In the book the author tells of Marines and Army units finding loads of morphine, amphetamines, uppers downers, all kinds of crap. The initial encounters with ex- Iraqi military and Egyptian , Jordanians and Syrians wasn't anywhere near as bad as when our guys began to encounter Chechens. Those bastards fought mean and were skilled. Another great book is "Thunder Run. The Armored Strike To Capture Baghdad'' by David Zucchino. This is another awesome account of the battle. Where "New Dawn'' is all house-to-house, room-to-room and claustrophobic, this is wide-open, free-wheeling, bullets, bombs and RPG rounds going everywhere. This was billed as ''the largest drive by shooting in history''. To give you an example of the Iraqis fighting capability here's an excerpt, (page 14) "The Iraqis seemed to have no training , no discipline, no coordinated tactics. It was all point and shoot. A few soldiers would pop up and fire,then stand out in the open to gauge the effects of their shots. The big rounds from the tanks and Bradleys sent chunks of their bodies splattering into the roadside...''.
“...’New Dawn, The Fight For Fallujah’ by Rich Lowy. ... without a doubt the most hair-raising, bloody and inspiring account of raw combat ... wasn’t anywhere near as bad as when our guys began to encounter Chechens. ... ‘Thunder Run. The Armored Strike To Capture Baghdad’ by David Zucchino. ... wide-open, free-wheeling, bullets, bombs and RPG rounds going everywhere. ‘... no training , no discipline, no coordinated tactics. It was all point and shoot.’ “
Ground forces seem to have arrived late in discovering the formidable aspects of the Chechens, who had been fighting the Russians for generations before the Soviets arrived; by the 1960s, killing a Red Army (Russian) soldier had become a rite of passage for Chechen males. Doesn’t speak well of Western doctrine, training, or intel establishments that in the 2000s it came as any sort of surprise.
The great variations to be found in combat conditions ought to make it clearer to the forum, that one single weapons system will not deliver superior performance in every situation. It holds true concerning small arms also.
In the First World War, US Army Air Service, AEF discovered that the method of system evaluation apparently endorsed by the authors of _New Dawn_ and _Thunder Run_ was not at all reliable. “Let the ‘experts’ wring out the new gadget” and “Listen to the vets” were found to be wanting. The military paid a heavy price to learn the lesson, then pretty much abandoned better methods before WWII, during which the earlier concepts had to be learned all over again, at greater cost. See _Ideas and Weapons_ by I.B. Holley Jr.
Collecting war stories from combat veterans, then insisting that the massive nature of their very agglomeration bestows unchallengeable status is not foolproof, but the hope is slim indeed that American ground forces can acknowledge as much. S.L.A. Marshall is still revered inside US Army training and doctrinal circles, though ever greater doubt has been cast on his methods, and his conclusions.
At the end of the day, one of the less-than-glorious insights illuminated by operational testing is that it delineates system limitations that the operator will simply have to live with.