No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units from Iran to Afghanistan

Rating:
Summary: Accurate Insights
Review: "No Room for Error" is a good read and provides hard hitting insights into the politics of U.S. special operations units and a glimpse at the superbly trained Special Tactics forces. These units have demonstrated their expertise in various conflicts despite Air Force organizational negligence and service parochialism on the part of the Army. Carney and Schemmer captured tremendous exploits without resorting to euphemisms used by other Special Operations books. A major unanswered question: Why aren't there more of these AF Special Tactics units? Note that I'm a former Special Tactics member enabling me to affirm the accuracy of the book.

Rating:
Summary: The credit they deserve
Review: Along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in the Mekong delta, and in the air, the U.S. military's special operations forces played key roles in Vietnam. After being neglected by the regular military bureaucracy for most of the quarter-century that followed, U.S. special ops forces finally got the appreciation and credit they deserved when a few hundred very smart and superbly-trained men engineered the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. This book is largely about the period in between Vietnam and the post-9/11campaign, and it fills an important gap in the literature. It focuses particularly on the U.S. Air Force's Special Tactics Units, who are an essential part of the larger special ops picture, and who make many missions possible through their extraordinary skils at getting teams in and out of dangerous territory, often at night and without being detected by the enemy. This book is full of revelations, and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the field.

Rating:
Summary: Interesting, but might be better as a Documentary Movie
Review: I'm about 2/3 done with this book. I previously read Black Hawk Down, and picked up this book next. While Black Hawk Down makes you feel like you are in the middle of the action, this book reads more like a documentary. You never quite feel for the heroes the author writes about; you never quite understand who they are, what their personalities are like, are what these people have gone through. Instead, its almost as if you are watching a black-and-white movie and are set far back away from the action. There's a lot of facts, and a lot of names. Names of people that not too many people (at least today) know about. The main point of the book seems to be that Special Operations has really grown up in America, and that frankly it was really disorganized before.