Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/August 2013/Book reviews


 * By Nick-D

No Easy Day is a first-hand account of the special forces raid that resulted in the death of Osama Bin Laden written by a leader of one of the Navy SEAL teams involved in the operation. It was written under the pseudonym "Mark Owen" in cooperation with the writer Kevin Maurer. The book attracted a lot of attention when it was released last year, and contributed to the excellent depiction of the operation in Zero Dark Thirty, but is it of any interest to military historians? In short: sort-of.

No Easy Day provides an account of "Mark Owen's" career in the elite United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, and covers his deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan from about 2003 onwards. This material is reasonably interesting, though it breaks no new ground. All of the second half of the book is devoted to the Bin Laden raid, and provides a high level account of the preparations for this operation and a very detailed narrative of the actual assault. This material is well written, and provides an insight into the tactics which were used. I found the author's observation that the Bin Laden raid was an unusually easy operation for his unit to be particularly interesting - he states that it was no more complicated than the operations elite special forces teams in Afghanistan conduct every day, and the planning for the actual assault could have been completed within hours if needed: the only complicated element of the operation was that it took place deep within Pakistan.

The authors stress in the foreword that they've taken pains to prevent any classified information from being published. Unfortunately, they've also left out a lot of detail on special forces operations which has previously appeared in other public sources. For instance, the description of the tactics used in Iraq and Afghanistan is greatly inferior to those published by Mark Urban in Task Force Black (which covers the British SAS in Iraq) or Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady in The Command (about the Joint Special Operations Command). Some details of the Bin Laden raid which have previously been published, such as the use of modified "stealth" helicopters and the preparations for the operation in Colorado, are also not mentioned. While this is understandable given that the author is presumably still subject to official secrecy laws, it's disappointing. The sections of the book in which "Owen" whines about politicians' reluctance to deploy special forces units and the political response to the death of Bin Laden are tiresome, and suggest a worrying lack of political and strategic awareness among members of a unit which is meant to specialise in strategically vital tasks.

Overall, military historians will find No Easy Day to be an interesting read, and it's likely that they'll learn something new about modern special forces operations. However, it's not really a ground-breaking book.

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