Customer Reviews

Blood Warriors: American Military Elites

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I would urge anyone with an interest in the Special Forces to buy this book. I am in the Army (actually writing this from afghanistan)and have read many military books and yet this one still had plenty of new things that i never hear before. President John Kennedys trip to Fort Bragg early in his term as well as the fact that Winston Churchill himself chose to call his elite troops "Commando" are just two examples of the kind of interesting details you will find in Michael Lannings pages.I liked the Daily Training schedule he included in the appendix and if someone is thinking of trying out for the Army Rangers,Delta Force or Navy Seals you would do well to have the information in this book.Lastly i wanted to mention the fact that you get the chapters set up where you get the history of a given unit first and then you read what the units responsibilities are Today.

It's difficult to believe that this book was written by the same man who wrote the excellent (if a bit dry) books about the Vietnam era Recon Marines and LRRPs. I get the impression that the book was quickly written to take advantage of the recent interest in the special operations elites of the US militaries.

Firstly, there is nothing new here at all. The background of the units might be of interest for those who don't want to buy a book dedicated to the individual units. However, it is quite abbreviated. The coverage of the units in the current day is even worse, there is nothing in there that is not covered more completely and for free on the web at sites like specialoperations.com or what have you. In addition, several of the entries, most notably the Delta Force one, looks like all of the research was done by reading older books on the subject already out there. The old story of Delta Force's racism is brought up again, which has as its sole source a poorly written special operations overview by an Italian author whose title I won't dignify by repeating. The fact that people, including former black Delta Force members have denied this is not even mentioned. The fact that most special operations forces have low nmumbers of minorities is never mentioned, except in the SF section where it is carefully explained away socially.

This book may have some use if you know nothing about these units and would like a relatively cheap primer. However, there are vastly better books already out there so save your money. And that is my main complaint with the book. There are already better books out there that do the same overview of America's units. Douglass Waller's "The Commandos" and David Bohrer's "America's Special Forces" come to mind. In addition, it repeats myths as fact, seemingly taken out of older, innaccurate books. In short, it's a book that tries to do what other books have already done and it does it poorly. It is simply another superficial "quickie overview of all of America's elite units or at least the ones with name recognition" book in a shelf already crowded with those books. From an author like this, who is simply the gold standard for special forces books along with Kevin Dockery, it is a true letdown. Also, the repeating every or two pages of the term "blood warriors" gets old, awfully fast. This seems to be the case of an exceptional author who, in this case, wrote a poor book.

Matt