A book I picked up during my recent trip to DC, Derek Leebaert's To Dare And To Conquer, is a prime illustration of the difference between useless and useful forms of military history.
For someone like me, Leebaert's book was irresistible. A broad historical survey, from ancient to modern times, of special operations? I'm there!
Unfortunately, Leebaert doesn't deliver what he promises. Reading this book, you might get a feel for some important elements of special operations. However, you have to wade through a swamp of muddy ideas and vague historical allusions. When you finally arrive at the book's ill-defined destination, you won't find much of substance there.
How to write useless history
Leebaert undercuts his own argument almost from the beginning. It's clear that he knows that special operations are different, just as special operations forces (SOFs) are different from other units. For example, he observes that conventional military leaders have a love-hate relationship with SOFs. Given their elite status, SOFs often appear as the tool for every tough job, when in fact they're best suited for a particular set of tough jobs. Small, mobile, creative units may be good at raids, rescues, and psychological warfare, but they're not the right forces for taking and holding every well-defended position.
Leebaert has obviously read a creditable number of books about special operations, to reach this kind of insight. However, he doesn't share the benefit of his scholarship with his own readers. His "theory" of special operations is a muddle of characteristics ("picked men") and principles (the element of surprise) that could apply to a lot more than just the SOFs.
When his book moves from special operators to special operations, Leebaert gets even more confusing. Special operations encompass tactical and operational techniques that, over time, increasingly became the province of a specialized kind of military unit. Leebaert correctly cites this trend, but makes it unclear what these specialized units are doing that makes them different.
Not every instance of surprise is special operations. Therefore, it's pointless for Leebaert to cite Hannibal's victory at Lake Trasimine, when a hidden detachment of Carthaginians helped surround and destroy a Roman army, as an instance of "special operations." Nor does every attempt to play on the fears of the enemy qualify as a "special operation." Soviet soldiers infiltrating behind German lines to confuse, harass, and terrify the enemy achieved the same results as, years earlier, the Nazi armored spearheads. What makes one operation "special," and the other not?
Without a clear, precise definition of special operations undergirding it, Leebaert's book devolves into a mishmash of historical anecdotes. However, even these bits of information are allusions, not full accounts of operations like the raid on the Tirpitz. You'll have to go elsewhere for these case studies.
Why, then, would you read To Dare And To Conquer? Good question. It provides neither a carefully-delineated theory of special operations, nor illustrative examples of this theory put into practice.
How to write useful history
For a stark contrast with Leebaert, check out William McRaven's Spec Ops. McRaven's prose may be less arty than Leebaert's, but he has a lot more useful information to convey.
Spec Ops starts with a simple, clear definition of special operations. Here's how they achieve specific military objectives in a particular way. You might have to puzzle over his diagrams, but after a couple of tries, they make sense. For example, his "inverted pyramid" of special operations--planning at the bottom; security and repetition in the middle; surprise, speed, and purpose at the top--is really a cone of events, radiating from planning through execution.
The rest of his book provides eight case studies, from the daring German glider attack on the Belgian fortress of Eben Emael, to the Israeli rescue raid at Entebbe. Each case study provides enough information that you actually learn something about the event, if you're not already familiar with it. Even if you're already an expert on, say, the British raid on the Nazi-held port at Saint-Nazaire, you get McRaven's analysis applied to this operation. Here's where the operation followed the theory of special operations; here's where it didn't. Here's why it succeeded; here's why it failed.
This approach makes McRaven's book useful to a variety of audiences. Military planners can use it to re-think the doctrine that goes into training and manuals. Military historians can better understand the reasons why one side won, and the other side lost. An interested public can better appreciate when the nation should contemplate sending its "picked men" into combat, and when it shouldn't.
Now that's a book worth reading.
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