America's Splendid Little Wars: A Short History of U.S. Engagements : from the fall of Saigon to Baghdad

America's Splendid Little Wars: A Short History of U.S. Engagements : from the fall of Saigon to Baghdad Peter Huchthausen Date: 27 July, 2004   —   $10.20   —   Book product page Rating:

For what it is, this is an interesting little book. As an overview of US non-covert actions (which Huchthausen tantalizingly alludes to, but does not elaborate on) since Vietnam, this is a handy reference and a good complement to Max Boot's, "The Savage Wars of Peace". However, there are much better full accounts of each of the individual actions covered.

The unifying thread is the growing need for joint special operations, and the author tends to discuss lessons learned in terms of how well the different services worked together and the effectiveness of the Special Forces units. Given the nature of most the actions covered, the Desert One hostage rescue attempt, the invasions of Grenada and Panama, Somalia, etc. that seems natural.

The one thing that resonated, and then bothered me, is Huchthausen's tendency to lay the blame for failures on US foreign policy (or lack thereof), and then gloss over the interservice rivalries and hidebound Pentagon generals who probably had a more direct effect on the operations.

It's possible that I'm overly sensitive to that, for some reason, but when he concludes that, "Americans today want immediate results. If victory is not clean and swift the U.S. citizen tends to lack the collective fortitude for prolonged struggle," I think it's a load of crap.

A more accurate assessment would be that, due to the wealth of real-time information now available to Americans, the bar for going to war in the first place has been raised. I think Mr. Huchthausen underestimates us.

Anyhow, it's a good overview of "America's splendid little wars" since Vietnam, and a great starting point for anyone interested in these amazing operations. And while there's a lot of detail missing, it is interesting to see the Balkan conflict summed up in a couple paragraphs.