Marc Ambinder
Autore di The Brink: President Reagan and the Nuclear War Scare of 1983
Sull'Autore
Marc Ambinder is a highly regarded reporter, DuPont Award-winning television producer, and teacher at the University of Southern California's Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Ambinder was a White House correspondent for National journal, the politics editor of The Atlantic, and an mostra altro on-air analyst and consultant for CBS News. He spent four years at ABC News, covering politics and policy. He lives in Los Angeles. mostra meno
Opere di Marc Ambinder
Etichette
Informazioni generali
- Altri nomi
- AMBINDER, Marc
- Data di nascita
- 1978
- Sesso
- male
- Nazionalità
- USA
Utenti
Recensioni
Potrebbero anche piacerti
Autori correlati
Statistiche
- Opere
- 3
- Utenti
- 141
- Popolarità
- #145,671
- Voto
- 3.7
- Recensioni
- 8
- ISBN
- 10
- Lingue
- 1
- Preferito da
- 1
It is always interesting how basic tenets of combat get re-invented and then lost, and so on in cycles. This is what happened with JSOC - in a move very much like one taken by Israel, steps were made to make a nimble and deadly corps capable of striking wherever it is necessary. I mention Israel here because this country is in almost constant war footing with its neighbors from the very beginning and to be able to cope with it, Israel had to create force able to match the more numerous enemies. And this happened by combining all the intelligence and combat resources at the disposal of relatively small security force.
It takes a very capable commanders (generals Flynn and McChrystal) to break the inter-agency barriers and pursue the goal of creating small and versatile strike force. When they finally enabled the forces to share information and participate in combined operations JSOC started to grow and its special operations capabilities grew almost exponentially. They pretty soon became force multiplier and enabled the rest of deployed forces to fight more efficiently.
Author shows how rivalry remained but (hah, could not guess) on management level while on operational level things continued to flourish.
Final few chapters tackle the question of where is JSOC aiming for in the future. Heavy utilization in CT operations seem to be a sole focuse of the entire command. But in light of events after the book was published it is visible that JSOC certainly has place in the modern world. But with such a capable force extra level of care is required to avoid issues that happened in the past (1980's events described in excellent book "Secret Warriors", especially Iran Contra affair that blemished US SOCOM for decades).
I have to admit that I am slightly surprised by some of the comments where people are shocked by covert JSOC operations outside of Middle East (namely China). It is like being surprised by India's role in Sri Lanka conflict with Tamil's, or constant Pakistan's paramilitary operations in Punjab, or both Pakistan's and India's secret war with China, China's covert wars especially against ROC, or North/South Korea infiltrations, European stand behind armies, or [not so] secret war against narco cartels in Central and South America....... and so on and so on. I like it when people decide to think that nations love each other. There are only and there will be only alliances and these are always temporary (remember the CIA industrial espionage affair in France at the start of 90's). And forces used to combat these silent wars are forces exactly like JSOC.
Excellent book, highly recommended to everyone interested in military and special operations in particular.… (altro)