One Hundred Victories: Special Ops and the Future of American Warfare
Robinson, who has not only written extensively on American special-operations forces but also spent the better part of two years on the ground with them in Afghanistan, has written a book that is sure to appeal to readers of military nonfiction. She begins her story in 2006, at a time in which special-forces commanders and their troops—not all of them, of course, but many—were at a crossroads. Unclear about their goals (this was five years after they were tasked to find Osama bin Laden), unsure of the effectiveness of their procedures (they had sustained some disheartening losses), they were beginning to feel it was time for a new approach, a new way of fighting the war that would minimize American losses and maximize the potential for actually carrying out their half-decade-old mission. The author examines how long-term interaction with Afghan locals—not terrorists, not warriors, just ordinary Afghan citizens—altered the behavior and ideas of the American soldiers and how lessons learned from Afghan police, not to mention the Taliban itself, helped the special-forces troops to create new goals and new ways of achieving them. Ultimately, this isn’t really a story about war; it’s a story about how an organization—one so complex you might almost call it an organism—evolves under pressure and becomes something better and more efficient than it once was. --David Pitt