Unseen War: Allied Air Power and the Takedown of Saddam Hussein - Softcover

This well documented and well written book deserves serious consideration by anyone who desires to understand the current capabilities of American airpower and its role in modern war. Even as Lambeth heralds a new era where the United States has finally mastered high-intensity conventional warfare, he admits the same era also has produced a refined mode of fourth generation asymmetric warfare to counter that preferred American methodology, and no acumen in tactics or operations can make up for flawed strategy. His closing comments, written against the backdrop of continuing strife in Iraq and Afghanistan, are more somber than Budiansky s. For Lambeth, the most enduring lesson from OIF about modern warfare surely must be that even the most capable air weapon imaginable can never be more effective than the strategy it is intended to underwrite. Parameters, U.S. Army War College The Unseen War is an essential read for anyone interested in understanding how a truly joint and combined operation consisting of all elements of national power is directed, planned and conducted. Military professionals and individuals interested in military history will benefit most from this book because it describes adeptly how conventional military force can be applied to systematically dismantle a State s military capability. Following just over 10 years of lower-intensity counterinsurgency conflicts, it is the detail encapsulated in this book that now needs to be remembered and re-learned in anticipation of the next high-intensity conflict where as the author suggests the stakes may be significantly higher. Royal Air Force Centre for Air Power Studies CAS s Reading List 2015 "Ten years of thorough research and very good writing have produced an outstanding account of the nearly unknown air war during the three-week phase of major combat operations in Iraq that helped end the regime of Saddam Hussein. In contrast to the strategic error of under sourcing ground forces, especially for post-combat stabilization, the joint and combined air operations were almost flawless. It was not a question of 'shock and awe' but of over 41,000 well-planned sorties that resulted in precise, relentless, and highly lethal air strikes. With collateral damage a constant concern, the effects were to shred Iraqi ground troops and armor and reverse the traditional roles of air and land power in high-intensity combat. During this phase of Operation Iraqi Freedom, ground forces flushed the enemy, air power attacked them, and ground forces then finished off the remnants. Lambeth (senior Fellow, Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments) brilliantly analyzes the reason for success as well as the reasons for occasional failures along with perennial problems such as insufficient tanker capacity, reluctant allies, fog and friction, and the inter-service delicacies involved with any joint action. No history is definitive, but this report comes close." CHOICE: Current Reviews for Academic Libraries

The Unseen War offers a comprehensive assessment of the air contribution to the three weeks of major combat that ended the rule of Iraq's Saddam Hussein in 2003. Unlike in the earlier instance of Operation Desert Storm in 1991, the role of allied air power in the nation's second war against Iraq was not apparent to most observers, since the land offensive began concurrently with the air offensive and the overwhelming majority of the reporters who accompanied allied forces into combat were embedded with ground units. Even today, the air war history of Operation Iraqi Freedom remains largely unreported, despite the fact that American air assets, aided substantially by the air contributions of the United Kingdom and Australia, played a key role in enabling the prompt achievement of the coalition's immediate campaign goals. Lambeth's work fills a long-standing gap in the literature on modern warfare by telling that story of the role of airpower for the first time in the fullest detail.