Admiral Bill McRaven speaks on the use of DevGru forces for IRF duties in Afghanistan:
The new commander of American Special Operations forces has defended the use of commandos in a Navy Seals unit to back up a raid in Afghanistan earlier this month that ended in tragedy when a Chinook helicopter was shot down, rejecting criticism that planning for the operation was different from other missions that had been carried out successfully, as many as a dozen on a typical night.
The commander, Adm. William H. McRaven, said “there was nothing unusual about this mission” to warrant the sustained criticism heard from some retired commandos and military analysts, who have questioned how the operation was planned and carried out and whether it was an appropriate use of the vaunted Navy Seals…
Admiral McRaven dismissed assertions that the most highly trained Navy and Army commando teams should be reserved solely for the most high-profile missions; he said they were regularly assigned to support commanders of units in a local area of combat if that contributed to the overall mission.
“We have to be fungible as a force,” Admiral McRaven said. “And if we are not fungible as a force, then we are not of value. It is not unusual at all for Seals or Rangers or Army Special Operations forces to be part of a quick-reaction force, as in this case.”
Admiral McRaven also said that Chinook helicopters were used instead of the smaller, more agile, Black Hawks when a larger team was transported.
“They are more than capable of doing this particular job,” he said of the Chinooks. “This was an appropriate use of that particular helicopter.”
Apart from their unique skill sets, SOF are of course capable of doing a wide spectrum of infantry missions, which is what the admiral is referring to when he speaks of fungibility. The question some asked was not whether they were suited to this task, but whether the task was suited to them. None dared doubt their personal courage. Some questioned their commander’s wisdom. But perhaps there were no other forces available, either in personnel or equipment. I will of course defer to Admiral McRaven when he speaks of perceived “value.”
But specialization matters: You could use an aircraft carrier to do a visit, board, search and seize operation at sea. But you wouldn’t, if you had a frigate or destroyer at hand. We lost eight Navy SEALS in a Chinook QRF in Afghanistan in 2005. Another 17 earlier this month in similar circumstances. As human beings they are to be mourned no more or less than any grunt in the line infantry. But as national treasures they are irreplaceable, at least in the short term, by which I mean the next ten to fifteen years.
The six basic principles of special operations, according to one widely read special operator, are simplicity, security, repetition, surprise, speed and purpose. The DevGru operators had three of those six; simplicity, speed and purpose. Maybe four if you throw in security, which the author used to describe secrecy in planning and training. There was of course no opportunity to specifically rehearse and repeat the targeting of squirters in a dynamic and fluid ground operation. The element of surprise was lost entirely.
The author of that seminal text?
Trying to calm turbulent water by pouring oil on it is all well and good… til the oil catches on fire.
If the Chinook was ‘capable of doing the job,’ no one would have died.
Defending a plan in defiance of the actual result is the act of a politician, not a military leader.
“Fungible” is an appropriate term… in accountancy. Not in combat planning.
The Chinook was arguably shot down by a salvo of RPG rounds fired in ambush. The enemy did a little strategic thinking (for once), some planning, and got lucky. Just like the Somalis did twenty years ago, when they took down one of the “superior” Blackhawks. With RPGs.
Ironically -given the above link is reasonably accurate- that’s the same strategy the VC used against US gunships during the Vietnam War. Determine the likely air routes and set up firing points.
With you all the way sarge. (BTW, Why is an NCO always leading this officer? Hmmmm….lets not go there..) To MY Barbancourt-infused mind the ENTIRE HISTORY of “Special Ops” makes the point that the CARDINAL MISTAKE is to treat them as line troops–that time, effort, and expense devoted to their tng is so great that they should be husbanded for ONLY those ops not capable of being carried out by line units and that to do other-wise is to fritter away a scarce, valuable resource needlessly that has a looong gestation-period in terms of standing-up on-line operationally. As is well known, there has been traditionally unto this very day an antipathy towards special ops by regular Army types who decry the “dilution” of their forces by the extraction of expertise, and mental & physical abilities and leadership (as well as scarce resources like airlift, etc.) attributes from their units to man the special ops billets. In WWII the paratroops were the “special ops” of their day, yet theater commanders tended to “capture” them once committed and use them like line divisions rather than allow them to disengage to rest, refit, replace losses and train for the next mission.
What this incident reflects, IMHO, is the deleterious effects of a reduced force which does not allow the necessary manpower & equip. to carry out all necessary missions–special AND “standard” line ops–across the board. We’re not just looking at the prospect of a “hollow” Army–we actually HAVE, for all practically purposes, a pretty large cavity service-wide already.
Plus one to both Sarge and Virgil. Flying such a large group of Special Ops forces into a hot zone in a single Chinook without first preparing the field with HE was a very poor strategy.
I am beginning to look to VX’s solution when stupidity appears to rule the day. I found this, and VX should get one:
http://failblog.org/2011/08/31/epic-fail-photos-win-so-you-can-game-while-you-pre-game-right/
LOL, reminds me of that ’59 B&W Ernie Kovacs noire comedy spy movie “Our Man in Havana” wherein Police Chief Kovacs and British local agent/”spy” Alec Guiness engage in a checkers game using miniature airline scotch bottles (Johnny Walker Black & Red) with rules being one had to drink the piece captured; the obj being to get Kovacs drunk so as to steal, hell, I can’t remember, his keys, gun?–been so long and I’m deep into my cups already this early am..
The best laid plans of Mice & Men. The planning was done to the highest standards but the POV (Point of Vunerability) was there, it was small and the B@stards were able to exploit it.
Rule #1 of war – Good Men die. Rule #2 – Officers and Senior NCOs are not allowed to change rule #1.
We all want to minimize the number and all involved with this OP did what they were supposed to and as they thought best.
While I deeply regret the loss of life, I will not second guess these dedicated warriors. They did what we asked and went in harm’s way. I appreciate what that means and how devestating a loss we all suffered.
You cannot fight without going into harm’s way.
Blood remains the price of admiralty, even in the mountains.
Not much you can do about a hit from 57 mm round from close aboard, 100 feet in the air and on final.
Helicopters in the attack are reynolds wrap dreadnaughts. Shoot downs in a hot LZ happen.
Fortunes of war. RIP honored dead.
Virgil, I think what you are saying, boiled down to essentials is some assets are so expensive (SEALS, Rangers,, Aviation, etc.) are so expensive, they must be held for high ROI operations. If so, I agree totally.
During WW2, Darby’s Rangers were almost always misused. They were often used as shock troops, or for the high risk ops like river crossings, rather than what they were originally trained for. It appears the SEALs, in this case, were misused as well. That’s no insult to the valor or training of the SEALs lost in the ops, just that someone made a serious error of judgment. Putting them all into one large chopper was another mistake. It also appears they may have made a mistake in forgetting the principles of airmobile ops learned in Vietnam as well.
Years ago, my older brother gave me a special Christmas gift: a set of Snap-On “Indianapolis 500 50th Anniversary” commemorative screwdrivers. Ya know? They would probably work just as good as chisels as my regular Sears Craftsmen screwdrivers. He would cut my hand off if I ever dared use them for such a purpose.
Looking at the official DoD press release, the ages/pay grades of *all* those involved–but especially the special operators–strongly suggests that the cumulative experience lost, simply due to poor planning (or support on the cheap–flying one Chinook costs one-half that of two Chinooks) is what is so costly.
Greetings: (this is a reposting of my rant at the “Outside the Beltway” site.)
Amid the outburst of breast-beating that has followed the demise of so many who would protect us, I can’t help but think about the nine blind guys and the elephant. It seems to me that very few are interested in figuring out the whole as opposed to the limited part to which one feels attached.
Among the many things my favorite Platoon Sergeant taught me was “Some days you eat the bulldog; some days the bulldog eats you.” However startling this incident is to us, things like this happen in war. Some days, for some reason or other, you get out-soldiered and pay the price. I’m sure there will be plenty of After Action analyses forthcoming and maybe they will provide some foresight in the future. But, I’m becoming a bit unsettled by all this bathos of hindsight.
One of the things that bothers me is all these genuflections before the SEALs and SEAL Team 6. Granted they are brave warriors and prized military assets, but nobody gets a round-trip ticket when he goes off to war. This stratification of our combat forces is also disturbing to me. I once had a sociology professor who thought that some people liked the military because they liked its hierarchical structure, they knew where they stood. The argument that SEALs shouldn’t be supporting Rangers or god forbid, I guess, some straight-leg rifleman is sophomoric to my mind. I seem to remember being sent, as a 1st Cav leg rifleman, to help some Green Berets and their fellow travelers, get out of some deep doo-doo. If the warrior uses what is at hand, so must the planner.
As for the “What’s the strategy?” issue, this reminds me much of the left’s standard manipulation “Just let me fix the world, and then we’ll get to work on your problem.” The strategy, the tactic, the Plan of the Day, is kill some bad guys; as many as you can, as often as you can, any where and any way you can. No matter how many layers of sophisticated “strategy” our politicians and generals slather on that’s what it’s all about, now and forever.
Lastly, in a kind of damning with faint praise kind of way, the process of hollowing out our military continues. End the military draft for men, accept higher and higher percentages of women, make the military safe for homosexual conduct, no collateral damage, rules of engagement, real-time video supervision of operations, let’s discuss whether I can/should shoot somebody/something. Oh, and by the way, your highly reproductive but not so productive fellow citizens need a big piece of your budget to feather their social safety nets/hammocks. Now let’s go to work.
11B there’s nothing wrong with using the high dollar assets at hand, if they’re the only thing you have available. If that is the case here, then someone is guilty of very poor planning.
McRaven knows there are limits to fungibility. Ask him what he said about how SEALs were used in Iraq in 2003-4, about SOF being used as gate guards and watchstanders.
Lex, you do seem to have overlooked a key difference between the 2005 ambush and this one. In 2005, the SEALs killed were going in to rescue other SEALs. This time around, they went in to help another element that should have had plenty of its own QRF support ready without tapping into SOF.
They still went to help their own fellow soldiers and sailors, though. It’s important to remember that SOF isn’t its own service, it’s just a finely trained subset of the larger services.
McRaven can take the heat, and heat is justified to determine if there was a better way to have responded to those troops in contact. But the straight leg Army better be feeling the heat as well.
There. Four bullet points none of which support the other.
If forces are truly fungible, why wasn’t McRaven humping a ride in on that Chinook?
The obvious answer is that an Admiral has special training, knowledge, and experience that makes him more useful for other things.
Bravo; So do SpecOps troops. They are rarer than are General officers, and definitely more intensive of time, talent, and treasure to replace.
Be that as it may; it still does not explain putting that many expensive hard-to-replace eggs all in one dumb-fire targettable tinfoil basket.
Using one additional copter would have cut their potential (and in this case actual) losses by 50%
That’s a planning and logistics failure, not ‘second-guessing.’ As has been pointed out previously, helos are notoriously vulnerable to ground fire on final into a hot LZ – - something known since they first started being used this way. Knowing that, loading just one with a painful proportion of any particular type of talent & making a catastrophic loss a one-shot possibility demonstrates either a lack of foresight, or an inexcusable shortage of resource.
Even the people who run Coca-Cola have the brains not to fly all their execs on one jet.
I think many are failing to understand the establishment of a QRF.
Many times they are pre-planned. However, the “quick” is a relative term. It is more than likely that these SEALs happened to be most ready to respond in the shortest amount of time. I personally have no specific issue with them being used in this role, so long as it does not detract from the unit’s overall mission readiness.
If these Sailors were anything like the SEALs I know, they heard the reports of Americans in need and they acted. They may have been on a strip alert for a SOC TST. They may have been somewhere in the middle of a rest/refit period between missions. Regardless, they acted as they saw fit and planned/performed as well as they could given the time restrictions. This is not unlike the Chinook that went down in 2005. There was little planning for the QRF, and a ragtag group was assembled to perform the task.
Remember, the Enemy always has a vote. You can never discount it, or casually toss that aside. These a hard men, wizened by years and decades of constant fighting. They are smart. They adapt to our tactics. We too must adapt. However, you can not adapt without coming to terms with the inadequacy of certain methods. In this case, we threw scissors; and the Enemy countered with rock.
N.B. I still find it odd that the sent a lone CH-47 with all of those men on board. There is no survivability in that plan IOT achieve mission accomplishment. If thats the only bird that they had, then so be it.
“There. Four bullet points none of which support the other.”
The Navy has trained you well, grasshopper..
No, the Navy teaches me to bend the other three around with euphemisms until they all look like they’re supporting whatever the commander wants. Unlike the Navy, I’m perfectly capable of living with reality, which is that very little actually goes together that neatly.
We obviously don’t know all the particulars of this mission but I can tell you in the recent past, that instead of inserting a QRF, helicopter gunships killed the “squirters” that were attempting to flee the target house. It might be the ROE that needs to be examined and not the tactics. Just sayin’