Delta force
The only insider's account ever written on America's most powerful weapon in the war against terrorism
Stats for nerds
2recommend
6mentions
2people
2014–2025years
50% recommend50% neutral
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- If you liked the book about Boyd and specifically the parts about getting things done at the Pentagon, I highly recommend Charlie Beckwith's book about the founding of Delta Force.
Nowadays, it seems obvious to have an incredibly elite counter terrorist team in the military but it's surprising how much push back Beckwith encountered.
The book is also filled with tons of funny stories.
e.g.
General: "Charlie, Tom over there is going to present your plan"
Beckwith: "But sir, Tom doesn't know anything about special forces."
General: "I understand Charlie. However, Tom is the BEST presenter we have and I want this to succeed and a great presentation is the first step to make that happen."
- The first scene in Tolstoy's War and Peace should be required reading for engineering graduates, particularly the hyper-rational Sheldon types. I'm referring specifically to the impact Pierre has on the people at the party, the importance of manners, why small talk, etc. War and Peace is generally a great book because of how much it captures about human nature and power plays and it is still relevant today. It has a reputation for length but I found it much more readable than, say, Lord of the Rings.
Delta Force by Col. Charlie Beckwith. Think your company has red tape? Try the US Army post-Vietnam. It's a great example of someone moving through bureaucracy to achieve great things and taught me to stop making excuses based on organisational behaviour. The Phantom Major by Virginia Cowles is in the same vein with some phenomenal hustling lessons. I still think of both men whenever I think whatever I'm doing is hard.
Dynamic Hedging by Taleb was written whilst he was a pit trader and is the most intuitive introduction to thinking about options I've read. It informs my thinking about decision making in terms of probability, path dependency and higher order greeks, and helps me take risks in a smart manner. I recommend it to a lot of people but nobody takes it up because (I'm guessing) it's only available as a second hand paper copy, and people think trading options has nothing to do with their life.
Legionnaire by Simon Murray was recommended to me by my thesis supervisor shortly before graduation. I respected his opinion so I read the thing and it blew my mind in what people were capable of doing when pushed to the edge. Murray went on to have multiple interesting careers and set records as a helicopter pilot.
There are two books that were lessons in what they did not teach me.
Clayton Christensen's Innovator's Dilemma/Solution presents a very enticing idea but I think the core explanation for what it covers is much better set forward in Marc Bloch's Strange Defeat. There are regular sub-threads on the book on HN so I won't go into it further.
I also read a couple of Jack Welch books and thought, wow, this guy knows what he is talking about. This was before 2007. After 2007, I heard from a few people - including very smart investors - who basically put GE's success down to the 30 year bull market and to the growth of GE Capital which became something like 60% of the company and indeed did almost take down GE with it after Lehman. It introduced the possibility that some famous leaders and gurus might not be as competent as they are branded to be and it's important to check for confounding variables.
- Hard data on decision making, and a better understanding of the way people think. The historical insights (including snapshots of how people lived and thought three or more generations ago) is a welcome bonus. So is gaining a better understanding of just what kind of people populate the border between civilization and hell. I'm young and I'd rather learn these lessons from third parties, life is, after all, rather short.
It's much harder to fudge the results of war than "management" - at the end of most large ones, the territory belongs to someone, and this is recognized by most authorities. So the data quality is better, provided you are careful about collecting it. If you are a manager, you can learn about leadership and how to do extraordinary things with ordinary people, or how to attract extraordinary people; if you are an employee, about which organisations and people to work for or avoid.
Is Jack Welch an extraordinary CEO, or was he, as is claimed in Thorndike's "The Outsiders", lucky to start his career with one of the largest economic booms known to man and retire right at the end of it? This impacts whether you'd like to adopt his methods: is stack ranking a great way to maintain high employee quality and engagement, or does it destroy corporate culture and lead to zombie companies with intense political in-fighting and little output?
On the other hand, nobody disputes today that a team of around 150 Selous Scouts and Rhodesian SAS, with no air support, wearing the enemy's uniforms and using the same weapons, literally walked into an enemy military base, killed thousands, and walked away without a SINGLE casualty (cf Operation Dingo); and when you dig, you realize this tiny group of men caused 3/4 of the enemy casualties in the entire war, many times in similarly one-sided operations, despite not existing before its start and not having any particular technological (the country was under embargo!), numerical or even political advantage. Such a group is worth studying no matter the politics.
It's also much easier to get several sides to the story: contrast Dick Marcinko's own controversial account of creating SEAL Team Six (which by the way has great insights on how to get things done in "big org") vs Robert Gormley who followed him at the helm of the group and had a more "official" view of the "Rogue Warrior". Or contrast Col. Charlie Beckwith's exceptional account of creating Delta Force, with a first hand, "from the ground" view by Eric Haney, and modern lessons on how it has evolved from Pete Blaber's excellent book about "helicopter" management (in this case literally).
You can learn about how a large organisation has managed to maintain efficiency and quality through centuries by picking up any of the numerous books on the US Marine Corps - Krulak's "First to Fight" and Chesty Puller's biographies were my starting point. Did you know Puller read 7 books about Korea on the ship that took him there? He is better known today for simply charging at the enemy in a straight line but like Patton who literally visualized great battles of the classical era to such details he could point at disappeared buildings, he was well read and thoughtful about how to best wage war.
What is it like to be "disrupted"? Read it first hand from Bloch's "Strange Defeat", describing just what it was like to face the new, fresh, efficient Wehrmacht when you are led by the last war's winners. Sir David Stirling's biography reads like a long list of impossible things - from breaking into an Army base to pitch his idea to a few generals, to being responsible for more aircraft losses with his handful of desert-dwelling infantrymen than the entire RAF in the sector. He failed a fair amount, too, including losing most of his men (!) on their first paradrop. And yet he got more budget and more men. Why?
You can learn a lot about human nature. Phoenix Program officers say that only 5-20% of a population holds firm views and will act on them; the rest will swing support to whoever controls the territory. How do you tell which is which, and can you turn the 5%? I've found this translates particularly well to analyzing which people you can count on (the famous "who'd be there when you're down"). It is interesting that most veterans will say you don't know who will keep a cool head and fire back until the bullets fly; there is little way of telling before then and no discernable pattern, so what does it imply about your interview process?
Finally, you can learn the limits of hindsight and analysis. Was COIN (the counterinsurgency doctrine advanced by the Pentagon since Vietnam) a success, as claimed by Chris Martin's analysis of open source documents about Delta Force in the 2000s? Or was it the reason American wars are so long and their results so controversial, as claimed by Col. Gian Gentile, because of a misinterpretation of previous successful COIN campaigns? (such as failing to notice that the British won in Malaya by displacing thousands of civilians from the affected areas, thus starving the guerilla)
I look at results that exceed expectations, try to draw some names out of it and then look up those names, preferably a first hand account, to understand how they thought and abstract the common traits. It is just amazing the extent to which the military can be a concentrated, more intense version of everyday life, perhaps because the stakes are so much higher.
- > the result of that discussion was to not document Step 7, because doing that might enforce the idea of what it should be for and why it should be done.
In Charlie Beckwith's book about Delta Force [0] there is a line where he says (paraphrasing):
"The SAS never wanted to write down what their role was and what tasks they were trained for. Why? Because they didn't want to get pigeon holed into a role. ... They also never wrote down their SOPs b/c the argument was that 'if you can't keep it in your head, you shouldn't be in the Regiment'. At Delta, we were going to write down our mission AND write down our SOPs."
- McKinsey flew me and a few other fresh grads to Dubai for a week because I was helping run the entrepreneurs society. 5* hotel, mock case study for 1/3 of the time and the rest tourism.
It was a holiday for the McKinsey guys running that thing as well, they appreciated being paid to go waterskiing and BBQing on the beach. For me it was luxury unlike anything I experienced until then - the rooms were so big we had to almost shout to be heard across them, and there was a sofa on the balcony! I took home loads of Hermes toiletries and cologne (I didn't have enough money on my bank account for the room deposit, and one of the consultants had to deposit with his card). In fact we even missed our Paris connection to Dubai, so McKinsey sent a consultant over to baby sit us, which meant taking a Mercedes to the Brasserie La Coupole for an epic feast followed by a night in a neighbouring 5* (I think in the Tour Montparnasse).
Unfortunately, I did not graduate with high enough grades (2.2 on the BA, cutoff was 2.1) for McKinsey, which is why they rejected me the first time. So by the third time they tried to headhunt me, I just told them upfront that their system/HR would reject me because of my grades and it was not worth our time continuing the discussion. They insisted, and it happened as predicted, making me wonder why they still care about that for more senior hires.
There was also a period of time in my life where I accepted conference speaking slots if the hotel was nice enough and close enough to my home. Can't resist a proper 5* hotel lunch buffet, especially if they have giant prawns and olive-roast beef and a decent beer on tap. I made my talks increasingly ridiculous, I think by the end I was explaining Starcraft cheese to middle-aged CTOs and quoting Delta Force founder Col. Charlie Beckwith before following up with droid-driven tractors (all relevant to ML in e-commerce, I promise). They loved it, got voted "best talk of the conference" a couple of times, not hard when 90% of the other talks were "so here's the 3Vs of Big Data" verbatim copied from Wikipedia.
- Always slightly embarrassing to comment on these things as a civilian (what do I know)... nevertheless...
It was worse than that - the failure of Eagle Claw was due precisely to Delta Force's operating with the help of standard branches, and "not special" logistics. We never found out whether Beckwith's plan was any good as none of the men made it to Tehran, after too many of their helicopters literally crashed on each other on the refuel site.
Beckwith was, obviously, incensed at having to cancel his first mission due to other people's incompetence, and began the lobbying process that led to the creation of JSOC in 1980. This allowed for the systematic creation of "special" units in many branches, most famously 160th SOAR and the ISA (which is very important - the Selous Scouts built their own Special Branch in part because of Reid-Daly's personality, but mainly because they found the existing one to be lacking or not quite as cooperative as required).
At the risk of creating a simplistic narrative: JSOC grew in scope and power, particularly as COIN (Counter-Insurgency - under which your "nation building" falls - see Col. Gian Gentile's book for a fairly famous critique) was making its way into the Pentagon as the new, happy, less (visible) collateral damage, cheaper, conquer countries cleanly doctrine. So special operation forces went from being strange pariahs operating on the fringes and occasionally shunned by more traditional minded commanders (including, allegedly, Norman Schwartzkopf), to (today) a desirable career passage if one is aiming to collect stars on the collar (McChrystal is a famous example).
It's important because it has changed US foreign policy. There is a large, thriving JSOC with direct contact with the President and wars have been renamed "low intensity operations", offering low cost high impact war in neat PowerPoint format. So, gradually, EO 12333, EO 12036 and EO 11905 (respective executive orders by Reagan, Carter and Ford prohibiting assassinations) were selectively relaxed starting in the late 90s. The extent to which this has impacted foreign policy is fuzzy, because anything written recently is of dubious accuracy due to operational security being maintained (should really get on to reading WikiLeaks some day). But I wouldn't be surprised to hear that the Green Berets had been resurrected into JSOC as a "grow a cancer in the enemy's land" type force, except more deniable than SOG or the Contras ever were.
