Record, Jeffrey. Beating Goliath: Why Insurgencies Win. Dulles, VA: Potomac, 2007.
Neiberg, Proceedings 133.9 (Sep. 2007), declares that this book's "brevity and clarity of writing make it accessible" to a wide audience. The author stresses the role of external assistance to the success of insurgencies. He attributes America's lack of success against insurgencies (indeed, lack of adeptness) to a failure to think beyond the use of force and adjust to this form of warfare.
Risher, Paulette M. [MAJGEN/USA] "U.S. Special Operations Command: Effectively Engaged Today, Framing the Future Fight." Joint Force Quarterly 40 (1st Quarter 2006): 49-53. [http://www.dtic.mil/doctrine/jel/jfq_pubs/issue40.htm]
"U.S. Special Operations Command is unique because it can act as a supporting or supported command, and it has its own budget authority and program objective memorandum. Its relatively small number of assigned forces (49,000) and portion of the defense budget (1.7 percent) offer a tremendous advantage: the abilty to combine a service-like force provider role with a supported war-fighter role."
Robinson, Linda. Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces. New York: PublicAffairs, 2004. 2005. [pb]
According to DKR, AFIO WIN 46-04 (13 Dec. 2004), this work "chronicles the role of the U.S. Army's Special Forces over the past 15 years and its operations in Somalia, the first Gulf war, the Balkans, Afghanistan and the Gulf again.... Robinson provides a good backgrounder on a type of military operators that are likely to have increasing importance in America's 21st century conflicts."
Keiser, Proceedings, Jan. 2006, expresses disappointment over "the absence of endnotes and references." Nevertheless, the author "presents a first-class examination" of Army Special Forces soldiers.
Robinson, Linda. "Men on a Mission: U.S. Special Forces Are Retooling for the War on Terror. Here's Their Plan." U.S. News & World Report, 11 Sep. 2006, 36-38.
The comments of Director of the Center for Special Operations Lt. Gen. Dell Dailey and SOCOM Commander Gen. Doug Brown stress the importance of both "black" (hunter-killer) and "white" (training and civil affairs) special operations.
Robinson, Linda. "The Men in the Shadows." U.S. News & World Report, 19 May 2003, 16-20.
"[S]pecial operations forces in Iraq played a key role in America's emerging model of precision, lightning-fast warfare. With the premium it puts on the use of real-time intelligence, pinpoint weapons targeting, and rapid transition from attack mode to stability operations, this new style of warfare plays perfectly to the unique skills America's special operators have been honing for years.... [In Iraq,] America's most elite fighting forces ... helped change not only the pace and prosecution of the war ... but the way America will fight an enemy force in the future."
Robinson, Linda. "Walking Point: The Commandos Taking the Lead in the War on Terrorism Suddenly Have Some New Rules." U.S. News & World Report, 18 Oct. 2004, 46-50.
"In a rare visit to SOCOM [Special Operations Command] headquarters in Tampa, U.S. News was given a detailed briefing on SOCOM's new structure and missions, as [Gen. Bryan "Doug"] Brown prepares to make his special operators the point of the spear in the terrorism war."
Includes sidebar: "The View from the Inside," pp. 48-49.
Rothstein, Hy S. Afghanistan and the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare. Annapolis, MD: Naval Institute Press, 2006.
Maitre, Air & Space Power Journal 21.3 (Fall 2007), notes that the author is "a retired career special-forces officer with 30 years’ active duty." His "concise, well-documented review of the literature, which defines the context of special operations and the arena of unconventional warfare, transforms several vague definitions into clear terminology." Rothstein "argues that despite significant investment in developing special operations, the military lacks the institutional capability of engaging opponents with irregular methods. Employing SOF in a mission does not automatically constitute a special operation."
For Berger, et al, I&NS 22.6 (Dec. 2007), "Rothstein does an excellent job of laying out the requirements for conducting unconventional warfare and uses his analysis of operations in Afghanistan to expose the failures of the US military, more specifically, of US special operations forces.... The only major shortcoming of the book is that it focuses primarily on the infrastructure requirements of an unconventional capability."
Ryan, Mike. Special Operations in Iraq. Barnsley, UK: Pen & Sword Books, 2005.
From advertisement: "This sensational book reveals the ... story of the Special Force units of the Coalition, such as the SAS, SBS and Delta Force.... It describes their missions behind the lines from the early days, well before hostilities opened formally.... The book also covers operations such as the spectacular rescue of POW Private Lynch and the secret operations to target Saddam and other leaders of his regime."
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