Welcome to another edition of the War on the Rocks podcast series. I'm sitting here with my friend Sean Naylor.

He's the author of the new book, Relentless Strike, The Secret History of Joint Special Operations Command,

J-Soc, which a lot of you have heard of, I'm sure,

about its exploits in Iraq and Afghanistan

attacking the insurgent networks,

but Sean has really put together this amazing history and that is already making headlines

and I'm sure we'll make many more of the organization from its origins during the Iran

Iranian hostage crisis.

That's right.

And Sean, what made you want to write this book?

You've done a lot of stuff on special operations in the past.

Yeah, so I had been writing about Special Operations for Army Times,

both before and particularly after 9-11,

and I had also dug fairly deeply into some J-SOC material for my last book

not a good day to die the untold story of Operation Anaconda.

And so I knew by 2006, 2007, that there was this extraordinary story to be told about an extraordinary

organization that was essentially taking the lead for the United States in general and for the

United States military in particular in the war on terror if you wanted to call it that

and and that what the American public who were paying

for this very expensive organization knew about it represented only the tip of the I spoke, that they would

occasionally hear about things that it had done, such as killing Udai and Kuzai Hussein in Iraq, capturing

Saddam Hussein and of course much later the mission that killed Osama bin Laden but they didn't I feel have a strong

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