Authors have a fundamental problem writing non-fiction about spies, commandos, and secret operations: all the interesting stuff is secret. If they can talk about it, it's either antique or it's mind-numbing. Either way it makes for a bad story.
When he wrote his first book about the BUD/S training school for Navy Seals, "The Warrior Elite", Dick Crouch carried it off well. He did lots of 'showing' and not much 'telling.' Maybe this shouldn't be a suprise, after all, doing 1000 pushups in an hour and not sleeping for a week may be demented but it's not a national security secret.
The sequel follows the class post-BUD/s and onto their advanced training, preparing them for active duty on 'the teams.' 'The Finishing School: Earning the Navy Seal Trident' starts out with a cool title, but goes no further. The fundamental problem is that there is almost no 'showing,' just 'telling.'
Theoretically the book should have been interesting, with students attending all sorts of radical schools (sniper, intelligence, emergency medicine, etc). However he never digs into any of them except perhaps the Winter Weather course in Kodiak Alaska, which is little more than a week-long, freezing-cold BUD/S redo. The whole book has a grim pallor of "operational security" over it, as if he isn't free to say anything very interesting. Even the characters he interviews are dull, anonymized individuals that say nothing memorable.
Consequently, to fill pages, he falls into the same trap of other special forces books -- tons of tedious administrative and organizational detail that no one enjoys except maybe Seal groupies. To the average guy looking for some riveting stories and impressive characters, you really don't give a shit about the variations of officer assignments and platoon compositions from Vietnam through the present. "Most of the time, the AOIC will move into the OIC position, but not always. Occasionally, the LPO will make chief petty officer and move into the key role as his platoon's chief petty officer."*yawn*
I've read far worse books, but I'd only recommend buying this volume if you crave completeness.