Black Ops
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- $21.99
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- $21.99
Publisher Description
A hard-hitting history of special-forces operations over the past fifty years in the United States, United Kingdom, and Israel.
After eight challenging years in Afghanistan, the new U.S. strategy, aimed at winning hearts and minds rather than search-and-destroy, refocuses the conflict on Special Forces: unorthodox soldiers who work outside of traditional military forces to combine secret military operations with nation building.
Tony Geraghty, an expert author in this field for almost thirty years, unveils the extraordinary evolution of this refined style of war-making from its roots in anti-guerrilla warfare in Ireland and Palestine, by way of the creation of the C.I.A., the S.A.S., the Green Berets, America’s Office of Strategic Services (O.S.S.), and many others, including Mossad.
This history is more than a tale of derring-do, although James Bond-like characters stalk every page. It is a sweeping examination of Black Ops at a time when they represent the future of an open-ended global war against terrorism.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Geraghty, an expert in the evolution of war tactics, explores the building blocks that propelled the creation of special forces wings within the American, English, and Israeli military. Geraghty begins with an examination of tactics used in two conflicts: Vietnam and Afghanistan. Initially viewed as primitive by the Americans, the Vietnamese soldiers had success because of their knowledge of the jungle terrain and their experience with militaristic infiltration of towns and villages. Geraghty then turns his attention to military veterans like Green Beret captain Charlie Beckwith, whose idea to create "a force of doers" came to him after he took part in a British SAS operation in 1962 (exhaustively detailed in Beckwith's own book, Delta Force, as well as many others). In Geraghty's comprehensive view, the evolution of secretive military might was a movement from fringe to standard operating procedure. He touches on everything from the Bay of Pigs to the Afghan drug trade, and details operations both successful and failed (some famously), but ultimately covers familiar ground. Photos.
