A minor application

Preparing a ‘clearance operation’

October 19, 2006  2 comments

From Patrick Cockburn’s superb (apart from the subtitle) The Occupation: War and Resistance in Iraq:

“During preparatory operations in the November 2004 Fallujah clearance operation, on one night over forty 155mm artillery rounds were fired into a small sector of the city,” recalled Brigadier Aylwin-Foster, the perceptive British commander serving with the US forces in Baghdad. “Most armies would consider this bombardment a significant event. Yet it did not feature on the next morning’s update to the 4-Star Force Commander: the local commander considered it to be a minor application of combat power.”