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Oppose Any Foe

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My review of Mark Moyar’s Oppose Any Foe is now up at H-Net.

In Oppose Any Foe, Mark Moyar chronicles the history of American special forces since World War II, casting a critical eye on the development and employment of these units. While Moyar acknowledges the heroism of such forces, and their effectiveness in certain tactical situations, he effectively paints a skeptical picture of their overall impact on warfighting, and on the larger American defense establishment. Moyar begins his account by discussing the prehistory of today’s special operations forces, the ad hoc units developed in the European and Pacific theaters during World War II. He examines both the political and military logics underlying these foundations, which often depended on idiosyncratic assessments of value and the strength of specific personal relationships.

One passage in the review that tragically did not make the cut, but that some readers may find useful anyway:

Finally, some of Moyar’s stylistic choices grate. “[General Dick] Scholtes watched the drunken revelry with the revulsion of the Theban King Pentheus observing his subjects debauched by the wine and carousing of Dionysus” is an analogy that may well work for a few of Moyar’s readers; it will mystify some others, and for most it (along with similar allusions sprinkled across the text) will seem an altogether gratuitous example of flashing classical knowledge to no particular point.

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