Sublime

Dick Couch offers another of his superb SOF selection and training books with his account of MARSOC’s approach to those issues: Always Faithful, Always Forward: The Forging of a Special Operations Marine (Couch 2015).

Peacetime CEO always has a contingency plan. Wartime CEO knows that sometimes you gotta roll a hard six.

Ross Hall’s The Ranger Book: A History, 1634–2006 (Hall 2007).

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).

Colonel John Boyd’s OODA loop, Three Years in Mississippi, and Herodotus’ The Persian Wars.

In November 1943, Rear Admiral John Hall took command of the 11th Amphibious Force and assumed the responsibility for depositing the Army’s Fifth Corps on the landing site designated as Omaha Beach—nothing less than the most important operation in American history.

He mastered defense matters, read up the classics on strategy, Sun Tzu, Clausewitz, and Liddell Hart. He subscribed to military journals to know the latest in military weaponry. He sent me books and articles, sidelined and flagged, insisting that I must know enough to decide what I had to approve.

Eisenhower enjoyed an exemplary reputation as a staff officer. For eighteen years he had amassed an uninterrupted string of “superior” ratings in jobs of increasing complexity. First with Fox Conner in Panama, then with Pershing, then George Moseley, and finally with MacArthur, he had demonstrated an exceptional capacity to produce under pressure.