Lightning in the Storm: The 101st Air Assault Division in the Gulf War

First off, this book stands alone as a work of excellence. What it is describing is the 101st Airborne (Air Assault) Division of the U.S. Army; its true to its subject matter--if the reader is bored or cannot understand its on him to ask himself if its he that is lacking in skill/understanding or the 101st is boring--which is highly doubtful. Second, books are not in a zero-sum competition with each other. There is no rule that says if I rate this book "5 stars" (which I do) another must be "4". What Col Taylor's book does is priceless--it describes the "Screaming Eagles" in Desert Storm better than any other book. Now I will explain why.To the serious student of warfare Taylor explains candidly why the 101st has been left out of Small Scale Contingency operations like Panama because its helicopters use up too much fuel and cannot fly far and fast enough to get there compared to the 82d Airborne Division which airdrops from fixed-wing USAF aircraft. The 101st's helicopters have to be disassembled and placed inside USAF fixed-wing aircraft or shrink-wrapped and placed on slow-moving ships to "get there". For a good comparison of the pros/cons of America's infantry, I highly recommend Col Dan Bolger's Death Ground: America's Infantry in battle, which echoes Taylor's observations. The Division, tired of being "orphaned" went on a strategic lift diet and cut out as many ground vehicles as possible to speed their mobilization. This is not some remote experience---the problem of getting U.S. Army forces with 3-D maneuver capabilities to the battlefield are as current as TF Hawk's woes were in Albania. For Desert Storm, the crafty planners at Fort Campbell were ready, and their foresight resulted in their AH-64A Apaches leading the way for the entire war by destroying key Iraqi radars. We need to employ the same thinking-ahead mentality today.The next learning point for the war student is the fuel logistics---this may be boring to a reader wanting a RAMBO story, but this demanded that a ground supply line of trucks be used to link-up with the 101st as it bounded forward into operating bases deep into Iraq. If you read this book for the details and to see how the leaders overcame the obstacles of fuel, weather and terrain to position themselves at the "back door" of the Iraqi retreat you would be reinspired to the creativity and humanity of the men in this great Division. What strikes up at you when you read this book is that once at Highway 9, the 101st lacked enough mobile infantry to keep that route closed to enemy escape, the tactic chosen was to use Apache gunships flying free to detect/attack from stand-offs targets of opportunity as the infantry basically secured the fuel dumps for the attack helicopters. With the benefit of 20-20 hindsight, its clear that had the "Screaming Eagle" Infantry been equipped with light Armored Fighting Vehicles like the German Airborne's Wiesels, massive amounts of fuel to use