Killer Elite

On my business trip this week, I finished "Killer Elite" by Michael Smith. It's a history of a special ops unit in the US military that focuses on on-the-ground intelligence gathering and what is euphemistically referred to as "battle space preparation" - things like sabotage and prepping landing zones, etc. This book was written by a British reporter, so it has a slightly different perspective on the increased role of special operations units in the US military.

This book was mediocre at best. Started off pretty interesting, but as the story progressed, things got more and more vague. It sounds like he had a good source for the early days of the unit's history, but had to go on declassified and rumored stuff for the more current events. It also had a lot of 'we have an awesome plan, but Brass won't let us do it' stories. These were some cool plans, but it's not very interesting to know what was planned but never executed. It's also very one sided, as it's always the brave heroes of The Activity versus the stuffy and unimaginative upper echelons of military command. Never mind that some of what they planned probably could have been considered war crimes.

Anyway, there's a new edition of this book that was published in 2011 - maybe he developed better sources after the 2007 edition was published.

Skunk Works

I just finished Skunk Works by Ben Rich. Rich was the second director of Lockheed's Skunk Works division, which was responsible for the U2 spy plane, the SR-71, and the F-117A stealth fighter, among other neat airplanes. This is a really interesting look at what the aerospace industry looked like before all the regulation and red tape in the acquisitions process - the director of Skunk Works went in with an idea for an airplane at one point, and the director of the CIA wrote him a personal check to get his assembly line started. Everyone involved would go to jail if that happened today. Seeing how these guys wee able to develop stealth technology with essentially the equivalent of pocket calculators is fascinating, and honestly, and incredible story. Also, the way you hear it, our brave, brilliant American scientists came up with stealth ex nilo. As it turns out, the key idea of stealth (the faceted surfaces that reflect radar off away from the receiver) was developed by a Russian scientist and published in an obscure journal that a Skunk Works employee happened to read. Of course, the Soviets ignored the original developer, and Skunk Works went on to develop stealth, and the rest, as they say, is history.

From a managerial perspective, the Skunk Works model is really interesting. They worked on high risk, high payoff projects that revolutionized aerospace design. They had virtually no oversight from upper management, and the only reason they were allowed to do what they did was because they were incredibly good at it. You have to hire the absolute best and give them a lot more rope than you are probably comfortable with. They also have to have a parent organization to borrow tools, people, and production lines from (and return to after they finish a product). It's a model that a lot of people have tried to emulate and very few have recreated successfully, which should tell you something about how easy it is. Also, the current acquisition process basically prohibits this kind of development, which is kind of an important difference.

Well worth a read. The technical stuff is fascinating, and the personal dynamics are very interesting.

SEAL Team Six

Amazon link

Continuing in my current theme of military memoirs, I just finished "SEAL Team Six: Memoirs of an Elite SEAL Sniper". The title is pretty much what you get. It's well written, and it's an interesting look inside the training that goes into making a SEAL team member. The author was involved in the Battle of Mogadishu, which is also recounted in "Black Hawk Down". I was amazed at what these brave men endure in order to do what our country asks of them. One thing that stuck out to me was the absolute certainty that after making it through SEAL training, you are somehow more than human. I wonder what that does to your psyche over time? It certainly was interesting to see how the author reacted when faced with his own mortality.

This is a quick read, and written with the pacing of a good Clancy novel. Good for the beach or the plane.

Between Silk and Cyanide

To speed things up, here's a link to the Amazon summary.

I really enjoyed this book - it's the memoirs of the British code master for their commando units during WWII. At the beginning of the war, the Brits were using a simplistic code based on picking a set of words out of a poem they had memorized and coordinated ahead of time with home base. Leo Marks, the protagonist, realized how vulnerable the codes were to interception and decoding, and designed a set of codes that were significantly more secure. The conflict between the eggheads who were designing codes and the directors who were running the agents is fascinating, and it's kind of surprising that we don't all speak German at this point, given how much politics went into fighting the war.

As an egghead, it was also really neat to read about someone who made a difference and saved lives in the field, even from the home base.

This book is quite long (600 pages?) but it is very well written. I could hardly put it down - he even makes frequency analysis exciting! The author later went on to write screenplays. Well worth a read if you like WWII history or cryptography.