Relentless Strike: Early Review

I got this book as a book on tape to listen to for the long commutes to GMU and back. I later heard of the controversy surrounding it only after beginning to listen to it. It has been very interesting, mostly for its no-frills presentation of the bureaucratic problems of organizing and controlling special operations forces. In particular, I found the origin of Joint Special Operations Command of great interest. Keith Nightingale was apparently the 1980s’ military Zelig figure, as he figures into the founding of JSOC, the origin of Fourth Generation Warfare theory, and apparently also pops up in various places regarding Maneuver Warfare, Boyd, and other related subjects. The description of Nightingale’s briefing regarding JSOC to a hostile military brass is a great piece of bureaucratic theater.

In general, I could have done with more of the management and organizational aspects and less of the tales of derring-do, but I suppose its impossible to find a book about special operations without excessively detailed accounts of badassery sourced to one of America’s numerous, ahem, “quiet professionals” (*cough cough*). If anything Relentless Strike makes me wonder how we are able to do special operations at all given that there is an increasingly large literature of detailed accounts of tactics, operations, and procedures going back at least thirty years now.