the close of the First World War. Prior to that war, although many military commanders and theorists had throughout history shown an aptitude for devising maxims concerning esprit de corps, fighting spirit, morale, and the like, military organizations had rarely sought either to understand or to promote combat motivation. For example, an officer who graduated from the Royal Military College (Sandhurst) at the end of the nineteenth century later commented that the art of leadership was utterly neglected (Charlton 1931, p. 48), while General Wavell recalled that during his course at the British Staff College at Camberley (1909-1 0) insufficient stress was laid "on the factor of morale, or how to induce it and maintain it'' (quoted in Connell1964, p. 63). The First World War forced commanders and staffs to take account of psychological factors and to anticipate wideJy varied responses to the combat environment because, unlike most previous wars, it was not fought by relatively small and homogeneous armies of regulars and trained reservists. The mobilization by the belligerents of about 65 million men (many of whom were enrolled under duress), the evidence of fairly widespread psychiatric breakdown, and the postwar disillusion (- xiii xiv PREFACE emplified in books like C. E. Montague's Disenchantment, published in 1922) all tended to dispel assumptions and to provoke questions about mo tivation and morale.
Col. Wright served three tours of duty in the Iraq War, commanding the last active combat brigade to withdraw from Operation Iraqi Freedom. His book personalizes the broader operational conflict we've all heard so much about, giving us a previously unknown insider command perspective that will fundamentally change how our nation thinks of the war. For Col Wright, the Iraq war was a good war fought well. In his new book, Iraq Full Circle, he offers a first-hand assessment of the US Army's eight year war in Iraq. As battalion operations officer for an infantry battalion from 2003-2004 operating in the dangerous and volatile Sunni Triangle, followed by a tour of duty as a Brigade Executive Officer from 2005-2006 in Baghdad, Wright witnessed some of the harshest fighting seen during the war. He saw the evolution from 'shock and awe' to the 'clear-hold-build' strategy during the height of sectarian violence and was on-hand for the transition to COIN followed by the handover of security operations to the Iraqi Security Forces. In August 2010, Wright, as a deputy brigade commander, was among the last combat soldiers to leave Iraq as part of President Obama's draw-down of troops. While Wright does not hesitate to criticize the political and military leadership that failed to foresee the insurgency, or the errors in judgment that led to the dismantling of the Iraqi Army in 2003, his overall assessment of the war is that the US Army achieved what it was asked to do by two Presidents. Calling upon his experience-and the examination of thousands of after action reports, combat operations orders, and over 100 interviews-Wright pieces together a compelling and cohesive narrative of the war. Readers will be surprised to learn: · Wright had a strong hunch beginning in September 2001 that he would be deployed to Iraq; he and his fellow Army leaders began preparing for an invasion soon after the 9/11 attacks. · Army leaders were already implementing much of the COIN doctrine in 2004 and 2005, well before the official change in doctrine and the publication of the new field manual on COIN. · For Wright and most other leaders at his level, President Bush's troop “surge” in November 2006 was completely uncontroversial and utterly inevitable. They knew that clear-hold-build was the right strategy and would work but that they did not have enough troops to make it stick. In his closing chapters, Wright discusses the growth and evolution of the Iraqi Security Forces, from an abjectly corrupt and militarily useless cohort in 2004 to a well-trained and stable entity capable of securing Iraq and providing for (mostly) safe and open national elections in 2010. He finishes his narrative with his thoughts on the future of Iraq, understanding that sectarian divisions persist, but that the Iraqi Security Forces have been well-trained by the US Army to secure Iraq's future.
"I Will Shoot Them from My Loving Heart" by Won Moo Hurh Pdf
In the spring of 1950, 17-year-old South Korean high school senior Won Moo Hurh dreamed of studying law at Seoul National University after graduation. His life changed irrevocably on June 25 when North Korean forces invaded his homeland. After less than three months of training, Hurh was commissioned as a second lieutenant in the Army of the Republic of Korea and sent to the front, where the casualty rate for such junior officers could reach 60 percent. In this exceptionally well written memoir, Hurh provides not only a descriptive chronicle of his wartime exploits, but also a social and psychological exploration of the absurdity of war in general. Hurh's vivid remembrances bring to life the "forgotten" Korean War from the viewpoint of a Korean officer, a perspective rarely available in English until now.
Advanced Land Warfare by Mikael Weissmann,Niklas Nilsson Pdf
International politics have become ever more volatile over the last decade, increasing the risk of large-scale military violence. Yet the precise character of future war will depend on a range of factors that relate to adversaries, allies, technology, geographical scope and multiple domains of warfighting. Few would question that land forces will be important also in the foreseeable future. However, given that the battlefield is in a state of transformation, so is the mission, purpose and utilization of land forces. Indeed, the future conduct of land warfare is subjected to serious and important questions in the face of large and complex challenges and security threats. Advanced Land Warfare explores the evolving role of land forces, paying particular attention to the changes that have taken place in the art of commanding and executing combat, as well as the role of rapid technological innovation and information dissemination in shaping warfare. The book provides insights into key contemporary developments in land warfare and presents case studies on land tactics and operations in different national contexts, drawing on the best of theory, practice, and professional experience and featuring chapters written by leading international scholars and practitioners. Relating to the realities of the modern battlefield, the book addresses a number of critical questions about land tactics and operations, combining a conceptual basis with empirical examples of tactical thinking and practice and emphasising the importance of understanding the perspectives of various national armies, in order to provide a current understanding of the central issues of land warfare. An open access title available under the terms of a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 International licence.
Author : Christopher H. Hamner Publisher : University Press of Kansas Page : 294 pages File Size : 45,8 Mb Release : 2011-04-07 Category : History ISBN : 9780700617753
Throughout history, battlefields have placed a soldier's instinct for self-preservation in direct opposition to the army's insistence that he do his duty and put himself in harm's way. Enduring Battle looks beyond advances in weaponry to examine changes in warfare at the very personal level. Drawing on the combat experiences of American soldiers in three widely separated wars-the Revolution, the Civil War, and World War II-Christopher Hamner explores why soldiers fight in the face of terrifying lethal threats and how they manage to suppress their fears, stifle their instincts, and marshal the will to kill other humans. Hamner contrasts the experience of infantry combat on the ground in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, when soldiers marched shoulder-to-shoulder in linear formations, with the experiences of dispersed infantrymen of the mid-twentieth century. Earlier battlefields prized soldiers who could behave as stoic automatons; the modern dispersed battlefield required soldiers who could act autonomously. As the range and power of weapons removed enemies from view, combat became increasingly depersonalized, and soldiers became more isolated from their comrades and even imagined that the enemy was targeting them personally. What's more, battles lengthened so that exchanges of fire that lasted an hour during the Revolutionary War became round-the-clock by World War II. The book's coverage of training and leadership explores the ways in which military systems have attempted to deal with the problem of soldiers' fear in battle and contrasts leadership in the linear and dispersed tactical systems. Chapters on weapons and comradeship then discuss soldiers' experiences in battle and the relationships that informed and shaped those experiences. Hamner highlights the ways in which the "band of brothers" phenomenon functioned differently in the three wars and shows that training, conditioning, leadership, and other factors affect behavior much more than political ideology. He also shows how techniques to motivate soldiers evolved, from the linear system's penalties for not fighting to modern efforts to convince soldiers that participation in combat would actually maximize their own chances for survival. Examining why soldiers continue to fight when their strong instinct is to flee, Enduring Battle challenges long-standing notions that high ideals and small unit bonds provide sufficient explanation for their behavior. Offering an innovative way to analyze the factors that enable soldiers to face the prospect of death or debilitating wounds, it expands our understanding of the evolving nature of warfare and its warriors.
Author : Robert C. Engen,H. Christian Breede,Allan English Publisher : Unknown Page : 240 pages File Size : 55,5 Mb Release : 2020-12-17 Category : History ISBN : 0228003865
How do small groups of combat soldiers maintain their cohesion under fire? This question has long intrigued social scientists, military historians, and philosophers. Based on extensive research and drawing on graphic analysis of close quarter combat from the Somme to Sangin, the book puts forward a novel and challenging answer to this question. Against the common presumption of the virtues of the citizen soldier, this book claims that, in fact, the infantry platoon of the mass twentieth century army typically performed poorly and demonstrated low levels of cohesion in combat. With inadequate time and resources to train their troops for the industrial battlefield, citizen armies typically relied on appeals to masculinity, nationalism and ethnicity to unite their troops and to encourage them to fight. By contrast, cohesion among today's professional soldiers is generated and sustained quite differently. While concepts of masculinity and patriotism are not wholly irrelevant, the combat performance of professional soldiers is based primarily on drills which are inculcated through intense training regimes. Consequently, the infantry platoon has become a highly skilled team capable of collective virtuosity in combat. The increasing importance of training, competence and drills to the professional infantry soldier has not only changed the character of cohesion in the twenty-first century platoon but it has also allowed for a wider social membership of this group. Soldiers are no longer included or excluded into the platoon on the basis of their skin colour, ethnicity, social background, sexuality or even sex (women are increasingly being included in the infantry) but their professional competence alone: can they do the job? In this way, the book traces a profound transformation in the western way of warfare to shed light on wider processes of transformation in civilian society. This book is a project of the Oxford Programme on the Changing Character of War.
On Point by Gregory Fontenot,E. J. Degen,David Tohn Pdf
Den amerikanske hærs første officielle historiske beretning om operationerne i den anden Irakiske Krig, "Operation Iraqi Freedom", (OIF). Fra forberedelserne, mobiliseringen, forlægningen af enhederne til indsættelsen af disse i kampene ved Talil og As Samawah, An Najaf og de afsluttende kampe ved Bagdad. Foruden en detaljeret gennemgang af de enkelte kampenheder(Order of Battle), beskrives og analyseres udviklingen i anvendte våben og doktriner fra den første til den anden Golf Krig.
U.S. Military Operations by Geoffrey S. Corn,Rachel E. VanLandingham,Shane R. Reeves Pdf
"In U.S. Military Operations: Law, Policy, and Practice, a distinguished group of military legal experts provide important insight into how law influences the conduct of all military operations, both in peacetime and in war. The text covers a range of operational issues to include: legal challenges inherent in special operations; legal complexities of coalition operations; legal regulation of military cyber-defense measures; how military lawyers advise commanders making life and death target engagement decisions; the important military interaction with the International Committee of the Red Cross; the role military justice plays in ensuring disciplined military operations; and how military commanders leverage claims authority to contribute to mission accomplishment. Written by authors whose expertise includes both content and implementation of the law, they offer insight into not just the what, but the equally important how and why of legal regulation of military operations"--Unedited summary from book cover.
Elizabeth D. Samet and her students learned to romanticize the army "from the stories of their fathers and from the movies." For Samet, it was the old World War II movies she used to watch on TV, while her students grew up on Braveheart and Saving Private Ryan. Unlike their teacher, however, these students, cadets at the United States Military Academy at West Point, have decided to turn make-believe into real life. West Point is a world away from Yale, where Samet attended graduate school and where nothing sufficiently prepared her for teaching literature to young men and women who were training to fight a war. Intimate and poignant, Soldier's Heart chronicles the various tensions inherent in that life as well as the ways in which war has transformed Samet's relationship to literature. Fighting in Iraq, Samet's former students share what books and movies mean to them—the poetry of Wallace Stevens, the fiction of Virginia Woolf and J. M. Coetzee, the epics of Homer, or the films of James Cagney. Their letters in turn prompt Samet to wonder exactly what she owes to cadets in the classroom. Samet arrived at West Point before September 11, 2001, and has seen the academy change dramatically. In Soldier's Heart, she reads this transformation through her own experiences and those of her students. Forcefully examining what it means to be a civilian teaching literature at a military academy, Samet also considers the role of women in the army, the dangerous tides of religious and political zeal roiling the country, the uses of the call to patriotism, and the cult of sacrifice she believes is currently paralyzing national debate. Ultimately, Samet offers an honest and original reflection on the relationship between art and life.