Book description
The U. S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has proven to be the
most lethal weapon in the president's arsenal. Shrouded in secrecy, the
Command has done more to degrade the capacity of terrorists to attack
the United States than any other single entity. And counter-terrorism is
only one of its many missions. Because of such high profile missions as
Operation Neptune's Spear, which resulted in the death of Osama bin
Laden, JSOC has attracted the public's attention. But Americans only
know a fraction of the real story.
In The Command, Ambinder and Grady provide readers with a
concise and comprehensive recent history of the special missions units
that comprise the most effective weapon against terrorism ever
conceived. For the first time, they reveal JSOC's organizational chart
and describe some of the secret technologies and methods that catalyze
their intelligence and kinetic activities. They describe how JSOC
migrated to the center of U. S. military operations, and how they
fused intelligence and operations in such a way that proved crucial to
beating back the Iraq insurgency. They also disclose previously
unreported instances where JSOC's activities may have skirted the law,
and question the ability of Congress to oversee units that, by design,
must operate with minimum interference.
With unprecedented access to senior commanders and team leaders, the
authors also:
- Put the bin Laden raid in the larger context of a transformed
secret organization at its operational best.
- Explore other secret missions ordered by the president (and the
surprising countries in which JSOC operates).
- Trace the growth of JSOC's operational and support branches and
chronicle the command's mastery of the Washington inter-agency
bureaucracy.
- By Marc Ambinder, a contributing editor at the Atlantic,
who has covered politics for CBS News and ABC News, and D. B. Grady,
a correspondent for the Atlantic, and former U. S. Army
paratrooper and a veteran of Afghanistan.
Marc Ambinder
is a contributing editor at the
Atlantic
, a former White House correspondent for
National Journal
, and has covered politics and policy for CBS News and ABC News.
D. B. Grady is a correspondent for The Atlantic. He is a
former U. S.
