Blood Warriors: American Military Elites

I would urge anyone with an interest in the Special Forces to buy this book. I am in the Army (actually writing this from afghanistan)and have read many military books and yet this one still had plenty of new things that i never hear before. President John Kennedys trip to Fort Bragg early in his term as well as the fact that Winston Churchill himself chose to call his elite troops "Commando" are just two examples of the kind of interesting details you will find in Michael Lannings pages.I liked the Daily Training schedule he included in the appendix and if someone is thinking of trying out for the Army Rangers,Delta Force or Navy Seals you would do well to have the information in this book.Lastly i wanted to mention the fact that you get the chapters set up where you get the history of a given unit first and then you read what the units responsibilities are Today.

It should be obvious that Michael Lee Lanning's BLOOD WARRIORS: American Military Elites was intentionally written for the reader with an interest in---but neither an obsession with, nor an already encyclopedic knowledge of---US Air Force Combat Control "CCTs" and Pararescue "PJs"; USMC Force Reconnaissance Marines; US Army Delta operators, Green Berets, and Rangers; and US Navy SEAL Teams. This is a book for readers who might not have already read dozens of other books about American special operations units. It is a book for people whose interest in America's elite military units may have been stirred by the fact that our country is at war and that members of these units are doing an extremely important share of the fighting. Even a glance at the books shelved next to each other will show that BLOOD WARRIORS is only marginally longer than Lt Col Lanning's INSIDE FORCE RECON or INSIDE THE LRRPs, and a glance at the subtitles shows that BLOOD WARRIORS covers a broader spectrum of units. It is pretty obvious, then, that this book was not intended to look at all these units in the same depth with which INSIDE FORCE RECON looked at Recon Marines, or INSIDE THE LRRPs looked at the Long Range Patrol and Ranger companies of the Vietnam War. BLOOD WARRIORS was intended to be an overview of American special operations forces, both historical and present day. And that is exactly what it is. It is unfortunate, then, that the first review of BLOOD WARRIORS posted ... takes Lt Col Lanning to task for accomplishing exactly what he sat out to do. BLOOD WARRIORS may have been written for a general audience and not specifically for those who've read dozens of books about American special operations forces. But I have read hundreds of books about American special operations forces, and I still learned new things from this book. When I showed BLOOD WARRIORS to a military author who has served in the active duty Army Rangers, reserve and National Guard Special Forces, and the Marine Corps Reserve Force Reconnaissance Company, he would have read it straight through if I hadn't snatched it out of his hands and told him to buy his own copy. He commented that the book was awfully hard to put down, and that the appendixes at the end of it were themselves worth the price of the book. When it comes to a comprehensive overview of American special operation forces, Michael Lee Lanning's BLOOD WARRIORS is the book to read, the book to recommend, and the book to buy.