Veteran and journalist Seth Harp’s new book is causing a stir as he explores how the war came home, complete with drugs, violence, and criminality. […]
Harp embeds the story of individual soldiers into a larger examination of the history of the global War on Terror (GWOT) that began after 9/11, and the U.S. military adoption of new forms of Special Operations-based warfare during that conflict. […]
While most will be familiar with the U.S. military use of covert assassination tactics and raids, what feels new here is the extensive documentation of the sheer volume and character of these operations. They feel less like targeted assassinations than an industrialized assembly line of personalized killing.
Harp describes Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) General Stanley McChrystal’s Find, Fix, Finish, Exploit, Analyze, and Disseminate (F3EAD) cycle, saying that “despite the ungainly initialism, the F3EAD cycle was not a complicated concept. It typically meant tracking down a target, killing him and every adult man and teenage boy in the vicinity, seizing every piece of paper and electronic device found on their persons, and using these materials to come up with more names to add to the hit list, and then killing them too, sometimes just a few hours later.” Läs presentationen