Tommy Franks

Very interesting to read about how the attack in Afganistan and Iraq was planned and executed. Includes behind the scenes discssions with the President and Rumsfeld during and after 9/11. Also interesting to note the differences in how we have changed the way our military command structure works with CENTCOM commanding all services in a geographical area rather than the different branches of the services controlling their assets as we did in WWII, Korea, and Vietnam. It seems like the practice works well here. Interesting to note that after commanding CENTCOM Gen Franks turned down the chief of the Army job becasue he was only interested in a warfighting position.

His experiences in Vietnam as a young artillary officer was a high point of the book as he was in the thick of the fighting on many occaisions. It is somewhat comforting to see commanders sending people to die that have experienced combat themselves and know the price and how to count the cost.

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An extremely easy book to read. I actually had to do a report on him when I was in ROTC. The first half of the book is his career and how he got started. It seemed as though he just stumbled up the chain and had a lot of lucky breaks. The second half is his time as commander during the war. Like I said the book was easy to read, and I would suggest it for anyone in the military. It was written in a military format, in that every chapter or section he summarized everything he was going to talk about, explained it, and then recapped it. Just like we are taught to do.

I would recommend this book for military people, not sure if people outside the military would enjoy this book.

This book does stay in my library at the house… (more)