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The U.S. Army in the Iraq War – Volume 2: Surge and Withdrawal, 2007-2011
Get PDFThe Iraq War has been the costliest U.S. conflict since the Vietnam War. To date, few official studies have been conducted to review what happened, why it happened, and what lessons should be drawn. The U.S. Army in the Iraq War is the Army\u27s initial operational level analysis of this conflict, written in narrative format, with assessments and lessons embedded throughout the work. This study reviews the conflict from a Landpower perspective and includes the contributions of coalition allies, the U.S. Marine Corps, and special operations forces. Presented principally from the point of view of the commanders in Baghdad, the narrative examines the interaction of the operational and strategic levels, as well as the creation of theater level strategy and its implementation at the tactical level. Volume 1 begins in the truce tent at Safwan Airfield in southern Iraq at the end of Operation DESERT STORM and briefly examines actions by U.S. and Iraqi forces during the interwar years. The narrative continues by examining the road to war, the initially successful invasion, and the rise of Iraqi insurgent groups before exploring the country\u27s slide toward civil war. This volume concludes with a review of the decision by the George W. Bush administration to “surge” additional forces to Iraq, and reviews the conduct of the “surge” and its aftermath.
This study was constructed over a span of 4 years and relied on nearly 30,000 pages of handpicked declassified documents, hundreds of hours of original interviews, and thousands of hours of previously unavailable interviews. Original interviews conducted by the team included President George W. Bush, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Secretaries of Defense Leon Panetta and Robert Gates, Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and every theater commander for the war, among many others. With its release, this publication, The U.S. Army in the Iraq War, represents the U.S. Government\u27s longest and most detailed study of the Iraq conflict thus far.https://digitalcommons.usmalibrary.org/books/1019/thumbnail.jp
Location, Location, Location: The Value of Disciplinary Adjacency in Enhancing Environmental Engineering Programs
No full textDo Women Know Their Prepregnancy Weight?
No full textOBJECTIVE: Prepregnancy weight may not always be known to women. A model was developed to estimate prepregnancy weight from measured pregnancy weight.
METHODS: The model was developed and validated using participants from two studies (Project Viva, n = 301, model development; and Fit for Delivery [FFD], n = 401, model validation). Data from the third study (Programming Research in Obesity, Growth, Environment and Social Stressors [PROGRESS]), which included women from Mexico City, were used to demonstrate the utility of the newly developed model to objectively quantify prepregnancy weight.
RESULTS: The model developed from the Project Viva study validated well with low bias (R
CONCLUSIONS: The developed model provides an alternative to determine prepregnancy weight in populations receiving routine health care that may not have accurate knowledge of prepregnancy weight. The software can identify misreporting and classification into incorrect gestational weight gain categories
The Relationship Between Foot Arch Flexibility and Medial-Lateral Ground Reaction Force Distribution
No full textBackground Overuse running injury susceptibility has previously been associated with the magnitude and slope of ground reaction force profiles, most often in the vertical axis. However, despite the implications of excessive pronation and supination on injury susceptibility, very little research has examined the factors that might affect distribution of force in the medial-lateral directions. Research question The purpose of this study was to consider how foot structure, specifically arch flexibility, affects the distribution of ground reaction force between the medial-lateral and vertical planes of motion. Methods Twenty-five participants were classified as having stiff or flexible arches, and three dimensional kinetic data were gathered while the volunteers ran at 7 mph on an instrumented treadmill. A mixed-effects ANOVA was used to analyze the effect of arch flexibility type on distribution of ground reaction force impulse in the medial and lateral directions. Results The results suggest that individuals with relatively stiff arches experience a greater proportion of ground reaction force in the medial-lateral plane of motion, as compared with those with more flexible arches (p = 0.03). Further, the results suggest that most individuals, regardless of foot structure, experience greater impulse of force in the lateral than in the medial direction (p \u3c 0.01). Significance Considering previously explored relationships between ground reaction force, foot pronation/supination, and chronic running injuries, the results of this study suggest that arch flexibility could be used as a criterion for assessing injury susceptibility. Further, conclusions drawn from this study add to the discussion on the pros and cons of training or using devices to increase or restrict arch flexibility while running
A Demonstration of Reliability and Certification Standards for Unmanned Aircraft System Control Links
No full textAs the desire to integrate Unmanned Aircraft Systems (UAS) more fully into the National Airspace System (NAS), significant concerns regarding safety remain. One concern is the possibility of an air vehicle losing link with the controller and causing harm to people on the ground or aboard other aircraft. Since a data link is not a critical component for manned aircraft, the industry lacks standards for such a system. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how minimum reliability standards for UAS links can be established using a Target Level of Safety (TLS) approach. This approach incorporates factors related to the operating environment. The paper demonstrates the implementation of a model that incorporates event tree analysis using Monte Carlo simulation to predict casualties caused by UAS failures to third-party persons only. The work demonstrates how analyzing a lost link condition as an initiating condition of a system failure, the user can determine minimum system reliability requirements and conduct trade offs between the link failure rate and a mean time to reestablish link, in the event of a failure
Highland Falls is America
Get PDFIn 1957 Samuel Huntington published a highly influential book called the Soldier and the State. In the last paragraph he famously wrote “Highland Falls [represents] the American spirit at its most commonplace…today America can learn more from West Point than West Point from America.” This passage was controversial at the time and even cost Huntington tenure at Harvard. The book would go on to influence generations of civil-military relations scholars. While the sentiment may have been accurate in the 1950s, today’s Highland Falls represents everything America should be
An Alternative Perspective of Veteran Disapproval of Recent Wars: The Civil-Military Health of the Nation is Strong
Get PDFA Pew Research Center report published on July 10 suggests that most veterans of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan believe these wars are “not worth fighting.” What are the implications of these findings? What can they reveal about the health of U.S. civil-military relations? Is it dangerous for the guardians to be opposed to the mission they are directed to accomplish
Improved Learning through In-Class Assessment
No full textOften, students arrive to their engineering classes day after day unprepared. When taking a course without reading quizzes, they are almost guaranteed to come to class without cracking open their textbook for even a cursory reading of upcoming material. When taking a course with reading quizzes, they might take the time to skim through the reading in hopes of catching a glimpse of a basic concept or key definition, since reading quizzes are typically not worth a significant percentage of their final grade. The authors surveyed students at the end of three semesters of engineering courses and discovered that well over half of the students in the course completed assigned readings prior to a given lesson less than one quarter of the time. The authors were determined to motivate students to read prior to class in order to provide students with an orientation of the material, encourage students to think critically about the subject matter, and contribute to student learning. Thus, the authors implemented an “In-Class Assessment” policy in their steel and wood design course. For the duration of the course, students sat in their self-selected project teams, each of which consisted of three students. Based on a roll of a dice, one person from each project team would stand up in class and answer a question from their instructor. If the student answered the question correctly, the entire project team earned their point for the day. If the student answered the question incorrectly, the entire team did not earn the point for that day. Key to implementation was removing anxiety for receiving low end-of-course grades for incorrect answers and ensuring the assessment was not perceived as a “haze” by the instructor, as the natural peer pressure for students to appear “qualified” in front of their peers provided incentive for students to prepare for class. Effectiveness of this verbal assessment procedure was assessed using both student course-end feedback and course assessment from the instructors (grades and time surveys). This paper will make the case that this pedagogy benefits the structural engineering profession by: getting young engineers in the practice of what engineers already do (prepare for work), increasing student understanding of a topic, and improving the ability of future structural engineers to communicate explanations clearly and effectively
