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'On Point' shares OIF lessons learned
Infantry Magazine, May-June, 2004 by Joe Burlas
A little more than a year after the end of major hostilities, the Army released May 25 its first major study on operations that liberated the Iraqi people. Hard copies of On Point: The United States Army in Iraqi Freedom are available through regular Army publication channels, and an online version can be viewed at http:// onpoint.leaven worth.army.mil.
The book is not intended to be a definitive history of what exactly occurred during Operation Iraqi Freedom, but an overview, according to its three coauthors.
"Soldiers see what is in front of them, not the big picture (in battle)," said retired Colonel Gregory Fontenot, On Point coauthor. "We wanted to communicate clearly and effectively what happened. This is the story of America's Army."
And it is a story primarily intended for Soldiers and defense officials, with a secondary audience of family members, Fontenot said.
Borrowing on Saddam's threat of the "mother of all battles," Fontenot said they could have used one command's 650-slide "mother of all briefings" after-action report as the basis for their study, but most Soldiers would not endure reading nothing but dry facts.
The authors--Fontenot, Lieutenant Colonel E.J. Degen and Lieutenant Colonel David Tohn--said they purposely wrote the study as a story, not just dry history. They avoided heavy use of military jargon, he said. And they used vignettes and quotes from Soldiers throughout the Central Command area of operations to highlight the study's discussion of what occurred.
In reviewing the deployment phase of the operations, the book describes plane loads of Soldiers arriving in theater, often with nobody in charge to meet them and the ensuing search in the dark as 300 Soldiers try to sort out which duffle bag belongs to who.
The Army does a good job of looking at and learning from its failures so that the same mistakes will not be made in the future, Degen said.
Fontenot said the authors realize that the study is one-sided as there is no balance of perspective by including enemy sources.
"We know this is not the perfect book, but it allows us to use it as a starting point on discussions of what occurred," Fontenot said.
And some of the study's insights have already impacted the way the Army currently trains. Tohn credited the study for the creation of an Iraqi village at the Joint Readiness Training Center, Fort Polk, Louisiana, and a cluster of similar villages at the National Training Center, Fort Irwin, California.
The team collected more than 2,220 audio interviews, 1,500 video interviews, 236,000 documents, and 79,000 photos for the study in May and June 2003. That research material is archived at the Center of Army Lessons Learned, Fort Leavenworth, Kansas, for future studies.
The first draft of the book went to Army senior leaders in August. Two drafts later, the book was approved for publication in December.
COPYRIGHT 2004 U.S. Army Infantry School
COPYRIGHT 2004 Gale Group
