Sublime

Yet when it comes to the great captains of irregular warfare, the same can hardly be said. While there are many accounts of daring commando raids, and more thoughtful works that explore the complex relationships between elite military advisors and friendly indigenous fighters, there is precious little study of the principles that might be distilled

Louis Botha,

Kiras, James D. Special Operations and Strategy: From World War II to the War on Terrorism. London: Routledge, 2006.

David Hogan offers an historical overview of army Ranger tensions from World War II up and through the early 1990s: Raiders or Elite Infantry? The Changing Role of the U.S. Army Rangers from Dieppe to Grenada (Hogan 1992).

The principal assault (code-named BAGRATION, for the great Czarist general killed at Borodino in 1812) was directed at Army Group Center, some 700,000 troops who held the midsection of the German front. Marshal Georgy Zhukov, who coordinated the attack, committed 166 Red Army divisions—2.4 million troops, 5,300 aircraft, and 5,200 tanks—twice that

Fresh from the first successful ground reconnaissance in the Central Pacific Theater, General Smith sent forth his VAC Recon Company like the twelve spies into Canaan. At Majuro Atoll, one of the VAC Recon platoon commanders, Lieutenant Harvey Weeks—a former Yale wrestler, former attorney, and former enlisted man—captured the Japanese commander wit