Describes role of the U.S. Army operations on Grenada in October 1983.

Operation URGENT FURY: The Invasion of Grenada, October 1983, prepared by Richard W. Stewart, is an edited extract of Center historian Edgar Raines' larger account of U.S. Army operations on Grenada entitled The Rucksack War: U.S. Army Operational Logistics in Grenada, October-November 1983. The brochure tells the story of the U.S. Army's "no-notice" joint force contingency operation on the island of Grenada. Because of a deteriorating political situation on Grenada after the deposing and execution of the leader of the government by its own military, the perceived need to deal firmly with Soviet and Cuban influence in the Caribbean, and the potential for several hundred U.S. citizens becoming hostages, the Ronald W. Reagan administration launched an invasion of the island with only a few days for the military to plan operations. While the U.S. military's capabilities were never in doubt, the unexpectedly strong Cuban and Grenadian resistance in the first two days of the operation and the host of American military errors in planning, intelligence, communications, and logistics highlighted the dangers of even small contingency operations. As the first joint operation attempted since the end of the Vietnam War, the invasion of Grenada also underscored the problems the U.S. Army faced in trying to work in a joint environment with its Air Force, Navy, and Marine counterparts.

The U.S. Army spent much of the decade after its retreat from Vietnam rebuilding itself into a supremely capable, all-volunteer force. With the application of new doctrine, equipment, and, especially, dynamic leadership at all levels, the Army slowly recovered from that traumatic time. Focused primarily on preparations to counter the Soviet and Warsaw Pact threat to central Europe, the U.S. Army trained hard in conventional operations as enshrined in its primary doctrinal manual, Field Manual 100–5, Operations (1976). Within ten years of the end of U.S. involvement in Vietnam, the Army had rebuilt itself but had only begun to integrate into a joint team capable of fighting in a synchronized multiservice operation. World events, however, have a way of forcing a nation to go to war or, at least, to engage in operations “with the Army it has, and not the Army it wants,” to quote a more contemporary statement of how occurrences have a way of surprising policy makers. In the case of Grenada, an obscure island in the Caribbean, the circumstances resulting from an internal power struggle between Communist leaders spilled over into a short, but intense, contingency operation for the U.S. Army.

In the fall of 1983, arguably the coldest year of the decades-long Cold War, the world's greatest superpower invaded Grenada, a Marxist-led Caribbean nation the size of Atlanta. Why and how this unlikely one-week war was waged was shrouded in secrecy at the time--and has remained so ever since. This book is an overdue reconsideration of Operation Urgent Fury, based on historical evidence that only recently has been revealed in declassified documents, oral history interviews and memoir accounts. This chronological narrative emphasizes the human dimension of a sudden crisis now regarded as the greatest foreign policy challenge of President Ronald Reagan's first term. Because the American intervention was hastily drafted, many snafus and accidents marked the chaotic initial days of the operation. Inevitably it fell to individual soldiers, aviators and sailors to perform heroic acts to make up for faulty intelligence, inadequate communication or poor coordination. This work recounts their inspiring, underreported stories in filling out a more complete portrait of Operation Urgent Fury. The final chapter recounts the invasion's aftereffects, especially the unexpected role it played in Congressional reform of the military for future combat in the Middle East.