Colonel David Hunt, U.S. Army (Ret), main point is that terrorism really started as a result of the inept response to the 1972 olympic kidnapping in Munich, Germany. He states that the solution to keeping this country safe from another attack is to separate the politics from the military decision makers, limit the bureaucratic red tape in the intelligence community, hold leaders responsible, and have the will to fight. I didn't need to read a book to understand that. In that respect, this books disappoints.

However, Col Hunt looks brilliant in some of his analyses. For example, he states (almost forewarns) that FEMA went from an efficient agency to a bureaucratic disaster when it was restructured and thrown into the Department of Homeland Security (this book was written prior to Hurricane Katrina). But it is difficult to take many of his suggestions serious. He states that the Pentagon workforce should be cut in half today by Presidential decree and that the U.S. should create a newfound agency - the "TKA" or "Terrorist Killing Agency." While he is a true believer, those are fantasy notions.

Colonel Hunt uses simple straight-forward prose throughout the novel but overuses hypophora and rhetorical questions to make his points. This latter technique became extremely annoying as I progressed through the book. ( )