Extreme Ownership: How U.S. Navy SEALs Lead and Win

Now I was being told that Task Unit Bruiser—my friends, my brothers,
these highly trained and motivated men—would have to fight alongside
conventional Iraqi Army soldiers, arguably some of the worst combat
troops in the world. Most Iraqi soldiers were poor, uneducated,
untrained, undernourished, and unmotivated. With dire economic
conditions across Iraq, many simply joined for a paycheck. When the
going got tough, they often deserted (as we later witnessed).
All of the soldiers had, to their credit, risked their lives to be part of
the Iraqi Army. Often their families were targeted by terrorists, their
lives threatened while the soldier deployed to fight in a distant Iraqi city.
Of course, there were some better soldiers among them. But the
competent and capable Iraqi soldier was the rare exception, not the rule.
The vast majority of soldiers in the Iraqi Army, as fighting men, were far
below the standard expected of any military, and certainly far below
what was needed to take on and defeat Iraq’s growing insurgency.
Back in 2003, the U.S.-led Coalition Provisional Authority disbanded
Saddam Hussein’s Iraqi Army completely. It then had to be rebuilt from
the ground up. The new Iraqi Army’s training was disorganized, ad hoc,
and scattered, at best. Some Iraqi soldiers had almost no training.
Officers often bribed or bought their way into their rank. Young enlisted
Iraqi soldiers’ primary goal was survival, not victory. Physically, they
were weak. Most Iraqi soldiers were incapable of doing even a few push-
ups or jumping jacks. Tactically, they were dangerous and unsound,
regularly violating basic safety procedures.
Worse, some of the Iraqi soldiers had questionable loyalty to the
coalition and to the new government of Iraq. Some Sunni soldiers
remained loyal to Saddam. But most Iraqi soldiers were Shiites, and
many of these saw Muqtada al-Sadr, the fiery cleric hostile to Americans