They Should be Ashamed

Let's begin with a disclaimer: I know a fair number of SEALs and I think they are some of the most profound professionals, and some of the most committed patriots, I have ever had the privilege of meeting. My time spent with them and working with them were, have been, are, and I trust will continue to be some of the most personally and professionally rewarding of my life.

That being said, I think I can in all honesty assert that the operation that ended with the death of Usama bin Laden last year was well executed, but in no way can it be called the ‘most audacious’ act of the last 500 years. I would, in fact, go so far as to say it probably is not the most audacious act of the last 6 months.

Consider the raid – about which I was as uninvolved as any human can be. But I know a little bit about the military, the Middle East and generally how decision-making takes place in Washington and so I can make a few assertions.

Was the raid risky? Sure. Every time you get a bunch of guys in helicopters at night, flying into someone’s compound, and you know they – the bad guys - are armed, there is risk. But what was the level of risk here? We all have visions (even if in some cases more the fruit of Hollywood then history) of two of the more prominent Special Forces raids of the last four decades (and most forget the third). Let me recap them very briefly. (There are lots of other raids, but as I said, these are fairly well known.)

The Raid on Entebbe (Operation Thunderbolt): Israeli commandos, flying out of Israel, made their way to Uganda – a country friendly to the terrorists, but not terribly sophisticated in air defenses – and snatched the hostages (passengers and crew from an Air France flight) held by PFLP terrorists. The raid (on July 4th, 1976) was against well-armed and fully alerted terrorists. Results: 245 hostages freed, three hostages, all the terrorists, and 40 or so Ugandan soldiers – who were providing security – were killed. One Israeli Special Forces soldier was killed – the strike commander, LtCol Yoni Netanyahu. He is the older brother of Prime Minister Netanyahu.

Desert One (Operation Eagle Claw): the attempt (on April 24, 1980) to recover the 55 US embassy personnel held in Tehran. We all remember how this went, a very complex operation, flying off of US aircraft carriers and out of several airfields in the mid-east, landing at a field in a desert in Iran, caught in a sand-storm, etc. There was a collision during refueling, two aircraft were destroyed immediately, 8 US personnel died, the raid was aborted. For range and complexity this may have been the most complex of the bunch.

The Son Tay Raid (Operation Ivory Coast): A raid conducted by US special forces to rescue prisoners held at the North Vietnamese prison at Son Tay (November 20-21, 1970). The raid was a failure in that the North Vietnamese had moved the prisoners out of the camp shortly before the raid – a failure of both intelligence and perhaps of operational security. Of note, US forces got into the camp – located about 20 miles west of Hanoi – and out with only two men wounded.

Compare these operational environments to Pakistan. Pakistan is an ally of the US; as much as some might want to question that, there is not only a US Embassy in Pakistan and a Pakistani Embassy in Washington, we have US military facilities in Pakistan, we routinely – daily - fly over their country (how do US Navy F-18s get to Afghanistan from carriers in the North Arabian Sea? They file a flight plan with the Pakistani government and then fly over Pakistan). And no one on either side of the border, when seeing an airplane approach the border from the other side considers that they are about to be attacked or invaded. Further, if something disastrous had happened at the compound, and all the aircraft were down and the men could no longer depart, would we anticipate that the Pakistani army would assault the compound and fight the SEALs? There might have been some confusion, but the Pakistanis – as much as the Americans – would not and do not want a fight of that kind. It is reasonable to suspect that if something untoward like that had happened that the SEALs would have been taken into ‘custody’ held briefly, and then driven to the nearest airfield and flown home. There might have been some political posturing, but the SEALs would have been ok.

And let’s consider the threat. Is it likely that the Pakistanis would fire on an aircraft that came from the general direction of Afghanistan? The Pakistani Air Force (a capable and professional force) knows who is in Afghanistan. I suspect they see US aircraft (those pesky drones) fly over the border every day and night. They do not try to shoot them down. How does this compare to the raid on Son Tay? At the time the area around Hanoi was the most heavily defended terrain on the planet. As for Iran, Tehran was also heavily defended in 1980, with a good deal of then new US technology. In both cases Americans who might be captured by the locals would expect VERY unpleasant treatment. And Entebbe? While Uganda’s air defenses were not as sophisticated as either North Vietnam’s or Iran’s, Idi Amin – the dictator – was a vicious individual who had made clear his friendship with groups such as the PFLP, and the Israeli commandos could be quite sure that any reception they received would be unpleasant to say the least.

And there are scores of more audacious events if we want to push back in time just a bit (the ones everyone will mention: Washington at Trenton, Dewey steaming into Manila Bay, the Doolittle Raid, anything associated with Merrill’s Marauders, Guadalcanal (the whole bloody thing), the landings at Normandy, the landing at Inchon), as well as ones that really haven’t seen much coverage, whether recent operations in Iraq, Afghanistan or elsewhere, or various operations in the Balkans during the 90s, etc. And these are just the US operations. What about the long list of SAS and SBS operations over the last 70 years? Or the Aussie SAS? If you don’t believe me, just start searching through the net, there is a mountain of stuff out there.

Even the guys we didn’t like did some pretty amazing stuff: dig around on the Russians (Soviets) during their war in Afghanistan, or the Germans during World War II or some of the Japanese operations during the early days of the war. All of which leads to the conclusion that the Vice President’s comment was absurd.

But there is more to it than that.

What is more disturbing in all this is ‘simply’ that the Vice President is perfectly comfortable couching the decision-making that led to the raid in terms of politics, not duty, not the nation’s interest, not the lives of the men on the raid. To quote the Vice President:

"Do any one of you have a doubt that if that raid failed that this guy would be a one-term President?" Biden asked, according to the media pool report from the event. "This guy is willing to do the right thing and risk losing."

What that comment suggests to me is precisely the opposite; that, in fact, the issue of re-election was considered before they made the decision, for as certain as the night follows the day that line of conversation would not occur to the Vice President if it hadn’t taken place. And I would suspect that the real calculus in the White House – long after the Admirals and Generals finished talking - was along the lines of:

“We are pretty sure he is there; if we don’t go, and the intelligence gets out, you’ll look weak. If we go and it goes bad, you will at least look strong, and you can always blame intelligence and the generals. And if we get him you are a hero. And that will help in your re-election.”

And that’s not real leadership, and it’s not audacious and it’s not virtuous; it’s shameful.