Daniel Ford is a late-blooming graduate of the War Studies program at King's College London (M.A. 2010). He is best known for his prize-winning history of the "Flying Tigers," American pilots who flew and fought for China in the opening months of the Pacific War. A stint as a reporter in South Vietnam inspired him to write a black-humor novel about that unhappy venture into counterinsurgency, a story that became the acclaimed Burt Lancaster film, "Go Tell the Spartans." Here he turns a lifetime interest in the U.S. military to the problem it faced in Iraq and Afghanistan against Islamists who always seemed a step ahead of the ponderous Goliath of American power.