Sublime

commanders. Daniel Green’s In the Warlords’ Shadow (Green 2017)

Jerry Boykin’s memoir, Never Surrender: A Soldier’s Journey to the Crossroads of Faith and Freedom, is notable because he rose higher in the Pentagon’s policy apparatus than most SOF officers and thus offers insights on the political aspects of managing SOF from Washington, DC (Boykin 2008).

General Marshall, who had been installed as chief of staff nine months earlier, was already trimming deadwood root and branch. His first target was the bloated square division of World War I.25 As early as 1920, General Pershing had urged the square division be scrapped in favor of a 15,000-man “triangular” structure of three regiments, which he be

Berets Waged an Unconventional War Against the Taliban to Win in Afghanistan’s Deadly Pech Valley and Ann Tyson’s American Spartan: The Promise, the Mission, and the Betrayal of Special Forces Major Jim Gant (Fry 2017; Tyson, 2015).

David Martin and John Walcott’s Best Laid Plans: The Inside Story of America’s War Against Terrorism (Martin and Walcott 1988).

Marquis, Susan L. Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces. Washington, DC: Brookings Institution, 1997.

Peacetime CEO sets big, hairy, audacious goals. Wartime CEO is too busy fighting the enemy to read management books written by consultants who have never managed a fruit stand.

Although appointed to oversee the deployment of an additional 30,000 troops to Afghanistan, the choice of McChrystal belies the popular notion of a wholesale shift to a less kinetic campaign intent on building relations with the local population. In his earlier role, McChrystal had led Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) for 5 years; this was t