Between the Rivers: Combat Action in Iraq, 2003-2005.

摘要

This work is the continuation and revision of a project started in 2006 with the publication of In Contact! by the Combat Studies Institute. The original concept was to present a series of military vignettes in a style similar to the widely used case-study methodology commonly found in military literature. The final version of Between the Rivers, instead of following this strict case-study format, presents combat action vignettes as narrative accounts of the various types of actions challenging combat leaders in Iraq in 2003-2005. The use of military case studies was common in the pre-World War I German Kriegsakademie, the school that trained General Staff officers. Training exercises, either in a classroom setting or in the field, were often stopped in order to make students devise solutions to a combat dilemma a commander or staff officer would be expected to face in a future war. Similarly, the Germans intensely studied military history and used historical vignettes in the training of officers. After World War I, the interwar Reichswehr made extensive study of the war, attempting to discover and codify the lessons of the war. One of the commercial products of this field of study was then-Colonel Erwin Rommel s publication of his World War I memoirs, Infantry Attacks, in 1937. Rommel wrote his memoirs as a series of case studies that presented the lessons of the war based on his own experiences.