Book Review: Task Force Black
I briefly browsed the book store at the airport on the way back from the Canberra 24 hour kirtan, and saw this book: "Task Force Black: The Explosive True Story of the SAS and the Secret War in Iraq".
When asking my workmates about the Amazon Kindle ereader, one of them told me: "It's great, you can go to a bookstore at an airport, see a book you like, then download it on your Kindle and read it on the plane."
And indeed you can. I had it downloaded before we boarded, but didn't have a chance to read it on the plane, as Krishnapada and I spent the time discussing the Canberra 24 hour kirtan and our kirtan and harinam plans for the year between now and the next one.
I got a chance to read Task Force Black today, and found it to be a thoroughly enjoyable and educational book.
It's no "Inside Delta Force" or "SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite Navy SEAL Sniper", the two previous Special Forces book I read. Those two books were written by members of Special Forces units, and focused on tactics, training, and missions, from the perspective of an individual who took part in them.
Task Force Black is written by a journalist - one who was in Iraq as an embedded journalist, but one who was there as an observer rather than a participant. Mark Urban brings a reporter's perspective to the task of documenting the operations of Task Force Black, the joint US - UK special forces operation in Iraq. As well, he builds his picture through interviews with soldiers from the field as well as the commanders who made the decisions. The result is the "big picture".
If you are looking for blow-by-blow accounts of missions, then this book may disappoint. In the Forward to the book, Urban explains his motivation as being historical documentation, and as a result he addresses the strategic dimension, and tactical details feature as details within that, rather than center stage as the primary narrative. I was surprised by this. I thought I was going to get more gritty personal narrative, and when I discovered on starting that the book that it was written by a reporter, rather than by a participant I worried that it would read like a clinical dissection. However, I was pleasantly surprised to find what is essentially a cogent strategic analysis of the military and political developments in Iraq since the US-UK lead invasion, up to 2009.
While recounting history, Urban is wary of the distorting perspective of hindsight, at one point cautioning against identifying what now seems clearly to be a "tipping point". He quotes one commander as saying: "It was never clear to us at any point". Our history was in fact someone else's future, just as this present moment now represents someone else's past.
Apart from putting all the familiar names such as Fallujah, Ramadi, Basra, and Al-Ansar into perspective in a narrative, Urban also fleshed out my knowledge of General Stanley McChrystal. McChrystal's revolutionary ideas of "building a network to fight a network", and "industrial counter-terrorism" seem to be practical demonstrations of Network-centric warfare (see here for the 2005 Australian report, and here for the original 1999 US DoD presentation). McChrystal has seen past the shallow technology idea of NCW and internalised the concept of Network-centricity as a deep metaphor for constructing an organisation and its operations. His JSOC (Joint Special Forces Operation Command) in Iraq demonstrates that it takes more than just networked technology to achieve battle space superiority through information superiority. It takes an understanding of how to drive the network-centric metaphor through the whole organisation.
McChrystal's struggles and successes, as documented in Task Force Black, demonstrate that network-centric warfare doesn't do away with the fundamentals of war - friction and unity of command remain decisive factors, and their effects are also detailed in Urban's work.
The book also contrasts and clarifies the different outcomes from the British and US approaches in Iraq, something that was novel information for me.
I don't recommend this book if you're after a gripping story of individual courage and heroism in the face of overwhelming adversity. Try Andy McNabb's Bravo Two Zero: The Harrowing True Story of a Special Forces Patrol Behind the Lines in Iraq or Marcus Luttrell's
Lone Survivor: The Eyewitness Account of Operation Redwing and the Lost Heroes of SEAL Team 10 for that. If you want a historical military and political understanding of post-invasion Iraq, and a grasp of modern developments in network-centric warfare and the strategic use of special forces in counter-insurgency, "Task Force Black" is the book is for you.
If you enjoy Task Force Black, then you might also enjoy "Spec Ops: Case Studies in Special Operations Warfare: Theory and Practice". I'm currently reading it, and will post a review once I finish.