Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command

Relentless Strike: The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command

Sean Naylor

Language: English

Pages: 560

ISBN: 1250105471

Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub


The New York Times Bestseller and Winner of the 2015 Army Historical Foundation Distinguished Writing Award for Unit History

Since the attacks of September 11, one organization has been at the forefront of America's military response. Its efforts turned the tide against al-Qaida in Iraq, killed Bin Laden and Zarqawi, rescued Captain Phillips and captured Saddam Hussein. Its commander can direct cruise missile strikes from nuclear submarines and conduct special operations raids anywhere in the world.

Relentless Strike tells the inside story of Joint Special Operations Command, the secret military organization that during the past decade has revolutionized counterterrorism, seamlessly fusing intelligence and operational skills to conduct missions that hit the headlines, and those that have remained in the shadows-until now. Because JSOC includes the military's most storied special operations units-Delta Force, SEAL Team 6, the 75th Ranger Regiment-as well as America's most secret aviation and intelligence units, this is their story, too.

Relentless Strike reveals tension-drenched meetings in war rooms from the Pentagon to Iraq and special operations battles from the cabin of an MH-60 Black Hawk to the driver's seat of Delta Force's Pinzgauer vehicles as they approach their targets. Through exclusive interviews, reporter Sean Naylor uses his unique access to reveal how an organization designed in the 1980s for a very limited mission set transformed itself after 9/11 to become the military's premier weapon in the war against terrorism and how it continues to evolve today.

America's Addiction to Terrorism

Terrorism: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)

Pakistan: Between Mosque And Military

Threat Warning (Jonathan Grave, Book 3)

Stop the Next War Now: Effective Responses to Violence and Terrorism

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

converged on the target, while the DAPs attacked the town’s power station two and a half miles away, in the process setting the oil in the transformers aflame. “It looked like a nuclear bomb went off,” said an MH-6 pilot. Fierce resistance, including armor-piercing rounds, met the assault force at the research center. The Chinook and Black Hawk door gunners responded with devastating minigun fire, and AH-6 pilot CW4 John Meehan expertly put a rocket through the front door of the government

item in the budget,” he said. Knowledge of the special access program was on a strictly need-to-know basis, and hardly anyone needed to know. Shortly thereafter the 160th regimental leadership came looking to 1st Battalion—the core unit of Task Force Brown—for two crews to go down to Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, and start training on the new helicopters. In the end one crew went after a couple of pilots volunteered. “I never saw them again,” said a 160th source. “They’d be permanently assigned

Command, and would oversee JSOC. It also created an Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict office in the Pentagon to oversee all special operations matters.21 These steps were taken despite bitter resistance from the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who feared they would lead to the creation of a fifth service, but they laid the groundwork for JSOC’s journey over the next two decades from the margins of the U.S. military to the centerpiece of its campaigns.22

were all over the world’s newscasts. The United States was humiliated.2 Most Americans, including many in the Carter administration, had despaired of rescuing the hostages in the wake of the Desert One fiasco. But the men at the heart of Eagle Claw had not given up; nor had their president. Within seventy-two hours of the catastrophe, Carter told Army Major General Jim Vaught, the task force commander, to be prepared to launch again within ten days, in the in extremis case that the hostages’

that combined would go a long way toward empowering JSOC for the campaign ahead: gaining JSOC the (U.S.) legal authority to operate in specific countries; giving the command the authority and the resources to target the Al Qaeda senior leadership; and creating an intra-governmental system to enable “time-sensitive planning” so that if the intelligence community or JSOC located a high-value target, the government could get a decision brief to the president fast enough for him to approve a mission

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