Lieutenant Colonel H. John Poole, USMC (ret.) completed “almost 28 years of commissioned and noncommissioned infantry service, John Poole retired from the United States Marine Corps in April 1993. While on active duty, he spent two years in combat (1966-69), six years as an instructor with the Advanced Infantry Training Company at Camp Lejeune (1986-92) and one year as the SNCOIC of the 3rd Marine Division Combat Squad Leaders Course on Okinawa (1992-93).

H. John Poole is the author of Militant Tricks: Battlefield Ruses of the Islamic Insurgent; Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods; The Tiger's Way: A U.S. Private's Best Chance for Survival; Dragon Days: Time for "Unconventional" Tactics; Tequila Junction: 4th-Generation Counterinsurgency; Terrorist Trail: Backtracking the Foreign Fighter; The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO’s Contribution to Warfare; One More Bridge to Cross: Lowering the Cost of War; and, Phantom Soldier: The Enemy’s Answer to U.S. Firepower.

According to the book description of Tactics of the Crescent Moon: Militant Muslim Combat Methods, “Tactics of the Crescent Moon comes none too soon for deployed U.S. service personnel. Little, if any, of their battlefield intelligence has been tactically interpreted. U.S. analysts are generally more interested in the enemy's technological capabilities. Even if those analysts did want to tactically assess their vast quantities of information, most lack the infantry and historical background to do so. This book fills the void. It reveals—for the first time in any detail—the most common small-unit maneuvers of the Iraqi and Afghan resistance fighters. Its author is a retired infantryman and recognized authority on guerrilla warfare. He has traveled the world extensively and still trains active-duty U.S. units.

Tactics of the Crescent Moon could save many lives (if not turn the tide of war) in the Middle East. It is a heavily researched, well-illustrated, and spell-binding account of how Muslim militants fight. While the book mainly delves into their tactical method, it also covers their cultural orientation. This nail-biting nonfiction covering events as recent as 15 September 2004.”

According to the book description of Dragon Days: Time for Unconventional Tactics, “Within Dragon Days are two studies: (1) how a rising superpower may be encouraging various Islamic insurgencies to screen its own Maoist expansion; and (2) what America must do to curtail either. Ostensibly, that power also provides foreign aid to the affected countries. But, the "corporations" involved are little more than extensions of its army. Thus, those countries may be at severe risk.

The U.S. military is ill-prepared for so subtle a confrontation. Instead of occupying such countries or training their armies, those forces must start to deploy "foreign aid workers in the law enforcement sector." Then, by the thousands, specially trained squad-sized units could anchor widely dispersed Combined Action Platoons. Their mission would be to help indigenous police and soldiers to reestablish local security. Without that security, there can be no viable counterinsurgency or operating democracy. Part Two of this book shows what U.S. infantrymen must know about criminal investigative procedure. Part Three contains some of the tactical techniques of unconventional warfare (UW). The latter are new to the literature and not covered by any U.S. military manual. They would allow tiny contingents of GIs to slip away unhurt whenever cut off and surrounded. Without this new kind of training, their only hope would be massive bombardment in, and forceful extraction from, a heavily populated area. Such things do little to win the hearts and minds of a population.

This book provides the training and operations blueprint for winning an unconventionally fought world war. It also points to a hidden foe.”

According to the book description of Terrorist Trail: Backtracking the Foreign Fighter, “After 28 years of commissioned and noncommissioned infantry service, John Poole retired from the United States Marine Corps in April 1993. While on active duty, he studied small-unit tactics for nine years. In the 13 years since retirement, John Poole has researched the small-unit tactics of other nations and written six other "tactics manual supplements."

As of September 2006, John Poole had conducted multiday training sessions (on how to conduct 4th-Generation Warfare at the small-unit level) for 38 Marine battalions, nine Marine schools, and seven special-operations units from all four U.S. service branches. He has been stationed twice each in South Vietnam and Okinawa. He has visited Japan, Taiwan, the Philippines, Indonesia, South Korea, Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macao, North Vietnam, Myanmar (Burma), Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore, Tibet, Nepal, Bangladesh, India, Pakistan, Russia, East Germany, West Germany, Morocco, Israel (to include the West Bank), Turkey, Iran, Lebanon, Egypt, and Sudan.”

According to the book description of Militant Tricks: Battlefield Ruses of the Islamic Insurgent, “U.S. decision makers at every level-whether policy, strategy, or tactics-need to get interested in this book. It paints a picture that is quite different from that which is generally accepted. In war, one can't afford the luxury of partial truth.”

According to the book description of The Tiger's Way: A U.S. Private's Best Chance for Survival, it “is divided into four parts. The first proves the Eastern private's edge in field skills, initiative, and tactical decision making. The second describes the new "basics” in which every U.S. soldier must be trained. The third shows — through historical example — the way Eastern soldiers fight in each type of engagement. Part four shows what the U.S. private and his parent unit can do to close the gap.”

According to the book description of Tequila Junction: 4th-Generation Counterinsurgency, “With U.S. citizens monitoring events in South Asia, a well-veiled threat has emerged much closer to home. Parts One and Two of Tequila Junction describes a non-Muslim nation's assault on the Americas. While the assault's objective has been political, it cleverly supports itself through local commodity trading (mostly in drugs). That makes it a highly deceptive variant of 4th-Generation Warfare (that which is fought in the political, economic, psychological, and martial arenas simultaneously. Undermining this assault before it can too drastically affect the heartland will take deploying lone U.S. infantry squads to Combined Action Platoons (those shared with host-country police and soldiers) and patrol bases in Colombia, Panama, and possibly Mexico. Part Three has the unconventional warfare techniques those U.S. squads will need to survive many times their number of drug traffickers and narco-insurgents. Those techniques have been derived from the counterinsurgency methods of the Vietnamese, Chinese, Japanese, and Iranians (those armies with the most cultural predisposition toward 4GW). Closely following this book’s proposals would also help in Afghanistan.”

The MOAA said of The Last Hundred Yards: The NCO’s Contribution to Warfare, “This is the product of 15 years of research and experimentation into small-unit infantry tactics. It is the collective opinion of 1,200 U.S. Marine Corps infantry NCOs on how to perform standard U.S. tactics with more surprise. It contains one or more squad techniques for each category of enemy counter. These techniques are in full compliance with U.S. doctrine. This book is restricted to former and present U.S. military personnel.”

The MOAA said of One More Bridge to Cross: Lowering the Cost of War, “Poole relives in great detail one battle from each U.S. war this century. He describes enemy successes and compares enemy capabilities with our own. He then shows how Americans can improve individual and small-unit tactical skills through a new type of instruction — battle drill and situational station competitions between 12-man groups—much like practicing football.”

The MOAA said of Phantom Soldier: The Enemy’s Answer to U.S. Firepower, “This is the most comprehensive treatise on Oriental warfare to be produced in the West. Well-researched and illustrated, it sheds new light on what an eastern infantry unit can do: (1) alternate between guerrilla, mobile, and positional warfare; (2) use “ordinary forces” to engage and “extraordinary forces” to beat an opponent; and (3) dodge any counterstroke. By identifying pronounced trends in the small-unit technique of every foe since World War I, this book reveals how future adversaries will fight.”