....In OIF I the shooting war with the Iraqi Army was over before the 3d ACR made its way into Iraq in late April 2003, and, taking on the subsequent insurgency, called for tactics that would take them out of their customary fighting mode. As armored scouts, they trained and expected to fight from inside their tanks and Bradleys where their mindset and unofficial motto is
“death before dismount”. The counterinsurgency mode, to the contrary, called for them to leave their armored vehicles and move about in “leather personnel carriers,” i.e., boots, as foot soldiers. Adjustment to these changes was rather uneven—some units in the Regiment handled it well, while others did not.
The 10 months between the two deployments provided the new commander of the 3d ACR an opportunity to retrain and, in a sense, retool, for these altered contingencies on the ground in Iraq. In its second deployment, the 3d ACR was the central force in
Operation Restore Rights, a mission to retake Tal’Afar, a city in northwestern Iraq that had fallen under the control of insurgents. How the 3d ACR accomplished this mission has been touted as one of the success stories of the war in Iraq. In this paper, we draw on information from interviews and focus groups we conducted with 3d ACR soldiers to explore the conduct and implications of the Tal’Afar campaign.....
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