Masters of Chaos: The Secret History of the Special Forces

This is a great overview of Special Forces (specifically that is Army Special Forces, not Special Operations Forces generally), from the late 1980s (Panama invasion) to 2004 (early Iraq war and occupation). I'm pretty familiar with Army SF (lived/worked with them for a while in Iraq; structurally, probably the best designed part of the US military), and it was interesting particularly to learn about the 90s SF (which I didn't know much about), and their use in Panama.

From 2006-today, there's been an increased conflict between the doctrinal Army SF mission (training and using local forces) vs. just using them as a special operations unit (given that especially in Iraq we had so many targets and needed teams to deal with them). This show more mostly fell to JSOC and the "black" special operations community, and an increased use of Army SF as the kind of elite small infantry team they're not optimal for (they're good, but they're not the absolute best at it, and it misses most of their other capabilities; it's like using a Mac laptop as a server for a moderately sized website -- works great, but you're missing a lot of other missions, and is very expensive in both direct costs and opportunity cost.) To some extent the Army decided to set up larger units and use National Guard/etc. to work with local military forces instead of using Army SF, with the argument that those local military forces were already organized and trained, but as we saw in Iraq and especially Afghanistan, they never really were -- we ended up with lots of "green on blue" violence which probably wouldn't have happened with Army SF running things.

The book was written by a journalist who embedded with specific ODAs, and thus told the stories of individual soldiers (who were largely representative of SF overall), which makes it a more approachable book. I generally prefer the books written by the principals themselves, rather than journalists or outsiders, but Robinson does a very good job presenting information, and it's a longer time scale than most individual careers would have covered (plus, only a very small percentage of the military was involved in any of the conflicts pre-2003). Also a great audiobook format with a good narrator.

Biggest downside is the book is now a bit dated; a lot of things happened from 2005-today, so this is only really a look at how Army SF worked 1989-2005. The Vietnam era was its own thing (and extensively covered); I'm interested in the nadir period of the military as well (post Vietnam to Gulf War I), which I haven't found great books about, and you'd probably want coverage of 2005-2011 at the very least (covering the peak terrorist hunting), if not the post-2011 post-UBL Afghanistan conflict.

Overall, a solid book, and a great introduction to Army Special Forces. show less

It just isn’t very well written. It also feels extremely credulous and worshipful. It seems to take American exceptionalism for granted, asks no or very few hard questions about the ethics and responsibilities of the use of such forces. With a straight face she reports about how American troops poised to invade Iraq on a flimsy pretext thought of themselves as comparable to the men who landed at Europe to end the prior big outbreak of fascism. That’s an absolute obscenity.

In short, it’s close to propaganda.

America’s special forces are indeed impressive and the people in them are unique. None of what I said about this book casts doubt on any of that. This just isn’t a good book.

1.5 stars. There are many better books on this show more topic. show less

My thoughts about special forces have changed in reading this book. The many stories of how special forces are deployed gave me a new perspective on all of the work that they do.
Reactions to this book were mixed oddly for me. In one hand I enjoyed learning all the details, and the writing is solid. On the other hand I was never drawn into the story in an exciting way. I desperately wanted to read further, but felt like things just dragged on and on. It was a good book, but unfortunately it did not take hold of me.