Sublime

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).

“LeMay says the only way a general can win a modern war is not fight one. Our whole raison d’être was deterrent force. When you don’t deter them any longer, you lose.

soldiered with the Communist leadership that would ultimately wrest control of the country from the Nationalists. While there, he became interested in Chinese guerilla operations against the Japanese, specifically the small-unit, “democratic” leadership model that pushed authority and responsibility down to the most junior levels in small combat

Charles Briscoe and his coauthors (Briscoe 2003) produced an early, official account of U.S. Army Special Operations Forces in Afghanistan: Weapon of Choice.

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

In Washington, the Joint Chiefs of Staff (Ridgway excepted) urged that the United States commit itself to defending the offshore islands and launch air strikes, with tactical nuclear weapons if necessary, against the mainland to break up Communist forces assembling there. Eisenhower said no. “We are not talking now about a brush-fire war,” Ike told