Unconventional Warfare: Rebuilding U.S. Special Operations Forces (Rediscovering Government Series)
This remarkable case study, based on personal interviews, congressional records, and other official documents, shows how defense policy is made and how difficult it can be to implement. The primary focus is the decade-long effort to reform the U.S. special operations forces community. After a long struggle "of dramatic highs and lows," this process culminated in legislation creating the Special Operations Command (SOCOM) in 1987. Marquis, a Defense Department employee who first wrote this as a Ph.D. dissertation at Princeton, covers the catastrophic rescue mission in Iran in 1980, Grenada, Panama, Somalia, and Iraq. There are some graphic but brief combat scenes. This amazing story deserves our attention as much as any war.?John J. Yurechko, Georgetown Univ., Washington, D.C.Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.