The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons

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Summary: A thorough, information-laden presentation
Review: The Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, And Military Lessons is an extensive study of the second war against Saddam Hussein's regime. Expert military analyst Anthony Cordesman knowledgeably dissects the course of the war as well as the interaction of joint forces day by day. He then draws lessons from the forces' interactions and conduct as applied to army land forces, marine corps land forces, naval forces, including intelligence concerning weapons of mass destruction. A thorough, information-laden presentation, The Iraq War is a very highly recommended and timely addition to Military History reference collections and reading lists.

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Summary: Lessons Still Being Learned
Review: With Iraq War: Strategy, Tactics, and Military Lessons, Anthony Cordesman has produced the most throughly researched work to date on this subject. Thoroughly sourced (although not indexed), Cordesman provides a near-encyclopedic view of the early phases of the Iraq war through mid-2003. This is not an easy read, dense, and often dry. But Cordesman offers a wealth of analysis and criticism.

Much has changed since this book's publication, and the proof of Cordesman's analysis is that his critique of what had gone wrong in 2003 and could go wrong in the future remains on target at the end of 2004. In particular, in the chapter "Conflict Termination, Peacemaking, and Nation Building," the list of 38 problems and failures (pp. 497-504) is a truly damning summary of the way the war has been managed to date. "Managed" not "fought" -- our military forces are doing their best, but have been placed in an impossible situation by the Bush administration.

Over and again, Cordesman returns to a key refrain: "...The U.S. military needs to fully accept that conflict termination, peacemaking, and nation building are as much a part of their mission as fighting. These must have the same priority as combat if terrorists and unstable countries are not to mutate, change tactics, and reemerge in a different form. No strategy for asymmetric warfare can be adequate that does not address these tasks as being as critical as the defeat of most enemy forces in battle.... The U.S. military did not learn this lesson from the first Gulf War, the Balkans, or Afghanistan."

Anthony Cordesman is no bomb thrower; in many ways he is the consummate think tank insider, and in fact, after laying out list after list of failures and problems over the course of 500 pages, he waffles near the end: "There is no way to predict how well the United States will do in the near term." On the contrary, when this book was published in September 2003, Cordesman had effectively made his predictions, and they are still coming true. The only thing upredictable is the final outcome.

Although I have not read it yet, I suspect that a more recent book by Cordesman, "The War after the War: Strategic Lessons of Iraq and Afghanistan" (June 2004, 96 pages) is the "lite" version, and may prove more readable for the reader who does not have the patience to wade through nearly 600 pages of sometimes dry analysis. But analysis it is, not unsubstantiated speculation or cant.