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The Iraq War: The Longest Story Never Told

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10.24.2018 at 11:04pm

The Iraq War: The Longest Story Never Told by CDRSalamander – USNI Blog

When you reach to the edges of living memory to today, there was no military challenge more complicated, important, or transformative than WWII.

The geopolitical, technological, warfighting, and demographic changes in the six short years from 1939 to 1945 are hard to fully understand as we approach the end of 2018.

Perhaps six years isn’t quite the metric we should be looking at when it comes to change at that time. Look at the 15-yr timespan going back from victory in WWII: 1930 to 1945.

In 1930, Hoover was President, the Army 137,645 strong, and its Field Artillery Manual still had articles on how to properly pack a mule.

By 1945, Truman was President, the army at its peak of 8,291,336 and just got through via the USAAF nuking two Japanese cities.

A lot can happen in 15-yrs, and lessons get stale fast.

Now, let’s do the same here. 15 years from today would be October 2003. At that point, the invasion of Iraq was seven months old. We were seven weeks from finding Saddam Hussein in a cellar south of Tikrit.

What have we learned since the start of that war? We don’t know – and that is a problem…

Read on.

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