The book is outstanding on several levels. As a chronicle of the evolution of the Air Force Combat Controller component of special forces it is an outstanding history of the creation and evolution of the Air Force special tactics units. As the story of a personal journey from wandering officer to a man with a mission it is a great story of achievement and sacrifice.

Action around the globe. If the US military was involved Carney was probably there. Reads like an travel plan from PJ O'Rouke's Holidays in Hell. Desert One in Iran, Grenada, Achille Lauro, Panama, Desert Storm, Somalia, Haiti, Balkans, Afghanistan and back to Iraq.

The book provides valuable historical insights along with an understanding of how the US special forces units operate. It also provides multiple examples of leadership, mostly good, in our military.

It is not an accident that praise for the book comes from deputy commander of Delta , former chief of staff of the US Army, former commander US Special Forces Command, Seymour Hersh and Army Times. This is the real deal.

The only blemish is that of production. The maps in the softcover are blurred and useless. Without that problem it is 7 Stars

Highly recommended.

I enjoyed this book immensely. "No Room for Error" is an open, straight forward look into the history and present day missions of U.S. Air Force Forward Air Controllers, Pararescuemen and Special Operations Pilots. Unlike many of the books written about Special Operations Teams, "No Room for Error" is short on ego but chalked full of mission specific tactical information and mission strength/weakness recaps. Mr. Carney gives the reader an amazing glimpse into life at the tip of the spear.

This book has an unusual pedigree and an even more unusual main author. John T. Carney is a retired Air Force Colonel who served for more than two and a half decades "traveling mostly by parachute" before his retirement in 1991. He's written this book partially as an explanation of the Air Force's Special Operations component, or at least the part of which he was the commander, the Special Tactics units. In this, he largely succeeds, but the book isn't what I expected, and from reading the other reviews on this page, I get the impression a lot of people were surprised.

Carney's an interesting character. Most special ops guys start out in the military as gung-ho types who want to get right into combat. They wind up spending their whole careers fighting military bureaucracy, and of course wind up not having much luck except when they let their actions speak for themselves. In Carney's case, he started out wanting to be a professional football player, and when an injury cut short his career as a player in college, decided to go into coaching. He went into the ROTC program for the money, and chose the Air Force because the money was the same as the other services, but you had to drill less. From ROTC, he went into the Air Force directly, and since he had experience in college football, he spent some years as a uniformed recruiter for the Air Force Academy. Doesn't sound like a special ops type, does he?

Then things took an unusual turn, and he wound up commanding the first Air Force unit built around the special operations ideal. He was actually on the ground at Desert One in the Iranian desert in 1979, watched from offshore during Urgent Fury (Grenada) and commanded most of the Air Force assets involved during the Panama invasion. He retired just after Desert Storm, though he gives you a synopsis of what happened in Mogadishu, Afghanistan, and Iraq. Those last concluding chapters are rather short, but they do include the author's decision to help set up and administer a program to provide college funding to the children of special operators who die in combat. I'm not sure what I think of this last: it's certainly a worthy cause, but in Iraq, for instance, the majority of our casualties have been regular grunts, even auto mechanics and the like, and Carney's foundation does nothing for them. It's an odd dilemma: I suspect he would say they can't afford to support everyone's kids, so they're concentrating on their own.

Regardless, this is an interesting book. As others have noted, it's not long on action, because of course that's not what it's about. The author does provide valuable insight into the Desert One fiasco, recounting how he reconnoitered the field they landed on two weeks before the actual raid, and how things were different the day of the operation, with dust covering everything, and visibility reduced to a few feet. This part of the book is probably the most enlightening, along with the section on Grenada.

I generally found the book valuable, because among other things there's so little written on the airborne para-rescue types, and their ground controller counterparts. It's also, as you might expect, a good primer in inter-service rivalries and warfare, with the Army (especially) insisting that ground control of aircraft should be their mission, and various Air Force agencies being unwilling to give up the troops to Carney's units so that they're at full strength.

This was an interesting book, and I enjoyed it. Just don't expect a shoot-em-up.

I listened to the abridged version of this book over the course of a few days and found it to be quite entertaining and informative. Those who are intrigued by the special mission units of the US military should look no further than here for an insider's account behind the scenes as many of the heavy hitters were just getting started in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Carney is at his best telling the tale of small unit leadership in action as he fought tooth-and-nail to gain respect and a mission for his "Brand-X" airmen.

Another strength of the book is in showing how hard it was for US special operations forces (SOF) to really get their act together. His account of Desert One in Iran, which has been written about elsewhere, is still not easy to stomach. Grenada was not much better. It was not until Panama in 1989 that things were truly clicking on all cylinders. Special Mission Units didn't have much of a role in Desert Storm/Shield, at least, not at first, but later in Somalia and of course in Afghanistan they were much more than bit players. Carney calls Afghanistan the first "special operations war." But will it be the last? The book was published before Iraq kicked off, but I wonder what he would think about attempting to extrapolate the successes of SOF to that war?

The narrative loses a bit of its strength towards the end after the author retires from active duty and can only watch from the sidelines. In all, No Room For Error is a fast read/listen and quite interesting.

No Room For Error fills a gap in military history. Such gaps have existed since the beginning of time whenever a 'special' operation was conducted. What Col Carney and the late Ben Schemmer have done is describe people, places, and events that bring to light the fact that the special ops 'community' before the 80s was a close knit family whose members and even kids often knew each other by name whether army, navy, or air force.

Col Carney brings faces and humanity to the facts. He shows what it was like to conduct special operations at a time when the majority of SOF was being disbanded after Vietnam and prior to Desert One.

Many Americans will never know the true sacrifice of some of the Quiet Professionals. Many Americans will never know how many fires were put out before they consumed nations. Read this book to discover heroes who don't see themselves as such. Unknown national heroes...of whom their families may never know of their accomplishments.

Col Carney has given credit to an honorable profession made so by honorable men...and today, honorable women.

Jim "Banzai" McClain
USAF Ret.
Desert One Iran

I'm about 2/3 done with this book. I previously read Black Hawk Down, and picked up this book next. While Black Hawk Down makes you feel like you are in the middle of the action, this book reads more like a documentary. You never quite feel for the heroes the author writes about; you never quite understand who they are, what their personalities are like, are what these people have gone through. Instead, its almost as if you are watching a black-and-white movie and are set far back away from the action. There's a lot of facts, and a lot of names. Names of people that not too many people (at least today) know about. The main point of the book seems to be that Special Operations has really grown up in America, and that frankly it was really disorganized before.

I am a combat control apprentice right now and I highly recommend this book to anyone interested in Special Operations or just want to understand them better. It is written in a historical format that presented facts more than a dramatic style.

I am very proud to be doing what I am doing after reading this book. It really brings Air Force Special Ops out and presents it for everyone to read. There are still many people in the military including those in the Air Force or don't know what Combat Controllers or PJ's are. Since combat control is such a new unit, news programs often credit other unit forces with tasks that were performed by AFSOC (Air Force Special Operations Command) units.

I enjoy military books immensely, and this book seemed right up my alley. I like those books that you can not put down, where you feel like you are right there in the middle of the action. This book, however, is written in a historical manner which presents lots of facts, names and who did this, who went where info. There is very little first-person action where conflicts are described and you feel part of the battle. Great book, well written, just not what I was looking for.

Colonel Carney and Ben Schemmer did an excellent job of describing the realities of U.S. contingencies in the last 40 years. As much as we try, the theory of the "purple suit" military and interoperability, i.e., all services working together, has not been achieved. The saving grace of this unfortunate situation is that our military forces usually demonstrate the flexibility to overcome these shortfalls and prevail. I commanded a rescue squadron which was tasked in an important support role for several of the operations that
Colonel Carney wrote of in this book and several that were not included. The Grenada mission was not the only one where we were unsure as to which command was really in charge. A well written book about a segment of the U.S.Air Force and our military forces which has not received the recognition and appreciation which they deserve. Colonel Carney is one of the Air Force's finest!

At first, this book seemed like one of those rah-rah "American soldiers make no mistakes and defeat every enemy" books, as the authors start their book by writing about the original development of special tactics forces.
But it soon developed that these authors offer a close-up and detailed, but relatively objective, perspective on a number of recent US military actions using special tactics units, including the Iranian hostage rescue attempt, Grenada, TWA 847 and the Achille Lauro, Panama/ Noriega, Desert Storm, Somalia, the planned Haiti invasion, and Afghanistan. The authors tell what went right, and what went wrong -- on the tactical, strategic, and political fronts. They don't pull the punches on how interservice rivalries, and poor planning and intelligence, caused a number of problems. A lot of depth is added to events that most of us are familiar with just from newspaper articles.
The authors also offer insight on the type of soldier who joins these units -- not Rambo types, or Tom Clancy "warrior" ethos heroes, but level-headed well-trained soldiers.
Anyone interested in recent history, politics, or military history would enjoy reading this well-written book.

Col. John T. Carney, USAF (ret.) takes the reader through his professional career and the history of U.S. Air Force special tactics units from the early 1980s through 2002.

Special Tactics, which has operated in most every American military action since Operation Eagle Claw (aka Desert One) in 1980, has its foundations in the Pathfinder units of WW2, and are often known as 'combat controllers.' They are often the first in and the last out.

In a frank and engaging manner, Carney lays out the history of special tactics and their operations, including Eagle Claw, Grenada, Panama, Achille Lauro, Desert Storm, and Somalia, through Enduring Freedom in Afghanistan. Given his firsthand involvement in the majority of these operations, Carney offers a unique perspective and pulls no punches in his assessment of Air Force and U.S. Special Operations. Nothing is glossed-over and the reader gets the sense that Carney bears more self-imposed crosses than he probably should.

If you are interested in a unique perspective of U.S. Special Operations and Air Force Special Tactics, this book should not be missed.

Special operations forces were all born from necessity, yet always treated as the bastard children of their traditional counterparts. So it was with the creation of the US Air Forces Special Tactics Units. They may not be as well known as the Army's Rangers and Special Forces, or the Navy's SEALs, but they are every bit as important.

Colonel Carney was personnally involved in the creation and development of these critically important units. While they have played in the shawdows of all recent conflicts, the participation of these Special Tactics Units came to the fore during Operation Enduring Freedom. There, in Afghanistan, their courage became legendary as they directed devastating bombing missions that quickly broke the back of al Qaeda and Taliban forces. With other special operations units, they fought on the ground where it gets up close and personal.

This book will give the readers an insight into a world they seldom hear about and a historical perspective of the battles of the Air Commandos - all told from the firsthand perspective of a true American hero.

You will also learn of Col Carney's continued service to the SOF community. Currently he runs the Special Operations Warrior's Foundation which provides scholarship to the children of our fallen comrades.

Along the Ho Chi Minh Trail, in the Mekong delta, and in the air, the U.S. military's special operations forces played key roles in Vietnam. After being neglected by the regular military bureaucracy for most of the quarter-century that followed, U.S. special ops forces finally got the appreciation and credit they deserved when a few hundred very smart and superbly-trained men engineered the overthrow of the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. This book is largely about the period in between Vietnam and the post-9/11campaign, and it fills an important gap in the literature. It focuses particularly on the U.S. Air Force's Special Tactics Units, who are an essential part of the larger special ops picture, and who make many missions possible through their extraordinary skils at getting teams in and out of dangerous territory, often at night and without being detected by the enemy. This book is full of revelations, and is highly recommended to anyone interested in the field.

Reading "No Room for Error" reminded me of how thankful I am to be a woman who is a citizen of The United States of America. In the pages of "No Room for Error," Carney and Schemmer introduced me to numerous members of the AF Special Tactics units who selflessly gave of themselves to guarantee my freedoms and those of a few billion of my closest friends and relations. The book has something for everyone - the reference information is phenomenal and at times a bit deep for an "outsider"; yet, the recounting of the (not all strictly military) activities and missions brings a smile to the lips and a tear to the eye - all bring a warming of the heart. I worked for a defense contractor for a little over a decade, and had a sense of pride knowing that many of the products produced provided the special edge to help our military. I am privileged to personally know over 100 friends and relatives who have served over the years in various branches of the military, including a few in the Special Operations Forces. War is never an easy topic of discussion. Carney and Schemmer have been able to broach the topic and round out the discussion - all in one book.