“We are currently locked in an insurgent war, one that’s likely to go on for a very long while,” writes Dick Couch, author of Chosen Soldier: The Making of a Special Forces Warrior and many other books. Chosen Soldier is the main book I’ll be blogging about this summer. This niche of the military—the Green Berets—is a significant detail of a larger issue that will figure prominently, not only in the upcoming election, but also in our nation’s near future and that of the rest of the free world.

This war with terrorists and religious radicals in the Middle East has made both our technology and “conventional military superiority” nearly irrelevant. What’s needed now is getting an “in” with the locals in Iraq, Afghanistan, etc. They are the ones who can tell our soldiers who the enemy is. “Simply stated, if we lose or fail to gain the popular support of the people, we lose it all,” writes Couch in the introduction to his book. “Our initial victories in Afghanistan and Iraq will have been for nothing.”

(I’ll leave alone whether or not we should have entered this “war on terror” in the first place. Regardless, we’re in it now. So we have to be savvy about where we are and what we’re now doing there.)

So, we are in a very different war, indeed. (For example, as Anne highlighted and I referred to in my first post on Chosen Soldier, we’re dealing with suicide bombers the age of U.S. high school freshmen.) It is one that requires intelligence as much as—really, much more than—it requires brute strength. And that’s where our branches’ special operation forces come in—namely, Army Special Forces (SF), or Green Berets. As Couch writes, “Special Forces are the most valuable asset on this battlefield. The Special Forces soldier is the most important man in uniform—our most essential warrior.”