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Verk av Gregory Fontenot

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"Official history" is a term used with a lot of caution. Generally assembled by committee, official histories theoretically have the potential to be the best histories that can be made because their writers have access to the best information and the have the support of organization leadership. Offsetting those advantages are the risk of command influence on the writers, multiple opportunities for editing by the chain of command, and the general risk of anything produced by a group. The gold standard for official military histories is the US Army "Green Books" for World War II. Composed of dozens of volumes spanning both combat operations and administrative histories, publication of the "Green Books spanned the decades from the 1940's to the 1980's, many volumes benefitting from the passage of time to produce thorough and well-balanced books.

"On Point" is a different kind of history altogether. The US Army views its history programs differently these days in looking for quickly produced works so that lessons learned can be quickly disseminated through the Army. As a result, this book was published within a year of the actions the book describes, a choice that has consequences.

"On Point" is the product of a team effort led by retired Colonel Gregory Fontenot, a retired tank battalion command with Operation Desert Storm experience. My copy of this publication is from the U.S. Naval Institute Press copyrighted in 2005. The original book, published by the Government Printing Office (GPO) in 2004, was printed in color; the USNI version is done in grayscale. Beginning with a forward by U.S. Central Command's General Tommy Franks, commander of the theater for Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), "On Point" contains 539 pages written in a style familiar to anyone who has served in the military in the last 30 years. The book's arrangement is unconventional for a history as the Army expects this publication to be instructional for those soldiers who did not participate in OIF. What that means is that the book's introduction contains information more usually seen in a conclusion. This practice is in keeping with Department of Defense (DOD) briefing standards of the day where one puts the "bottom line up front" or BLUF.

There are eight chapters altogether. Chapter 1 provides the Army's back story post-Vietnam through Operation Enduring Freedom (post 9/11 invasion of Afghanistan), speaking to all of the changes in technology, doctrine, and leadership over that span of time. Chapter 2 depicts all the preparations for OIF, from theater preparation to unit deployments. Chapters 3 through 6 constitute the operational history of the war. The story jumps around the various operational areas within Iraq: the main drive up the Euphrates valley, the Kurdish north, and the sandy wastes of Western Iraq, but the flow is chronological within those areas. Chapter 7 is about the implications of the OIF campaign on the Army, a very detailed analysis of the points brought up in the book's introduction. There is a very brief Chapter 8, Transition, necessary because it was clear that the insurgency in Iraq would require substantial Army effort in the months and years to come--in other words, Operation Iraqi Freedom was not over despite President George W. Bush's declaration of the end of major combat operations on 1 May 2003. Following Chapter 8 there is a section about the team that put "On Point" together, followed by a substantial OIF order of battle that include the US Marine Corps contribution to OIF, the I Marine Expeditionary Force. There is an extensive glossary, most needed in a work swamped by acronyms, a bibliography, and an index. There are endnotes for each chapter.

As far as rating this history, I am in a quandary. On the one hand, the quality of the writing is superb. Once one gets through the Pentagonese, this is a book that captures the campaign well and provides significant and useful analysis. The authors do not avoid controversy, noting the significant waste of resources looking for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that served as a major catalyst for the conflict. At the time this book was drafted, that WMD stance was not embraced by the Bush administration, so it took some courage to introduce the point in this book. The authors were less direct in their justifiable criticism of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and US CENTCOM, but then once can't really criticize the man writing the Forward for the book either.

On the other hand, this printing of "On Point" suffers greatly from its illustrations. The Chief of Staff of the Army wanted this historian team to put together an OIF briefing fairly quickly after 1 May 2003. The briefing slides, done in PowerPoint, became the illustrations for the book. While expedient, the problem is that the smaller fonts used in the slides are unreadable to the unaided human eye, especially for the maps, as there are no maps created exclusively for this publication. This situation, while bad in the original color GPO printing, grows much worse in the grayscale USNI release. Digital images are poorly rendered, and the maps are downright unreadable. As a result, the complex military operations so completely described by the book's authors lose their clarity.

If I rated this book solely on textual content, I would give it the full five stars. However, with the inclusion of the briefing slides, I reluctantly give it three and a half stars.
… (mer)
½
1 rösta
Flaggad
Adakian | Jun 3, 2022 |
The truism that good history takes time to write is proven with this book. COL Fotenot took 26 years to get this 2017 volume to press, and the result is well worth the wait. Most Operation Desert Storm histories, outside of personal memoirs, seem to have been written between 1991 and 1995. Most were mediocre, simply because they did not benefit from the availability of resources that sometimes take years to appear for a variety of reasons. Making use of his time and now available research resources, COL Fontenot has put together a creditable history of the First Infantry Division during the conflict that encompasses campaign history, unit history, and personal memoir in one readable account. One reason for the great pains to which the author takes to write an accurate account is that he was a participant in many of the events described in the book as the commander of the 2-34 Armor task force during Desert Storm.

The format of the book is a bit more complex than the usual military history. Fontenot gives the reader a list of figures and maps, a forward by former U.S. Army Chief of Staff Gordon Sullivan, acknowledgements, notes to the reader provided by the director of the First Division Museum in Cantigny, Illinois, author's notes about the writing conventions he used in the text, a list of abbreviations (always a big help when reading about modern American military affairs), a preface, introduction, 15 numbered chapters, a very extensive bibliography, and an index.

One of the reasons good histories take time to write is that those books written later usually have greater access to research material. Fotenot makes good use of what he found, especially in terms of Iraqi sources that were only made available in the wake of Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2003. Ironically, while Fontenot had access to wide swathes of Iraqi military information across most levels of the Iraqi chain of command, he did not have similar success with the U.S. Army classified documents of the same era. I had seen some of COL Fontenot's Freedom of Information Act requests over my years at the National Archives, and, unfortunately, they all had to pass through the hands of the Army Declassification Activity. ADA was, and probably still is, motivated by the fact that the Presidential executive order covering records declassification, EO 13526, didn't require them to declassify any document until it was 30 years old, regardless of whether the national security information therein was still sensitive, which in the case of Desert Storm records simply wasn't necessary. Fontenot's disappointment is evident in his acknowledgements as he tried to resolve critical points in the First Infantry Division's 100-hour war, especially the multiple "friendly" fire events that marred the division's performance.

Despite these setbacks, Fontenot gives us a history of the conflict centered on the First Infantry Division, but provides the reader details at much higher and lower levels in the chain of command. By his waiting for more historical sources to appear, Fontenot gives his writing much needed context, from the reconstruction of the U.S. Army after Vietnam to the post-Cold War drawdown. He also give the reader and inside look of the U.S. Army changing culturally in the wake of the Vietnam debacle. The nature of the All-Volunteer Force, changing political environments, the rise of professionalism, changing attitudes towards race, and the assignment of women to roles that exposed them regularly to combat are all examined in this book, again within the context of the First Infantry Division.

Overall this was a great read, a tribute to the author's dedication to research, the First Infantry Division, and the U.S. Army.
… (mer)
 
Flaggad
Adakian | May 5, 2021 |

Statistik

Verk
6
Medlemmar
90
Popularitet
#205,795
Betyg
3.8
Recensioner
2
ISBN
11

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