This book is far more substantive than the question/ answer format may imply. Prados is a prolific writer with great knowledge of recent military affairs and actions. This is really a history and description of the current status of the various US special forces. Prados does use the question/ answer format used in all the books in this series (I've read several, they're all substantive).
Prados covers the history of US special forces, noting a pattern of formation during crises and dissolving them after a war is over, and he sees Vietnam as the crucial era, leading to the grudging recognition by regular forces that special forces have a purpose. Special forces have had a tendency to be resistant to military bureaucracy and sometimes are able to use channels other than the regular hierarchy.
He does not describe every special forces action, but describes several that give the reader a real sense of what these forces can do and what can go wrong. He describes in considerable detail the Green Berets in Vietnam, in particular the use of special ops to train the Montagnards to use against the NVA. He describes two near disaster ops, the famous Blackhawk Down action in Somalia and the raid into Iran to free the embassy prisoners. He discusses the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, and the initial operations against the Taleban in Afghanistan. Prados notes the presence of US operations units in 70 countries, mostly training locals--this can be morally suspect when the troops trained later engage in questionable actions, as happened in El Salvador.
Something like a third of the book looks as 9/11 and after. Prados briefly discusses training (hard!) and other issues. One is how women might be integrated into the units, which seem to tend to have a supermacho unit culture. He discusses at some length the issues surrounding assassination (Prados does not use the word) of suspects and others, such as US citizens fighting for the enemy, whether by a raid as in the bin Laden case, or using Predator drones to kill. Prados does not make judgments in these matters, saying more or less that it is uneasy ethical grounds.
There are no illustrations, but there is one map. There is a fairly extensive appendix of short biographical essays about many of the people involved in the history of US special operations forces.
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