America’s Modern Wars, Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam is a theoretical work on the nature of insurgencies and counterinsurgencies. It was originally going to be called Understanding Insurgencies but at the publisher’s request we changed the title. I added the “Understanding” part. Needless to say, theoretical works rarely top the Times Best Seller List.
The publisher (Casemate) also chose the cover art. I asked them where it was from, and they only thing they could tell me as that it was from Iraq. But, it was nice and yellow and seemed to stand out and what else do you put on the cover of a theoretical work? It did seem to stand out in the bookstore shelves.
Well, last month, the commanding officer of the two soldiers in that picture contacted me and told me where it came from. To copy parts from his emails (with his permission, of course):
I was personally present when that photo was taken in March 2007 in Buhriz, Iraq (a suburb of provincial capital city Baqubah). The photo was taken several hours into a day-long battle with al Qaeda insurgents.
The photo was taken in March 2007 in the city of Buhriz which is just south and adjacent to Baqubah along the Diyala River about 35 miles northeast of Baghdad. The two soldiers — SSG Derek Grimes and SPC Joshua Emmett– were Cav Scouts in the Stryker-equipped Bronco Troop, 1-14 CAV, which was part of the Cav Squadron of 3-2 SBCT – the Army’s first Stryker Brigade. I was the Troop commander. At the time the Troop was attached to 5-20 Infantry, a Stryker infantry battalion. We had just moved up to Baqubah from Baghdad after participating in the first official surge operations there.
It was our first day there. My troop was assigned the city of Buhriz as our AO and part of the troop had stumpled into a complex ambush in a well-prepared kill zone featuring IEDs, emplaced obstacles, pre-registered indirect fire (mortars), RPG volley fire, heavy machine guns, etc. The ambush devolved into a crawling 15-hour fire fight with my troop of 17 strykers reinforced with a platoon of Bradleys, a tank platoon, a engineer platoon for IED route clearance and ultimately five AH-64 Air Weapon teams that rotated through to empty their loads of thermabaric hellfire missiles. The al Qaeda fighters had laid real or decoy IEDs (mostly triple-stacked 152mm artillery shells with control wire detonators) approximately every 30 meters along the single available road.
After al Qaeda had been evicted from Ramadi at the end of 2006 they moved to Baqubah and declared the city the capital of their Islamic Caliphate. That part of Diyala was under 3rd Bde 1 Cavalry Division, but they lacked the manpower to secure the city and were being heavily attritted. The Mech Infantry Team that I took over Buhriz from lost 19 Abrams and Bradleys in their first 4 months there and over 10 percent of their company KIA. Buhriz, itself had never been under US control. It was a Baathist retirement community before al Qaeda had moved in and laid siege to a local Iraqi Army base which they took over an literally leveled after al Qaeda had defeated a US battalion-level armored counterattack that failed to penetrate into the town and relieve the siege. If Baqubah was the capital of al Qaeda in Iraq, Buhriz was the capital of al Qaeda in Baqubah. When we arrived, 3-1 CAV reported over 4,500 “active fighters” for al Qaeda in the city.
Within a few weeks, Bronco Troop became ground zero for what later became called the Sunni Awakening. Michael Gordon partly recounts the story of how this happened and how it spread through Iraq in his book Endgame. He actually embedded with my troop for a few days during the Summer. In early April we were able to form an alliance with the local population, evict al Qaeda and establish a secure fortified enclave. Because of the reputational importance of Buhriz and the threat that if Buhriz succeeded in defying al Qaeda, active opposition would spread, al Qaeda was compelled to launch a series of large-scale conventional attacks to attempt to retake the town. This of course played to our strengths, and we repulsed them each time with heavy losses to them and minimal losses to us. We had established our own intelligence network that had infiltrated al Qaeda and we were able to get enemy BDA within 48 hours of each engagement. A former Iraqi military intelligence officer and military academy graduate who ran the network reported a total loss to al Qaeda over six months of fighting over Buhriz at around 1,200 fighters KIA. Buhriz became the meat-grinder that destroyed al Qaedas fighting power and reputation in Iraq. Our local Iraqi allies spread the “Awakening” through their networks and as we demonstrated the success of our model and succeeded defeating al Qaeda and securing the people of Buhriz (and delivered essential services), the movement quickly spread throughout the Sunni and moderate Shia areas of Iraq. And yes, as you suspected in your book, their were former insurgents who had fought US soldiers in earlier battles among the Awakening membership and leadership.
Ben Richards (Major, USA, ret.) was seriously wounded in Iraq in a targeted attempt to kill him. He has since gotten a PhD and will be giving two virtual presentations, the first on this coming Wednesday, at 7:00 PM EST via zoom.
1. The Counter-Insurgency Insurgency (Battle of Baquba 2007) – 10 September:
Christopher A. Lawrence is a professional historian and military analyst. He is the Executive Director and President of The Dupuy Institute, an organization dedicated to scholarly research and objective analysis of historical data related to armed conflict and the resolution of armed conflict. The Dupuy Institute provides independent, historically-based analyses of lessons learned from modern military experience.
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Mr. Lawrence was the program manager for the Ardennes Campaign Simulation Data Base, the Kursk Data Base, the Modern Insurgency Spread Sheets and for a number of other smaller combat data bases. He has participated in casualty estimation studies (including estimates for Bosnia and Iraq) and studies of air campaign modeling, enemy prisoner of war capture rates, medium weight armor, urban warfare, situational awareness, counterinsurgency and other subjects for the U.S. Army, the Defense Department, the Joint Staff and the U.S. Air Force. He has also directed a number of studies related to the military impact of banning antipersonnel mines for the Joint Staff, Los Alamos National Laboratories and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation.
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His published works include papers and monographs for the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment and the Vietnam Veterans of American Foundation, in addition to over 40 articles written for limited-distribution newsletters and over 60 analytical reports prepared for the Defense Department. He is the author of Kursk: The Battle of Prokhorovka (Aberdeen Books, Sheridan, CO., 2015), America’s Modern Wars: Understanding Iraq, Afghanistan and Vietnam (Casemate Publishers, Philadelphia & Oxford, 2015), War by Numbers: Understanding Conventional Combat (Potomac Books, Lincoln, NE., 2017) , The Battle of Prokhorovka (Stackpole Books, Guilford, CT., 2019), The Battle for Kyiv (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2023), Aces at Kursk (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024), Hunting Falcon: The Story of WWI German Ace Hans-Joachim Buddecke (Air World, Yorkshire, UK, 2024) and The Siege of Mariupol (Frontline Books, Yorkshire, UK, 2024).
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Mr. Lawrence lives in northern Virginia, near Washington, D.C., with his wife and son.
It would have been more in line with previous publications. Perhaps they were unaware of the potential (or rather the actual) target audience and hence whether it actually mattered.
It would have been more in line with previous publications. Perhaps they were unaware of the potential (or rather the actual) target audience and hence whether it actually mattered.