Word: battlefield
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 2000-2009
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...miles of Baghdad in a week, and American forces have defeated the Iraqis in every head-to-head encounter. Despite individual setbacks last week, U.S. fortunes can switch course at any moment. But in this media age, expectations are almost as much a part of any war as the battlefield. As even military strategists note, flexibility and muscle, not theories, lead to victory. That's something the military planners of Gulf War II are now taking into account. --Reported by John F. Dickerson, Mark Thompson and Douglas Waller/Washington, Sally B. Donnelly/Doha, Meenakshi Ganguly/Bahrain, Scott MacLeod/Cairo and Terry McCarthy/Kuwait City
...extraordinarily demanding. Guerrillas typically melt away into the general population, either because they have political support there or because they terrorize civilians into protecting them. (My guess is that in Iraq today both conditions are met.) So the strong power has to hunt the enemy not on the battlefield but in towns and villages. The risks are twofold: an ambush like that in Mogadishu or a gradual alienation of the local population leading to unbearable political pressure to end a war--which is how the French were forced out of Algeria. In the 1950s, the British perfected antiguerrilla warfare...
...were at Camp Iwo Jima on our way to spend time with the Devil Docs, the military's nickname for a group of physicians who set up a groundbreaking approach to battlefield medical care called the Forward Resuscitative Surgical Suite. The idea is to provide real surgery at the front lines during the so-called golden hour, when proper treatment gives wounded soldiers the best chance of recovery...
Allied leaders attributed the perception that U.S. and British forces have suffered battlefield setbacks to the constant reports of combat from journalists embedded with the troops; those snapshots of the war, military commanders say, have failed to convey the larger picture of the allies' progress. "We're one week into this," Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said last Friday, "and it seems to me a little early for history to be written...
...Jazeera," says a Navy officer at the Pentagon. Defense officials say that as the battle for Baghdad is joined in coming weeks, the U.S.'s unusually tight restrictions on target selection may be relaxed. Notes a Pentagon official: "We won't announce it." In the chaos of the battlefield, the old rules of engagement have already been tossed out. Lieut. Colonel Wes Gillman, commander of Task Force 130 of the 3rd Infantry Division, told his men, "If you see an Iraqi in civilian clothes coming toward you--even with a stick--shoot...