"Official history" is a term used with a lot of caution. Generally assembled by committee, official histories theoretically have the potential to be the best histories that can be made because their writers have access to the best information and the have the support of organization leadership. Offsetting those advantages are the risk of command influence on the writers, multiple opportunities for editing by the chain of command, and the general risk of anything produced by a group. The gold standard for official military histories is the US Army "Green Books" for World War II. Composed of dozens of volumes spanning both combat operations and administrative histories, publication of the "Green Books spanned the decades from the 1940's to the 1980's, many volumes benefitting from the passage of time to produce thorough and well-balanced books.

"On Point" is a different kind of history altogether. The US Army views its history programs differently these days in looking for quickly produced works so that lessons learned can be quickly disseminated through the Army. As a result, this book was published within a year of the actions the book describes, a choice that has consequences.

"On Point" is the product of a team effort led by retired Colonel Gregory Fontenot, a retired tank battalion command with Operation Desert Storm experience. My copy of this publication is from the U.S. Naval Institute Press copyrighted in 2005. The original book, published by the Government Printing Office (GPO) in 2004, was printed in color; the USNI version is done in grayscale. Beginning with a forward by U.S. Central Command's General Tommy Franks, commander of the theater for Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF), "On Point" contains 539 pages written in a style familiar to anyone who has served in the military in the last 30 years. The book's arrangement is unconventional for a history as the Army expects this publication to be instructional for those soldiers who did not participate in OIF. What that means is that the book's introduction contains information more usually seen in a conclusion. This practice is in keeping with Department of Defense (DOD) briefing standards of the day where one puts the "bottom line up front" or BLUF.

There are eight chapters altogether. Chapter 1 provides the Army's back story post-Vietnam through Operation Enduring Freedom (post 9/11 invasion of Afghanistan), speaking to all of the changes in technology, doctrine, and leadership over that span of time. Chapter 2 depicts all the preparations for OIF, from theater preparation to unit deployments. Chapters 3 through 6 constitute the operational history of the war. The story jumps around the various operational areas within Iraq: the main drive up the Euphrates valley, the Kurdish north, and the sandy wastes of Western Iraq, but the flow is chronological within those areas. Chapter 7 is about the implications of the OIF campaign on the Army, a very detailed analysis of the points brought up in the book's introduction. There is a very brief Chapter 8, Transition, necessary because it was clear that the insurgency in Iraq would require substantial Army effort in the months and years to come--in other words, Operation Iraqi Freedom was not over despite President George W. Bush's declaration of the end of major combat operations on 1 May 2003. Following Chapter 8 there is a section about the team that put "On Point" together, followed by a substantial OIF order of battle that include the US Marine Corps contribution to OIF, the I Marine Expeditionary Force. There is an extensive glossary, most needed in a work swamped by acronyms, a bibliography, and an index. There are endnotes for each chapter.

As far as rating this history, I am in a quandary. On the one hand, the quality of the writing is superb. Once one gets through the Pentagonese, this is a book that captures the campaign well and provides significant and useful analysis. The authors do not avoid controversy, noting the significant waste of resources looking for nonexistent weapons of mass destruction that served as a major catalyst for the conflict. At the time this book was drafted, that WMD stance was not embraced by the Bush administration, so it took some courage to introduce the point in this book. The authors were less direct in their justifiable criticism of the Office of the Secretary of Defense and US CENTCOM, but then once can't really criticize the man writing the Forward for the book either.

On the other hand, this printing of "On Point" suffers greatly from its illustrations. The Chief of Staff of the Army wanted this historian team to put together an OIF briefing fairly quickly after 1 May 2003. The briefing slides, done in PowerPoint, became the illustrations for the book. While expedient, the problem is that the smaller fonts used in the slides are unreadable to the unaided human eye, especially for the maps, as there are no maps created exclusively for this publication. This situation, while bad in the original color GPO printing, grows much worse in the grayscale USNI release. Digital images are poorly rendered, and the maps are downright unreadable. As a result, the complex military operations so completely described by the book's authors lose their clarity.

If I rated this book solely on textual content, I would give it the full five stars. However, with the inclusion of the briefing slides, I reluctantly give it three and a half stars. ( )