It’s not just “lol, let’s try it. If we die, we die!”
And their success rate should be and is, pretty high. That said, this was a National Command Authority (came down from the White House) mission and those tend to be the riskiest.
I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT.
Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt, including the claim that they were even SF in the first place.
However, they all describe the selection processes similarly. And, my educated assumption is that this part is probably too dull for them to lie about, much less lie about in unison across many accounts and years. So I have a decent level of confidence in that aspect of their tales.
Anyway, the common threads are that while they do want highly confident and confident types who are also outliers in terms of physical ability, the selection process is HIGHLY geared towards selecting intelligent team-oriented individuals. Without those two traits you are going to get you and your squadmates killed in a hurry. These missions are highly planned but due to the inherent ambiguity and difficulty the SF guys have to make a LOT of autonomous decision making on the fly when things (inevitably) deviate from the script.
You hear very similar stories from other "elite" types in the military, like combat pilots. While you have to be sort of a highly talented "alpha" type you also need to be professional and team oriented. No loose cannons allowed, either on the individual or squad level.
In terms of military history this is not strictly true. In past conflicts where personnel was limited and compromises had to made these types of soldiers were often given solo or special assignments and very often excelled in that environment, with more than a few of our highly decorated soldiers from WWII having served in this way.
Peace time militaries tend to get bogged down with this strict squadron type of thinking and in that context you are not at all wrong, but it is interesting that when push comes to shove, the military rediscovers that there's more than one way to win the battle.
I think it needs to be said that people who choose those careers are probably one of the worst kinds of people. They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command. And then you select out of those the ones that think being interviewed on YouTube about that is a good idea. They should be studied anthropologically not listened too.
I’m guessing you’ve never met any special operations people, much less folks from the SMUs. I have met many. 100% A+ people. I’m sure there are bad apples, but I’ve never met one.
> They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command.
Rules of engagement are a thing — a very real thing.
For those who are interested, here is an interview with a very active former Delta Force operator. There are interesting stories about selection, rules of engagement, the stresses of doing the type of work he did, and life after the military.
Do you have any other similar podcasts, videos, etc. to recommend that feature interviews with former operators?
They should be studied anthropologically not listened too.
I think it needs to be said that people who
choose those careers are probably one of the
worst kinds of people
And then you select out of those the ones
that think being interviewed on YouTube about that
is a good idea.
What specific channels would you recommend?
The majority of them also have views that I find pretty problematic.
Is it?
We obviously don't get most reporting, but of the publicly known missions, the success rate is abysmal, and even the "successes" are disasters.
Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed, it was operationally questionable _and_ it was 9 years after another spectacularly failed mission involving SEALs ("Operation Anaconda") allowed bin Laden's escape, which in turn was following the disastrous Battle of Tora Bora which was the first major failure in a war respite with them.
None of these operations were daring acts of brave men. They were all - like the one in the article - full of cowardly acts and human rights abuses, from deliberately killing civilians to using fake healthcare workers to collect DNA samples (which has caused and continues to cause thousands of deaths due to the ongoing suspicion of childhood vaccines in Pakistan) to the torture of enemy soldiers and civilians alike in secret prisons to shooting an eight-year-old girl in the neck (Nawar al-Awlaki).
> they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand
That's certainly the Hollywood version, but the reality doesn't match up.
Emphasis added. Is the death of Osama bin laden under any serious dispute? It's been 14 years.
Died peacefully in his sleep was not a suitable ending for the mastermind of 9/11, so it would never have been allowed to happen, even if the truth had to be bent to achieve it.
- On-scene & eyewitness identification by the SEALs (including identification by a wife). [1]
- CIA facial-recognition match to known images. [2]
- Rapid DNA testing matching bin Laden to family members. [3]
- Existence of classified post-mortem photos/videos acknowledged in court. [4]
- Official U.S. account of Islamic-rite preparation and burial at sea. [5]
- Al-Qaeda’s public acknowledgment of bin Laden’s death. [6]
- Large intelligence haul from the Abbottabad compound (letters, books, documents).
- Pakistan’s Abbottabad Commission findings and related interviews/documentation.
Taken together, this evidence is certainly more than "a press release." Do you have stronger evidence that he wasn't killed?
Sources: [1] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/docs/UBLDocument...
[2] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/docs/UBLDocument...
[3] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/docs/UBLDocument...
[4] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1...
[5] https://www.cpf.navy.mil/Newsroom/News/Article/2755760/bin-l...
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/al-qaeda-confirms-os...
[7] https://www.dni.gov/index.php/192-dni/resources/1198-bin-lad...
https://ctc.westpoint.edu/letters-from-abbottabad-bin-ladin-...
[8] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/7/8/document-pakistans-b...
The Letters from Abbottabad also fall into this category. Their timing and content are unusually convenient for the U.S. narrative, and there is no independent verification of their authenticity beyond U.S. release.
The Abbottabad Commission’s findings were limited. It was unable to independently verify bin Laden’s residence in Abbottabad except via U.S. assertions. What it did conclude was that Pakistani authorities had no prior knowledge of his presence or of the American raid.
It’s also worth noting that the claim bin Laden was “martyred” by U.S. forces was desirable for Al-Qaeda’s own propaganda purposes. It provided them with a rallying narrative regardless of the underlying facts.
So when you ask whether there is “stronger evidence he wasn’t killed,” the point is that there is no independent evidence either way. What we have are uncorroborated U.S. claims and propaganda statements from Al-Qaeda for whom his death at the hands of the US was a propaganda boon. Neither of which can be treated as reliable proof.
In fact, the level of evidence is comparable to other cases where U.S. authorities presented certainty that later collapsed - such as the claim that the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan produced VX nerve agent, or that Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire. Both were asserted as fact by the U.S. military and government until contradictory evidence made the truth undeniable. It would be naïve to assume we are working with reliable sources here.