Sublime

James D. Kiras, a student of Colin Gray’s, challenged Gray’s generally optimistic treatment of SOF strategic utility using two case studies of raids from World War II in Special Operations and Strategy (Kiras 2006).

Taylor was soon off the reservation, arguing that the United States should abandon massive retaliation and the New Look in favor of what he called Flexible Response. Much to Eisenhower’s consternation, Taylor argued that a future war between the United States and the Soviet Union could be fought with conventional weapons.

They justify military humanism ‘in the name of protecting freedom, human rights and democracy even when it is pursued unilaterally by a self-appointed imperialist power’ such as the US.38 More broadly, it is hard not to conclude with Chandler that ‘the roots of today’s human rights-based humanitarianism lie in the growing consensus of support for

how far can we go in the rightful defense of our Western values without abandoning them along the way? My fictional chief of the British Service—I called him Control—had no doubt of the answer:

no more need to have them enforce our contracts.

The study, Improving the Understanding of Special Operations: A Case History Analysis,