The Command: Deep Inside the President's Secret Army

By Marc Ambinder and D.B. Grady

The U.S. Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) has proven to be the most lethal weapon in the president's arsenal. Shrouded in secrecy, the Command has done more to degrade the capacity of terrorists to attack the United States than any other single entity. And counter-terrorism is only one of its many missions. Because of such high profile missions as Operation Neptune's Spear, which resulted in the death of Osama bin Laden, JSOC has attracted the public's attention. But Americans only know a fraction of the real story.

In The Command, Ambinder and Grady provide readers with a concise and comprehensive recent history of the special missions units that comprise the most effective weapon against terrorism ever conceived. For the first time, they reveal JSOC's organizational chart and describe some of the secret technologies and methods that catalyze their intelligence and kinetic activities. They describe how JSOC migrated to the center of U.S. military operations, and how they fused intelligence and operations in such a way that proved crucial to beating back the Iraq insurgency. They also disclose previously unreported instances where JSOC's activities may have skirted the law, and question the ability of Congress to oversee units that, by design, must operate with minimum interference.

With unprecedented access to senior commanders and team leaders, the authors also:

• Put the bin Laden raid in the larger context of a transformed secret organization at its operational best.
• Explore other secret missions ordered by the president (and the surprising countries in which JSOC operates).
• Trace the growth of JSOC's operational and support branches and chronicle the command's mastery of the Washington inter-agency bureaucracy.
• By Marc Ambinder, a contributing editor at the Atlantic, who has covered politics for CBS News and ABC News, and D.B. Grady, a correspondent for the Atlantic, and former U.S. Army paratrooper and a veteran of Afghanistan.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Turner Publishing Company
• Release date: Feb 7, 2012
• ISBN: 9781118346723

Marc Ambinder

Marc Ambinder is a highly regarded reporter, DuPont award-winning television producer, and teacher at the University of Southern California’s Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism. Ambinder was a White House correspondent for National Journal, the politics editor of The Atlantic, and an on-air analyst and consultant for CBS News. He spent four years at ABC News, covering politics and policy. Ambinder also consults for Fortune 100 companies on strategic and corporate communication. He lives in Los Angeles. He is the author of The Brink.

Reviews for The Command

[richhayes · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

NOTE: I received a copy of the book from the publisher.If you are looking for a Tom Clancy type of book with all kinds of action with Seal Team Six or Delta Force then this is not the book for you, but if you are interested in the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) this is a good book.While this book does have how Seal Team Six killed OBL it mainly was about what equipment, units and the political decisions about it. It also has some accounts about other actions taken by JSOC forces but again little to no action but what was used, why the actions was taken and things like that. It also details how JSOC forces went from being considered a wild cowboy unit which no one wanted to work with yo being considered one of the best units out there.It also talks about how JSOC is organized, what units are in it, what civilian forces and agencies are in it or associated with it. Who the commanders have been and what problems they are starting to have after so many deployments. All in all a good study of JSOC.The main problem I had with the book and what kept it from getting 5 stars is the fact it is so short. It feels like it is a condensed study of JSOC, written for some government entity. Of course the fact that so much of what JSOC does and who and what is in it is classified, this may have been all he could publish.