Military Review English Edition May-June 2016 | Page 146

decades-long Cold War. With the addition of new
combat systems and doctrine, the Army needed to
recruit soldiers who were motivated to serve and ready
to face the Soviet threat. Several members of Eagle
Troop recount their individual paths that led them to
join the Army and their assignments in Eagle Troop.
The account of Eagle Troop’s rapid mobilization
and deployment to Saudi Arabia and the struggle to survive the environment is a testament to
how quickly the Army must be able to transition
and adapt to threats around the globe. Many of
the tenets and core competencies of the U.S. Army
Operating Concept are on full display in this book.
Details accounting the arrival in theater to crossing
the berm north into Iraq provide a look into the friction at the tactical and operational levels of war that
plague all armies in terms of planning and actuality
once boots hit the ground.
The detailed account of the determination of the
soldiers to perform their duties in the austere environment and the speed and ferocity with which the
battle unfolded serves as the major attraction of this
book. Eagle Troop, lead element of VII Corps, led the
charge east from Saudi Arabia through the 73 Easting
at a pace that caught the Iraqi Republican Guard by
surprise. Although the battle is a small portion of the
book, it highlights the tenets of initiative, endurance,
and lethality in the U.S. Army Operating Concept.
I do not perceive any major detractors from the
book. The only minor issue is the long lead up to the
battle itself. The author uses the first third of the
book for character background and development.
If you are expecting to be submersed into the battle
immediately, this may catch you off guard. One may
derive lessons from the personal accounts of the
soldiers and the actions of the units that were a part
of this battle.
The book is well written and informative given the
first-hand accounts and level of detail derived only
from extensive research and a willingness to provide
accuracy in detail. I recommend this book to casual
readers interested in personal accounts of the battle
and to Army leaders interested in how this battle
relates to the U.S. Army Operating Concept tenets and
core competencies.

Maj. John Halsell, U.S. Army,
Fort Leavenworth, Kansas
144

DRONE WARFARE: The
Development of Unmanned
Aerial Conflict

Dave Sloggett, Skyhorse Publishing, New York,
2014, 256 pages

D

ave Sloggett has penned an ambitious survey of the development and uses of unmanned aircraft (UMAs). An experienced
analyst and scientific advisor to UK military forces,
Sloggett sets out to document the long history of
UMAs, their technical evolution, their operational
uses, and their impact on counterinsurgency campaigns in the Middle East and South Asia.
He succeeds impressively in defining parameters:
What is a UMA,
or “drone” in
popular parlance?
What does it
do? How can
it be used? His
answers to these
questions provide a fascinating
analysis of the
interplay between
technology and
operational uses.
Drone Warfare
draws the reader
into the cycles
of technological
development in
airworthiness, reliable remote control, and real-time
sensing that broadened UMAs’ military utility from
an experimental aircraft of questionable reliability to
contemporary UMAs that regularly conduct surveillance and carry out precision strikes. Sloggett has
collected an impressive set of facts for this work.
Drone Warfare falls short at times when the author
fails to lay out these facts in a coherent narrative.
Faced with competing demands for detail and succinctness as he navigates through the abundance of
UMAs developed over the past century, Sloggett opts
for succinctness. This can leave the reader bewildered
by the sudden appearance of a new UMA or concept
May-June 2016  MILITARY REVIEW