Shortly after The Event, I wrote to friends:
Brother Alan is correct, that I can’t comment on classified matters of which I might have some knowledge. But, like any American, I am permitted to vent about things about which I am absolutely clueless (a right exercized in abundance by many Americans, of late), knowing no more than what we all read in the papers. And I would like to weigh in on this.
The UBL snatch must be one of the most brilliantly executed military maneuvers in history. In style, it most resembles the ops of the Israelis -- surgical, no fingerprints. (“Who was that masked man?”) At the front end, there was years of intel prep (no comment); but when the wind hit the rotors, there was another element, a hardware element -- a sort of Stealth helicopter, without which the mission would probably not have succeeded.
Now, Cousin Skip (Harry to you young’uns) knows more about helos than I ever will, but the basic idea here is this. Despite lip-service paid to our “ally” Pakistan, our guys were basically flying into what we call “denied territory”. The consequences of our being detected -- not just by the target, but by the Paki Air Force -- were too horrible to contemplate. Had they had advance knowledge that this capability even existed, they could have taken countermeasures that would have defeated the mission.
And yet, the Administration and the small segment of witting R&D and military had the discipline to keep this capability absolutely undetected. Neither I nor anyone I know had the slightest idea that the capability existed. The technology is still very new, very raw -- after all, one of the birds went down -- but despite all our challenges in AfPak, the Administration had the wisdom to refrain from using the capability for lower priorites, not to reveal this hole-card prematurely. Our President has his detractors, but when it comes to CounterTerrorism, he gets full marks.
Another thought: Obama succeeded exactly where Carter failed. The weak point of the Iran-hostage rescue-mission (had it succeeded, Carter would have had two terms, and history would have been different) was again the crucial matter of helicopters. And in this latest raid, they were used in a way that cruise missiles could not be. A lesser Commander-in-Chief might have been content with the vastly lower-risk mission of simply blowing up the UBL compound . But our guys -- apart from inflicting no collateral damage such as is inevitable with missiles -- scooped up a treasure-trove of the most exquisite intel… Kids, just imagine a cavern filled with more comic-books than you have ever seen.
An excellent journalist’s account of the snatch appeared in The New Yorker; and now, we have a book purportedly written by one of the actual Seals on the scene.
Reviewed here by someone who apparently knows what he is talking about:
The author, apparently, is weeping all the way to the bank:
Ultimately, it’s a marketing strategy that appears to be working: The book will still be sold on US bases throughout the world at military exchanges.
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