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Priest does a marvelous job of conveying both the daily operating realities and the large-scale strategic tensions that go with America's new role. The book is well-written and is full of sharp details and vignettes. For instance: that only two members of the Special Forces team that called in air strikes in Afghanistan had ever been on horses, before they got to the battlefield and realized that horses were the only way to get around. Or the reason for a gruesome "friendly fire" episode in Afghanistan, when a precision-guided bomb homed in precisely on an American unit: An Air Force controller changed the batteries on a GPS targeting unit but "did not realize that after the battery was changed, the machine would revert to displaying the coordinates for the GPS's location, instead of those for the intended target." Late in the book Priest has a wrenching chapter on an American soldier who raped and killed an 11-year-old girl in occupied Kosovo. Even in the age of precision weapons, real human beings, with their flaws, fight the battles and administer the peace.

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