I often hear from friends and colleagues who have published books or scholastic articles. In most cases these are non-fiction works on military or intelligence topics in which they are or have been deeply immersed. Occasionally, the subject is fiction, and in this case, my friend Sean McFate has a new book on a topic area in which he has likewise been deeply immersed, and for that reason it rivals the work of Tom Clancy.

Sean has an undergraduate degree from Brown and graduate degree from Harvard, neither of which seem to have permanently disabled his formidable intellect. He was an Army officer, a jump master with the 82nd Airborne during the Clinton years, which he notes “was a horrible time to serve.” He then became a private contractor for the State Department, mostly in Africa, where he raised small armies in our national interest, demobilized warlords and helped stop a genocide, among other adventures.

After completing his PhD from the London School of Economics, Sean became a professor of national security strategy at the National Defense University at Fort McNair, Washington, DC, and also teaches at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service. (Having spent some time at NDU myself, let me say McNair is a good place to land!) He just completed a fellowship at Oxford University.

Sean is author of Modern Mercenary, a non-fiction work on the topic of private armies and their implication for world order — a subject on which he has written extensively. Sean notes that in OIF the contracted force was 50% and OEF, 70%. Currently, contracted forces are proliferating in the Middle East and Africa theaters.

Regarding his novel, Deep Black, its the followup to his first novel, Shadow War, in his Tom Locke series. The books are largely based on Sean’s military experience – thinly veiled fact-based fiction, which takes place in the ISIS Caliphate. It is undergirded by the serious scholarship which attends his writing, and is recommended reading!