Every so often a book lands on a force developer’s desk at exactly the right moment, and Damn Fine Soldiers is one of them. Lieutenant Colonel Scott Rutter — who commanded Task Force 2-7 Infantry in the opening campaign of Operation Iraqi Freedom — and his co-author, then-Captain Matt Paul, have written a firsthand account of the 21-day, roughly 400-mile attack from the Kuwaiti border to Baghdad in the spring of 2003: eight battles, through As Samawah and the Karbala Gap, ending with the seizure of the airport on the capital’s doorstep. In the interest of full disclosure, Scott is a colleague who was generous enough to sign a copy at AUSA this month.
What makes this book essential reading now is its timing against the Army’s own moment. After two decades oriented on counterinsurgency, the force is re-centering on large-scale combat operations — and Damn Fine Soldiers is a vivid, granular case study in what a modernized heavy force does when it has to fight at continental scale and tempo. Task Force 2-7 was a combined-arms battalion task force: mechanized infantry, armor, engineers, and fires organized and fought as a single system rather than a collection of branches. Rutter shows that integration working under the hardest possible conditions, and in doing so he hands today’s requirements community a living picture of the capability it is trying to rebuild.
The book’s real value is in the seams — the places where modernization either holds together or comes apart. Scott Rutter and Matt Paul capture how the task force synchronized Bradley Fighting Vehicles and M1 Abrams Main Battle Tanks, massed indirect fires, and brought in close air support while moving faster and farther than any American heavy force had since Desert Storm. They are equally good on the then-emerging edge of battlefield digitization and shared situational awareness that let widely dispersed companies keep a common picture across hundreds of miles of advance. For readers who spend their days arguing about network requirements and combined-arms formations, this is that same argument told through steel, fuel, and ground truth.
Just as valuable, they refuse to skip the unglamorous half of modernization. The sustainment story — fuel, maintenance, recovery, and the logistics tail that makes a 400-mile armored offensive physically possible — gets the attention it deserves, because they understand that an army modernizes its sustainment force or it does not modernize at all. And underneath the equipment sits the human engine: the training, discipline, and readiness that turn platforms into combat power. The book is, among other things, a quiet argument that the most important modernization a unit does happens long before first contact.
“An army modernizes its logistics and its leaders, or it does not modernize at all.”
As a leadership text it is simply moving. Rutter writes about his soldiers with the clear-eyed affection of a commander who brought them to war and did not bring all of them home. The brotherhood, resilience, and sacrifice at the center of the book are not sentiment; they are the reason the hardware worked. That is a lesson the Army’s current formations, standing up new commands and fielding new systems, would do well to keep in front of them.
For the Dispatch’s readers — anyone thinking about force design, combined-arms formations, and what the return to large-scale ground combat really demands, which is exactly the conversation running through this year’s AUSA floor — Damn Fine Soldiers is both a gripping campaign narrative and a practical reference. This book should be part of every ground combat leader’s library.