| PRODUCT DETAILS | | No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units from Iran to Afghanistan |  | |
No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units from Iran to Afghanistan
When the U.S. Air Force decided to create an elite "special Tactics" team in the late 1970s to work with special-operations forces, John T. Carney was the man they turned to. Since then Carney and the U.S. Air Force Special Tactics units have circled the world on clandestine missions. They have combated terrorists and overthrown dangerous dictators. They have suffered eighteen times the casualty rate of America’s conventional forces. But they have gotten the job done. Now, for the first time, Colonel Carney lifts the veil of secrecy and reveals what really goes on inside the special-operations forces that are at the forefront of contemporary warfare.
Manufacturer: Listen & Live Audio
Price: $4.62
 No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units from Iran to Afghanistan
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| User Reviews |  | Hard work and dedication that paved the way for the Air Force special operations of today!
rating: 5
"No Room For Error," is a book about all the guts, hard work and pride that Colonel J. T. Carney had in creating the United State Air Force CCT's as they are today. Read this book if you want to know about the creation of the United States most elite units. This book is not a "let you down." Colonel Carney shares the mistakes and mishaps early Special Operations Combat Controllers went through in order to make them polished professionals capable of working in any branch of the military. I enjoyed this book!
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Excellent Book, At times Hard To Follow
rating: 4
This is a great book about an ELITE group of Air Force Special Operations Forces. The author is a founding member of the Special Tactics Units in the Air Force. The Authors tell, in detail, what the up and downs of the US Air Force Special Tactics units go through both in training and actual operations. The book shows how Excellent, Highly trained professionals are held back by politics and egos.
I found that the book was at times hard to follow. Specifically the chapters on Grenada and Panama. This is the reason I only rated the book a four. I DO HIGHLY RECOMMEND THIS BOOK!!!!
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Outstanding - highly recommended
rating: 4
The book is outstanding on several levels. As a chronicle of the evolution of the Air Force Combat Controller component of special forces it is an outstanding history of the creation and evolution of the Air Force special tactics units. As the story of a personal journey from wandering officer to a man with a mission it is a great story of achievement and sacrifice.
Action around the globe. If the US military was involved Carney was probably there. Reads like an travel plan from PJ O'Rouke's Holidays in Hell. Desert One in Iran, Grenada, Achille Lauro, Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, Haiti, Balkans, Afghanistan and back to Iraq.
The book provides valuable historical insights along with an understanding of how the US special forces units operate. It also provides multiple examples of leadership, mostly good, in our military.
It is not an accident that praise for the book comes from deputy commander of Delta , former chief of staff of the US Army, former commander US Special Forces Command, Seymour Hersh and Army Times. This is the real deal.
The only blemish is that of production. The maps in the softcover are blurred and useless. Without that problem it is 7 Stars
Highly recommended.
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A thorough and in depth look into the teams few know exist.
rating: 5
I enjoyed this book immensely. "No Room for Error" is an open, straight forward look into the history and present day missions of U.S. Air Force Forward Air Controllers, Pararescuemen and Special Operations Pilots. Unlike many of the books written about Special Operations Teams, "No Room for Error" is short on ego but chalked full of mission specific tactical information and mission strength/weakness recaps. Mr. Carney gives the reader an amazing glimpse into life at the tip of the spear.
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Not What I Expected
rating: 4
This book has an unusual pedigree and an even more unusual main author. John T. Carney is a retired Air Force Colonel who served for more than two and a half decades "traveling mostly by parachute" before his retirement in 1991. He's written this book partially as an explanation of the Air Force's Special Operations component, or at least the part of which he was the commander, the Special Tactics units. In this, he largely succeeds, but the book isn't what I expected, and from reading the other reviews on this page, I get the impression a lot of people were surprised.
Carney's an interesting character. Most special ops guys start out in the military as gung-ho types who want to get right into combat. They wind up spending their whole careers fighting military bureaucracy, and of course wind up not having much luck except when they let their actions speak for themselves. In Carney's case, he started out wanting to be a professional football player, and when an injury cut short his career as a player in college, decided to go into coaching. He went into the ROTC program for the money, and chose the Air Force because the money was the same as the other services, but you had to drill less. From ROTC, he went into the Air Force directly, and since he had experience in college football, he spent some years as a uniformed recruiter for the Air Force Academy. Doesn't sound like a special ops type, does he?
Then things took an unusual turn, and he wound up commanding the first Air Force unit built around the special operations ideal. He was actually on the ground at Desert One in the Iranian desert in 1979, watched from offshore during Urgent Fury (Grenada) and commanded most of the Air Force assets involved during the Panama invasion. He retired just after Desert Storm, though he gives you a synopsis of what happened in Mogadishu, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Those last concluding chapters are rather short, but they do include the author's decision to help set up and administer a program to provide college funding to the children of special operators who die in combat. I'm not sure what I think of this last: it's certainly a worthy cause, but in Iraq, for instance, the majority of our casualties have been regular grunts, even auto mechanics and the like, and Carney's foundation does nothing for them. It's an odd dilemma: I suspect he would say they can't afford to support everyone's kids, so they're concentrating on their own.
Regardless, this is an interesting book. As others have noted, it's not long on action, because of course that's not what it's about. The author does provide valuable insight into the Desert One fiasco, recounting how he reconnoitered the field they landed on two weeks before the actual raid, and how things were different the day of the operation, with dust covering everything, and visibility reduced to a few feet. This part of the book is probably the most enlightening, along with the section on Grenada.
I generally found the book valuable, because among other things there's so little written on the airborne para-rescue types, and their ground controller counterparts. It's also, as you might expect, a good primer in inter-service rivalries and warfare, with the Army (especially) insisting that ground control of aircraft should be their mission, and various Air Force agencies being unwilling to give up the troops to Carney's units so that they're at full strength.
This was an interesting book, and I enjoyed it. Just don't expect a shoot-em-up.
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No Room for Error: The Covert Operations of America's Special Tactics Units from Iran to Afghanistan
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