Mark Moyar - Oppose Any Foe: The Rise of America’s Special Operations Forces

Mark Moyar has written an important history of US Special Operations Forces that eloquently records their recent rise in prominence. In this well-referenced and highly readable book, Moyar highlights the chronic challenges that Special Operations Forces have faced in working for conventional commanders and describes the limits of the military instrument in its current configuration in achieving US foreign-policy objectives. He shows the need for fresh thinking on how America conducts its own irregular warfare activities and a better understanding by policymakers and their senior military advisors on what is possible through military force.

Charles T. Cleveland, Lieutenant General (ret.), commander of the United States Army Special Operations Command, 20122015

Historian Mark Moyar weaves together nuggets of history from Special Operations past to create an in-depth account of Americas elite forces. But Oppose Any Foes best part comes at the end. Moyar offers advice to future Special Operations Forces. Recommended reading for the current administration and future SOF leaders.

Kevin Maurer, coauthor of No Easy Day: The Firsthand Account of the Mission that Killed Osama Bin Laden

It is exceptional to find a writer who has the diligence and depth of the careful scholar, with the skill to tell a rattling good talebut Mark Moyar is that author. This is a masterly account of the rise of American Special Forces, a compelling account not just of the derring-do, but the Washington politics and organizational rivalries that went into forging the tip of the American armed forces spear.

Eliot A. Cohen, Robert E. Osgood Professor of Strategic Studies, Johns Hopkins SAIS, and author of The Big Stick

Simply put, Oppose Any Foe is now the single best account available of US Special Operations Forces from their creation in World War Two to todays brushfire wars. An accomplished military historian, author Mark Moyar writes with the precision of a scholar and the vibrancy of a journalist. Moyars sweeping history will superbly serve government and military professionals, and the nations citizens, in fully understanding the extraordinary character and capabilitiesand limitationsof this elite grouping of American warfighters.

Dr. Kalev I. Sepp, former deputy assistant secretary of defense for Special Operations and Counterterrorism

Mark Moyars first-rate book is the best popular history of the Special Operations Forces to date and will remain an indispensable source of information, with memorable personalities and dramatic battle scenes, for the foreseeable future.

Thomas Henriksen, senior fellow, Hoover Institution, and author of Eyes, Ears, and Daggers

T he airplanes entered Somali air space several miles above the earths surface, at an altitude where one would expect to find an intercontinental passenger jet traveling from Paris to Singapore. Had a Somali high-adventure company been offering nighttime skydiving excursions, their planes would have been flying at something less than half as high. These aircraft had nonetheless shown up for parachuting, of a sort known in the military as High Altitude, High Opening, or HAHO for short. Designed to prevent hostile ground forces from hearing the parachutes popping open, HAHO jumps require parachutists to spread their canopies after a free fall of only a few seconds, leaving them floating at such high altitudes that they need oxygen tanks to keep breathing on the way down.

Twenty-four US Navy SEALs, each of them specially trained in the technique, had been assigned to parachute from these fearsome heights onto Somali territory. They checked over their gear one last time, then leaped from the aircraft, one at a time, into a frigid and moonless night. Once the chutes jerked the SEALs out of free fall, the men extended their arms and legs like flying squirrels, so as to guide their canopies during the long glide.

Monitoring their locations with global positioning system devices, the parachutists steered toward predesignated landing zones near the town of Adado, the capital of a Somali district with several hundred thousand people. American planners had chosen a landing zone several miles outside of town, a clearing where reconnaissance flights on previous nights had spotted no Somalis at this hour. During the descent, the SEALs realized that the intended drop zone was enshrouded in fog, so they initiated a midair discussion over their helmet microphones, at the end of which the team commander decided to .

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The SEALs had been sent to rescue two captives, thirty-two-year-old Jessica Buchanan of the United States and sixty-year-old Poul Hagen Thisted of Denmark. The pair had been abducted three months earlier while working on a demining project for the Danish Refugee Council. On October 25, 2011, they had been driving by car through southern Somalia when their vehicle was cut off by a large Toyota Land Cruiser, out of which swarmed pirates who banged the butts of their AK-47s on the cars windows and windshield. Hauling Buchanan and Thisted from the vehicle, the thugs drove them to . A pirate spokesman issued a demand of $45 million in ransom for the two of them.

The pirates had moved the prisoners almost daily to keep foreign governments and rival kidnappers off their scent. Separated from one another, Buchanan and Thisted received one small can of tuna and one piece of bread per day. After three months of this bleak existence, Buchanan contracted a urinary tract infection. She notified the captors that the infection was going to kill her if left untreated, a piece of information that they conveyed to an American hostage negotiator in an effort to strengthen . When Washington learned that her life was in jeopardy and that US intelligence had drawn a bead on her location, President Barack Obama decided to send in the SEALs.