Linda Robinson (1)
Autore di Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces
Per altri autori con il nome Linda Robinson, vedi la pagina di disambiguazione.
Sull'Autore
Linda Robinson is a senior writer for U.S. News & World Report.
Opere di Linda Robinson
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Statistiche
- Opere
- 8
- Utenti
- 371
- Popolarità
- #64,992
- Voto
- 3.7
- Recensioni
- 4
- ISBN
- 29
From 2006-today, there's been an increased conflict between the doctrinal Army SF mission (training and using local forces) vs. just using them as a special operations unit (given that especially in Iraq we had so many targets and needed teams to deal with them). This mostly fell to JSOC and the "black" special operations community, and an increased use of Army SF as the kind of elite small infantry team they're not optimal for (they're good, but they're not the absolute best at it, and it misses most of their other capabilities; it's like using a Mac laptop as a server for a moderately sized website -- works great, but you're missing a lot of other missions, and is very expensive in both direct costs and opportunity cost.) To some extent the Army decided to set up larger units and use National Guard/etc. to work with local military forces instead of using Army SF, with the argument that those local military forces were already organized and trained, but as we saw in Iraq and especially Afghanistan, they never really were -- we ended up with lots of "green on blue" violence which probably wouldn't have happened with Army SF running things.
The book was written by a journalist who embedded with specific ODAs, and thus told the stories of individual soldiers (who were largely representative of SF overall), which makes it a more approachable book. I generally prefer the books written by the principals themselves, rather than journalists or outsiders, but Robinson does a very good job presenting information, and it's a longer time scale than most individual careers would have covered (plus, only a very small percentage of the military was involved in any of the conflicts pre-2003). Also a great audiobook format with a good narrator.
Biggest downside is the book is now a bit dated; a lot of things happened from 2005-today, so this is only really a look at how Army SF worked 1989-2005. The Vietnam era was its own thing (and extensively covered); I'm interested in the nadir period of the military as well (post Vietnam to Gulf War I), which I haven't found great books about, and you'd probably want coverage of 2005-2011 at the very least (covering the peak terrorist hunting), if not the post-2011 post-UBL Afghanistan conflict.
Overall, a solid book, and a great introduction to Army Special Forces.… (altro)