The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa

Author: Michael L. Burgoyne
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
ISBN: 0226080943
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 179

Book Description
Following the invasion of Iraq in 2003 the U.S. military found itself in a battle with a lethal and adaptive insurgency, where the divisions between enemy and ally were ambiguous at best, and working with the local population was essential for day-to-day survival. From the lessons they learned during multiple tours of duty in Iraq, two American veterans have penned The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa, an instructional parable of counterinsurgency that addresses the myriad of difficulties associated with war in the postmodern era. In this tactical primer based on the military classic The Defence of Duffer’s Drift, a young officer deployed for the first time in Iraq receives ground-level lessons about urban combat, communications technology, and high-powered weaponry in an environment where policy meets reality. Over the course of six dreams, the inexperienced soldier fights the same battle again and again, learning each time—the hard way—which false assumptions and misconceptions he needs to discard in order to help his men avoid being killed or captured. As the protagonist struggles with his missions and grapples with the consequences of his mistakes, he develops a keen understanding of counterinsurgency fundamentals and the potential pitfalls of working with the native population. Accompanied here by the original novella that inspired it, The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa offers an invaluable resource for cadets and junior military leaders seeking to master counterinsurgency warfare—as well as general readers seeking a deeper understanding of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Just as its predecessor has been a hallmark of military instruction, The Defense of Jisr al-Doreaa will draw the road map for counterinsurgency in the postmodern world. Visit a website for the book here: www.defenseofJAD.com

The Defence of Duffer's Drift

Author: Ernest Dunlop Swinton
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Guerrilla warfare
Languages : en
Pages : 74

Book Description

Fiasco

Author: Thomas E. Ricks
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101201401
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 524

Book Description
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize • One of the Washington Post Book World's 10 Best Books of the Year • Time's 10 Best Books of the Year • USA Today's Nonfiction Book of the Year • A New York Times Notable Book "Staggeringly vivid and persuasive . . . absolutely essential reading." —Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The best account yet of the entire war." —Vanity Fair The definitive account of the American military's tragic experience in Iraq Fiasco is a masterful reckoning with the planning and execution of the American military invasion and occupation of Iraq through mid-2006, now with a postscript on recent developments. Ricks draws on the exclusive cooperation of an extraordinary number of American personnel, including more than one hundred senior officers, and access to more than 30,000 pages of official documents, many of them never before made public. Tragically, it is an undeniable account—explosive, shocking, and authoritative—of unsurpassed tactical success combined with unsurpassed strategic failure that indicts some of America's most powerful and honored civilian and military leaders.

The Defense of Hill 781

Author: James R. McDonough
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0307434850
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 225

Book Description
“Brilliant, hardhitting description of modern war on the U.S. Army’s premier training ground. A must-read tactical primer for today’s warrior.”—John C. “Doc” Bahnsen, Brigadier General, USA (Ret.) At the turn of the century a small, humorous book on tactics was published. The Defense of Duffer’s Drift quickly became a bestseller and today is still widely read. The Defense of Hill 781 is a modem version of this classic—a tactical primer with ample funpoking, but with serious lessons to be learned. Lt. Col. A. Tack Always Finds himself in the California high desert, alone, disheveled, confused. A guide soon appears to inform him of his situation: He has died and is now in Purgatory (his humility in the Army was somewhat lacking) where he must atone for past sins. Purgatory is, aptly, the U.S. Army’s National Training Center (NTC), and Lt. Col. Always may earn his way out by completing a successful mission. Through a series of six missions, the reader plans and fights with Lt. Col. Always, making the split-second decisions that determine victory or defeat, life or death. Through successive difficulties, some important lessons are burned into the commander’s brain—lessons about tactics, about people, about what it takes to fight a winning battle. Like Duffer’s Drift this book is a valuable resource for all military tacticians. For the armchair general, it is a fascinating look at how the members of a military unit work together in combat.

Radical Inclusion

Author: Martin Dempsey
Publisher: Tom Rath
ISBN: 1939714125
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 197

Book Description
A WALL STREET JOURNAL BEST-SELLING BOOK NAMED BY THE WASHINGTON POST AS ONE OF THE 11 LEADERSHIP BOOKS TO READ IN 2018 Radical Inclusion: What the Post-9/11 World Should Have Taught Us About Leadership examines today’s leadership landscape and describes the change it demands of leaders. Dempsey and Brafman persuasively explain that today’s leaders are in competition for the trust and confidence of those they lead more than ever before. They assert that the nature of power is changing and should not be measured by degree of control alone. They offer principles for adaptation and bring them to life with examples from business, academia, government, and the military. In building their argument, Dempsey and Brafman introduce several concepts that illuminate both the vulnerability and the opportunity in leading today: Radical Inclusion. Fear of losing control in our fast-paced, complex, highly scrutinized environment is pushing us toward exclusion―exactly the wrong direction. Leaders should instead develop an instinct for inclusion. The word “radical” emphasizes the urgency of doing so. The Era of the Digital Echo. The speed and accessibility of information create “digital echoes” that make facts vulnerable, eroding the trust between leader and follower. Relinquishing Control to Preserve Power. Power and control once went hand in hand, but no longer. In today’s environment, control is seductive but unlikely to produce optimum, affordable, sustainable solutions. Leaders must relinquish and share control to build and preserve power. The principles discussed in Radical Inclusion are memorable and the book is full of engaging stories. From a young vegan’s confrontation with opponents in Berkeley to a young lieutenant’s surprising visitor during the Cold War, from a reflection on the significance of Burning Man to a discussion of challenges faced in the Situation Room, Radical Inclusion will provide you with leadership tools to address real leadership challenges.

The Revenge of Geography

Author: Robert D. Kaplan
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812982223
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 450

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • In this “ambitious and challenging” (The New York Review of Books) work, the bestselling author of Monsoon and Balkan Ghosts offers a revelatory prism through which to view global upheavals and to understand what lies ahead for continents and countries around the world. In The Revenge of Geography, Robert D. Kaplan builds on the insights, discoveries, and theories of great geographers and geopolitical thinkers of the near and distant past to look back at critical pivots in history and then to look forward at the evolving global scene. Kaplan traces the history of the world’s hot spots by examining their climates, topographies, and proximities to other embattled lands. The Russian steppe’s pitiless climate and limited vegetation bred hard and cruel men bent on destruction, for example, while Nazi geopoliticians distorted geopolitics entirely, calculating that space on the globe used by the British Empire and the Soviet Union could be swallowed by a greater German homeland. Kaplan then applies the lessons learned to the present crises in Europe, Russia, China, the Indian subcontinent, Turkey, Iran, and the Arab Middle East. The result is a holistic interpretation of the next cycle of conflict throughout Eurasia. Remarkably, the future can be understood in the context of temperature, land allotment, and other physical certainties: China, able to feed only 23 percent of its people from land that is only 7 percent arable, has sought energy, minerals, and metals from such brutal regimes as Burma, Iran, and Zimbabwe, putting it in moral conflict with the United States. Afghanistan’s porous borders will keep it the principal invasion route into India, and a vital rear base for Pakistan, India’s main enemy. Iran will exploit the advantage of being the only country that straddles both energy-producing areas of the Persian Gulf and the Caspian Sea. Finally, Kaplan posits that the United States might rue engaging in far-flung conflicts with Iraq and Afghanistan rather than tending to its direct neighbor Mexico, which is on the verge of becoming a semifailed state due to drug cartel carnage. A brilliant rebuttal to thinkers who suggest that globalism will trump geography, this indispensable work shows how timeless truths and natural facts can help prevent this century’s looming cataclysms.

Platoon Leader

Author: James R. McDonough
Publisher: Presidio Press
ISBN: 0307416380
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
A remarkable memoir of small-unit leadership and the coming of age of a young soldier in combat in Vietnam.' "Using a lean style and a sense of pacing drawn from the tautest of novels, McDonough has produced a gripping account of his first command, a U.S. platoon taking part in the 'strategic hamlet' program. . . . Rather than present a potpourri of combat yarns. . . McDonough has focused a seasoned storyteller’s eye on the details, people, and incidents that best communicate a visceral feel of command under fire. . . . For the author’s honesty and literary craftsmanship, Platoon Leader seems destined to be read for a long time by second lieutenants trying to prepare for the future, veterans trying to remember the past, and civilians trying to understand what the profession of arms is all about.”–Army Times

Passion of Command

Author: B. P. McCoy
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780940328372
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 82

Book Description

Run to the Sound of the Guns

Author: Nicholas Moore
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1472827074
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 338

Book Description
As part of an elite special operations unit at the fighting edge of the Global War on Terrorism, Nicholas Moore spent over a decade with the US Army's 75th Ranger Regiment on the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. In this compelling biography, a detailed narrative of gruelling life on the ground combines with accounts of some of the most dramatic search and rescue operations of the period to tell the true story of life on the line in the War on Terror. Charting his rise from private to senior non-commissioned officer, this title follows Moore as he embarks on a series of dangerous deployments, engaging in brutal street combat and traversing inhospitable terrain in pursuit of Taliban fighters and Iraq's Most Wanted. Including revelatory first-hand accounts of high-profile special operations missions including the tense rescue of Private First Class Jessica Lynch and the search and rescue mission for US Navy Seal Marcus Luttrell, Moore recounts, in vivid detail, the realities of life on the front line.

The Robin Hood Guerrillas

Author: Pablo Brum
Publisher: Createspace Independent Publishing Platform
ISBN: 9781497308725
Category : Guerrillas
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
The President of Uruguay, José "Pepe" Mujica, has recently become a global icon. Among other things, he lives a notoriously austere lifestyle; eschews luxury and protocol like no other head of state; has legalized marijuana and same-sex marriage; has agreed to take in Guantánamo detainees and Syrian refugees, and more. According to Mujica himself, all of his conduct and ideology is rooted in his time as a guerrilla: as a Tupamaro. Beginning in the late 1960s, the uprising of the Tupamaros shook Uruguay and rippled across the Western world. Born in a middle-class, urbanized society, these guerrillas did not fight within the natural shelters of jungles and mountains, but rather in the concrete maze of the city. Infiltrating residences, bars, movie theaters, sewers, police stations, and mansions, the Tupamaros were everywhere and nowhere. Uruguay's under-resourced police had to face the world's most sophisticated urban insurgents. The Tupamaros employed diverse, though often contradictory, tactics: from hunger relief commandos and the armed propaganda that gave them the Robin Hood title, to taking hostages and descending into murderous terrorism. In doing so, they integrated women like no other guerrilla force before, and staged memorable prison escapes. This is the first complete English-language history of the Tupamaros and of Mujica, who under the codename Facundo was directly involved in many operations. As the president himself has said, the way to understand him as both man and politician is as a Tupamaro.