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Bezig met laden... Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forcesdoor Linda Robinson
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Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. My thoughts about special forces have changed in reading this book. The many stories of how special forces are deployed gave me a new perspective on all of the work that they do. Reactions to this book were mixed oddly for me. In one hand I enjoyed learning all the details, and the writing is solid. On the other hand I was never drawn into the story in an exciting way. I desperately wanted to read further, but felt like things just dragged on and on. It was a good book, but unfortunately it did not take hold of me. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
Special Forces soldiers are daring, seasoned troops from America's heartland, selected in a tough competition and trained in an extraordinary range of skills. They know foreign languages and cultures and unconventional warfare better than any U.S. fighters, and while they prefer to stay out of the limelight, veteran war correspondent Linda Robinson gained access to their closed world. She traveled with them on the frontlines, interviewed them at length on their home bases, and studied their doctrine, methods and history. In Masters of Chaos she tells their story through a select group of senior sergeants and field-grade officers, a band of unforgettable characters like Rawhide, Killer, Michael T, and Alan -- led by the unflappable Lt. Col. Chris Conner and Col. Charlie Cleveland, a brilliant but self-effacing West Pointer who led the largest unconventional war campaign since Vietnam in northern Iraq. Robinson follows the Special Forces from their first post-Vietnam combat in Panama, El Salvador, Desert Storm, Somalia, and the Balkans to their recent trials and triumphs in Afghanistan and Iraq. She witnessed their secret sleuthing and unsung successes in southern Iraq, and recounts here for the first time the dramatic firefights of the western desert. Her blow-by-blow story of the attack on Ansar al-Islam's international terrorist training camp has never been told before. The most comprehensive account ever of the modern-day Special Forces in action, Masters of Chaos is filled with riveting, intimate detail in the words of a close-knit band of soldiers who have done it all. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)356.16Social sciences Public Administration, Military Science Infantry Organization Special infantry troopsLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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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. ( )