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According to the book description of
The Canons of Jihad: Terrorists' Strategy for Defeating America, “Since the 9/11 attacks,
scholars have struggled to help Westerners understand what motivates the jihadi movement. Noting that the best way to understand
jihadists is to ignore statements they release to the West in favor of examining what they say to each other, Jim Lacey provides
a definitive collection of writings that intellectually underpins the movement. Rather than guessing about terrorist motivations
from a Western perspective, readers are offered essays--including those by the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, Hasan al-Banna,
and a leading early member, Sayed Qutb--that define the movement through the eyes of the terrorists themselves. As jihadist
cadres begin to rebuild, Lacey notes that they are turning once again to their original thinkers to justify their actions.
This project is sponsored by the United States Joint Forces Command.
According to the book description of
The Terrorist Perspectives Project: Strategic and Operational Views of Al Qaida and Associated Movements,
“This timely book synthesizes the perspectives of Osama bin Laden and his fellow Salafi jihadists on how to wage war
on their many enemies. A team of experts from the Institute for Defense Analyses working on the Terrorist Perspectives Project
undertook the study in order to help U.S. military and civilian policymakers, planners, and educators better understand terrorists.
In assembling strategic and operational perspectives of Al Qaida and Associated Movements (AQAM), they focused on the Salafi
jihadists intellectual leadership and a sampling of their followers, who together comprise the vanguard of the global jihad
and share a common enemy--the West. This project is sponsored by the United States Joint Forces Command.”
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Jim Lacey is a former U.S. Army infantry
officer and Institute for Defense Analyses analyst where he has written several studies on the war in Iraq and on the Global
War on Terrorism. During the invasion of Iraq, he was an embedded journalist with Time magazine, traveling with the 101st
Airborne Division. Jim Lacey is the author of Takedown: The 3rd Infantry Division's Twenty-One
Day Assault on Baghdad and Pershing; and, a co-author of The Terrorist Perspectives Project: Strategic
and Operational Views of Al Qaida and Associated Movements. Jim Lacey has also edited A
Terrorist's Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri's Islamic Jihad Manifesto and The
Canons of Jihad: Terrorists' Strategy for Defeating America.
According to the book description A
Terrorist's Call to Global Jihad: Deciphering Abu Musab al-Suri's Islamic Jihad Manifesto, “The
U.S. counterintelligence community identifies Abu Musab al-Suri as the most important theorist of the global Islamic jihad
and considers his manifesto to be the most important strategic document produced by al Qaida or any jihadi organization in
more than a decade. But to Americans his 1,600-page manuscript largely consists of incomprehensible, impenetrable Islamic
scholarship. With this publication, defense analyst Jim Lacey delivers a meaningful distillation of al-Suri's Call to
Global Islamic Jihad, a work that has been called the Mein Kampf of the movement. This project is sponsored by the United
States Joint Forces Command.”
According to the book description of
Pershing, “In this persuasive biography, Jim Lacey sheds light on General Pershing's legacy
as the nation's first modern combat commander, setting the standard for today's four-star officers. When the U.S.
entered into WWI in 1917, they did so with inadequate forces. In just over a year, Pershing built and hurled a one million
man army against forty battle-hardened German divisions, defending the hellish Meuse-Argonne and turning the tide of the war.
With focus and clarity, Lacey traces the development of Pershing from Indian fighter, to guerrilla warrior against the Philippines
insurgency to victorious commander in WWI.”
According to the book description
of Takedown: The 3rd Infantry Division's Twenty-One Day Assault on Baghdad, “Over time
the impression has grown that the 2003 invasion of Iraq met with little resistance and that, with few exceptions, the Iraqi
army simply melted away. As this book clearly shows, nothing could be further from the truth. In its drive to capture Baghdad,
the U.S. Army's 3rd Infantry Division was in nearly constant combat for twenty-one days. While Americans were watching
Saddam's statue being torn down on TV, a brigade of the 3rd ID was on the verge of being overrun by Iraqi Republican Guard
units trying to escape north. Told to hold two bridges in his sector, a brigade commander had to blow up one of them because
he did not have the combat power to hold it. The company commander holding the other bridge was so hard pressed that he called on the artillery
to fire their final protective fires a command made only when a unit is in mortal danger and one that had not been given since
Vietnam. Every one of the division's armored vehicles was hit by rockets some taking more than a dozen hits and the fighting
was so fierce at times that entire battalions ran out of ammunition. Nevertheless, when the fighting was finally over, the
3rd ID had destroyed two Iraqi Regular Army divisions and three divisions of the much vaunted Republican Guard.
Takedown tells the little-known
story of what happened to the 3rd ID during its struggle to win Baghdad, a campaign that some call one of the most vicious
in American military history. To offer this firsthand account, Jim Lacey, a former Time magazine reporter embedded with the
1st Brigade of the 101st Airborne Division, draws on extensive interviews that he conducted with the American soldiers involved
as well as access to personal papers and war memoirs. This story is also enriched through his extensive use of interview transcripts
of senior Iraqi army officers along with their personal written recollections. From the Kuwaiti border to the streets of Baghdad,
these dramatic eyewitness descriptions of what went on give readers an accurate look at the brutal engagements in which the
division fought for its life. In
making use of such a wealth of primary source material, Lacey has succeeded in writing a fast paced narrative of the conflict,
backed up by verifiable facts, that shows how modern wars are really fought.”
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