* Examines America's failure to fight unconventional warfare
*Authoritative overview of US military strategy in Afghanistan

The US military has attempted to create and maintain a capability in unconventional warfare- but has apparently failed

Afghanistan and the Troubled Future of Unconventional Warfare examines Operation Enduring Freedom, maintaining that although operations in Afghanistan appear to have been a masterpiece of military creativity, the US executed its impressive display of power in a totally conventional manner.

Arguing that the initial phase of the war was appropriately conventional given the disposition of the enemy, Rothstein suggests that once the Taliban had fallen the war became increasingly unconventional, yet the US response became more conventional.

This book presents an authoritative overview of US military strategy. Drawing a distinction between special operations and unconventional warfare, the author demonstates that the use of special forces does not automatically make the fighting unconventional. Rothstein questions the ability of US forces to effectively defeat irregular threats and suggests ways that they might be able to regain lost unconventional-warfare capacity in the future.

Hy S. Rothstein served as a special-forces officer for more than twenty-six years, and spent many years training and advising governments threatened by active insurgencies. He is now Senior Lecturer in the Department of Defence Analysis at the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, California. Seymour Hersh is a Pulitzer prize-winning author, who exposed the Vietnam My Lai massacre and one of the first to report on abuses at Abu Ghraib.