Steel in the City: Part 2

In the second installment of "Steel in the City," Lt. Col. (Ret.) Scott Rutter and Matthew Paul welcome a special guest: Lt. Col. (Ret.) Jimmy Lee, former commander of the only tank company team in Task Force 2-7 Infantry during Operation Iraqi Freedom. A decorated combat veteran, Lee brings a first-hand perspective on what it meant to lead a company team through the streets of Baghdad in March and April 2003.Lee puts you in the turret for the march to Baghdad: the training that built his combined-arms team before the fight, the one-page op order he used to invade a country, the night four tanks got stuck outside Objective Hannah while the division pushed north without them and the letter he wrote to a soldier's mother while still in combat.Lee warns that today's Army has drifted—units avoid urban terrain at combat training centers and COIN-era instincts bleed into large-scale combat training. His prescription: get infantry on the ground, get combined arms into the city, maintain momentum and accept that war is ugly. He closes with a pointed observation that the best mission command he ever saw wasn't on a screen—it was two generals on a Humvee with a paper map asking commanders face-to-face: "What do you see? What do you need?"