On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom

by David Tohn, E.J. Degen, Gregory Fontenot

Book Overview

On Point I is a study of Operation IRAQI FREEDOM (OIF) as soon after the fact as feasible. The Army leadership chartered this effort in a message to the major commands on 30 April 2003. In his... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0160781965
• ISBN13: 9780160781964
• Release Date: January 2007
• Publisher: Government Printing Office
• Length: 539 Pages
• Weight: 0.88 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 7.4" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Book review

A wonderful read about the success of the 3rd ID in Iraq. Excellent examples or courage and bravery by our soldiers.

On Point: The United States Army in Operation Iraqi Freedom

Sensational video feeds and embedded journalist accounts shaped public perception of Operation Iraqi Freedom, the U.S.-led military campaign to topple Saddam Hussein. Accounts by embedded journalists added color but did little to illuminate broader strategy and planning. On Point, the official U.S. Army history of the campaign, is therefore a welcome addition to those accounts. It is a masterful compendium of the planning and operations that ultimately led to the U.S. capture of Baghdad. In addition to chronicling each units' drive forward, the authors add needed perspective. They contextualize the Iraq mission within the history of U.S. military campaigns: with concurrent operations in Afghanistan, the Iraq campaign marked the first time since World War II that U.S. armed forces conducted major campaigns simultaneously in different areas of operation. Not since the Korean war had a combined and joint land component directed all ground operations. The authors place special emphasis on new developments in information-based warfare. Digital linkages and new technology enabled unprecedented air-ground coordination. The authors also describe what lessons influenced military planners. They describe changes in military doctrine in the twelve years between the liberation of Kuwait and the overthrow of Saddam Hussein and include summaries of lessons learned from U.S. operations in Somalia, Haiti, Rwanda, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Urban combat preoccupied the war planners. On Point describes various seminars, discussions, and exercises to prepare the U.S. Army to fight in Baghdad. Numerous photos, maps, and charts bring the descriptions to life. The authors offer considerable detail, not only of planning--training exercises in Germany, for example--but also describe how the U.S. military managed with very little public note to ready ports, airfields, and other infrastructure in the Middle East needed for its campaign. Subsequent chapters describe the drive north from Kuwait. Various battles are diagrammed and explained. A chapter on the fall of Baghdad gives behind-the-scenes detail on "thunder runs" probing the city, the much-photographed toppling of Saddam's statue in Firdos Square, and the final fighting within the city. On Point stops its narrative with the end of major combat. There is only the briefest discussion of the transition and no discussion of the start of civilian administration and the continuing insurgency. Some fleeting allusions beg more detail. While the authors mention that "the total number of FIF [Free Iraqi Forces, Iraqis trained in Tazsar, Hungary, before the war] was small, their strategic, operational, and tactical impact was significant," but do not elaborate on how or why. It is unfortunate that air force and navy operations remain outside the purview of examination, as some discussion of these would have illustrated force integration and given a better idea of the challenges and operations of modern warfare. While Oper

Fine, Detailed Operational Study of OIF

To date, most of the published writing about the Second Iraq War has consisted of politcal/moral debates about the "rightness" of the war, or of first-hand accounts by soldiers and especially embedded journalists. Some of this work has been excellent--"Thunder Run" and "The March Up" come to mind-- and some have been self-serving, anti-war diatribes like "In the Company of Soldiers". "On Point" was commissioned by the Army as a history of Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF) through the fall of Saddam's regime in April, 2003, but despite the "official" stamp, and viewed in the context of the other books about the war, the book provides a refreshingly objective and highly informative analysis of the campaign. The authors begin by outlining developments in US Army training, doctrine, logistics, and inter-service cooperation from the First Iraq War (Desert Storm) to Operation Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan and how these improvements made OIF (at least initially) such a success. The actual campaign description is minutely detailed, with numerous maps, charts and diagrams describing everything from unit manuever schemes and objectives, to logistics routes, even Iraqi deployments and order of battle. Army success and failures are clearly delineated, along with the authors recommendations for the future. Readers familiar with Bob Scales superb official history of Desert Storm will find the format and scope of "On Point" pleasingly famliar. Unlike the Scales work however, unless the reader is comfortable with professional military writing, the prose of "On Point" may seem a bit intimidating. Sown thick with acronyms and abbreviations, I found the writing to be somewhat dry, and the battle descriptions and analysis almost forensic. The authors did thoughtfully include a complete glossary of military terms and acronyms, as well as the most complete US order of battle for OIF yet published. Overall, the quality of this otherwise solid and informative work is diminished slightly by substandard priniting quality from the publisher, Naval Institue Press, whose standards are normally quite a bit higher. Hopefully, later editions of the book will correct this flaw. While "On Point" is clearly intended for a professional miliary audience, the lay-reader willing to make the effort will find a clearer understanding of modern military operations and the institutional "lesson learning" process that make he US Army one of the premier fighting forces in the world.

Great information, but poor quality of printing

I've been waiting for a print version of this book to be available for some time, since the online version ( ... ) is hard to collect and read on the go. I was therefore thrilled to see the Naval Institute pick up the title and publish it. While I am happy with the fact that I now have this report in one, bound copy, the printing of this leaves something to be desired. The entire book is black and white, and not a clear copy as it is, rendering many of the photos difficult to see or interpret. Grey boxes appear as they would on a poor copy machine. The text is, for the most part, clear, and the story of course is as interesting as ever, but if you expect a high-quality reproduction of the online report, you likely will be disappointed.