Includes nine maps and one photo illustration Following World War II, the War Department Historical Division in 1946 published Small Unit Actions, the study of some discrete battles drawn from three different theaters of war...Nearly 20 years later, toward the end of American combat in Vietnam, the Office of the Chief of Military History again essayed to address small-unit actions with the publication of Seven Firefights in Vietnam. The present volume lies directly within the tradition of these predecessor works on small-unit actions. Since the fall of 2001, the U.S. Army, along with the other American armed services, has been engaged in military actions in Iraq and Afghanistan. Because the current conflict has so many different fronts and facets, no handful of small-unit case studies could do justice to such a complex tapestry of events. This book thus represents a volume that showcases the American soldier in combat operations within the context of the Global War on Terrorism/The Long War. This series of five case studies is drawn from events in Iraq. Four of the studies discuss combat operations within a counterinsurgency framework at the company and battalion levels. The final case study presents a deployment dilemma facing a brigade-level task force commander when he was asked to replace a whole division in the same geographical space. In each case, the story is derived from oral interviews and key documents and is fully annotated. The primary purpose for presenting these vignettes is to provide a vicarious education in what future participants will face as the War on Terrorism continues and beyond.
