To Dare and to Conquer: Special Operations and the Destiny of Nations, from Achilles to Al Qaeda Book

The author, a former Marine, a government consultant, and a professor at Georgetown, offers a dramatic thesis: that "special operations" - daring, small, commando missions led by people who think outside the box and not the massive thrusts of conventional armies - have repeatedly changed the course of human events. To prove this, Leebaert takes the reader on a fascinating tour of Western military history, from the siege of Troy through the 2003 invasion of Iraq. He not only chronicles military history but also provides readers with a political, diplomatic, technical and cultural tide of events; taken together, this rush of facts, states, empires and timelines constitutes nothing less than a (sometimes overwhelming) overview of Western civilization over 600 pages. (There's no Sun Tzu, Genghis Khan or Tamerlane, and little on Soviet forces.) The reader is introduced to Ulysses and Gideon, Alexander the Great (and his undreamt of scaling of a mountain pass guarded by Oxyartes) and the Roman Empire, of course, but also meets the Carolingians, the Byzantines, the Crusaders, the Huguenots, Joan of Arc, Cortez, Pizarro (recast as special operators) and the pirates of the Caribbean. After more than 250 pages, we arrive at the American Revolution, Napoleon Bonaparte, the Civil War and, by around page 450, World War II.

This shows admirable sweep; Leebaert spends almost as much time putting the conflicts in context as he does describing the special operations themselves. (I found myself wishing I could read a whole chapter about a mad brave escapade that Leebaert devotes a few lines or a paragraph to, but the author, and the sweep of history, moves remorselessly on.) Within the context of each era, he offers nuggets of fascinating, bold, decisive actions, from taking down castles to robbing Spanish gold under false flags to Nazis landing gliders on Eben Emael, all of which attest not only to soldiers' ingenuity and daring but also to the value of the unexpected in military operations. Finally, Leebaert concludes with a dry, understated, but nevertheless scathing attack on the self-professed experts and armchair generals of the futile Iraq invasion. Leebaert uses his dozens of examples to assert that a few men with imagination, self-sufficiency, a knowledge of psyops, guile, a lay of the land, stealth, speed, unpredictability, imagination, a willingness to divert from the rule book, and clever use of the fear factor can change the history of the world (one prominent example is the assassination of Pearl Harbor raid architect Isoroku Yamamoto). However, he has some impressive (and depressing) things to say about the track record of special ops when intelligence agencies are not properly aligned, when control is disputed, when patience and language training and planning are tossed out in favor of flooding the market with commandos. While it's clear from the book that special ops are no panacea, the lessons it preaches on the subject - that cowboy diplomacy, brutal tactics, and imperial arrogance are counter-effective and antithetical to the special ops philosophy - are worth hearing.