Wikipedia:WikiProject Military history/News/August 2013/Book reviews
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No Easy Day - "Mark Owen" and Kevin Maurer |
![](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/8/86/Osama_bin_Laden_compound2.jpg/250px-Osama_bin_Laden_compound2.jpg)
- By Nick-D
No Easy Day is a first-hand account of the special forces raid that resulted in the
No Easy Day provides an account of "Mark Owen's" career in the elite
The authors stress in the foreword that they've taken pains to prevent any classified information from being published. Unfortunately, they've also left out a lot of detail on special forces operations which has previously appeared in other public sources. For instance, the description of the tactics used in Iraq and Afghanistan is greatly inferior to those published by Mark Urban in Task Force Black (which covers the British SAS in Iraq) or Marc Ambinder and D. B. Grady in The Command (about the Joint Special Operations Command). Some details of the Bin Laden raid which have previously been published, such as the use of modified "stealth" helicopters and the preparations for the operation in Colorado, are also not mentioned. While this is understandable given that the author is presumably still subject to official secrecy laws, it's disappointing. The sections of the book in which "Owen" whines about politicians' reluctance to deploy special forces units and the political response to the death of Bin Laden are tiresome, and suggest a worrying lack of political and strategic awareness among members of a unit which is meant to specialise in strategically vital tasks.
Overall, military historians will find No Easy Day to be an interesting read, and it's likely that they'll learn something new about modern special forces operations. However, it's not really a ground-breaking book.
Publishing details: Owen, Mark; Maurer, Kevin (2012). No Easy Day : The only first-hand account of the Navy SEAL mission that killed Osama Bin Laden. London: Penguin Books.
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