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Comment by saltcured | Hacker News Reader

If you can stomach the bravado and unclear factual accuracy, the 2007 book Lone Survivor gives an account of a similar failure, in Afghanistan, where a SEAL team was discovered early in their mission. But, it devolved into a running battle and a disaster for the US special forces where most of the team and many rescuers also died. As a result of those prior events, I can imagine they have different rules of engagement in the event of being detected.

But, what's most crazy to me is that these details are being published in such a short time. My impression is that these clandestine forces used to have much more strict control, and details would not emerge for many decades or even during the lives of the participants?

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> In Marcus Luttrell's original after-action report, he stated that he and his teammates were attacked by 20–35 insurgents, while his book places the number at over 200....military journalist Ed Darack cites a military intelligence report stating the strength of the Taliban force to be 8–10.

> Luttrell's book and the film both suggest that the SEALs decision to release the goat herders led to their subsequent ambush - yet according to Gulab, people throughout the area heard the SEALs being dropped off by helicopter, and the Taliban proceeded to track the SEALs' footprints.

Yeah, I'm going to go with the reason these details are "emerging" (aka published in coordination with the DoD) is the aforementioned "unclear factual accuracy".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Survivor#Historical_accur...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Luttrell#Operation_Red_...

Honestly, I’m not inclined to believe the NYT reporting here either. Those leaking the “facts” necessarily must obscure and change details to avoid being caught as the leaker. But after a few paragraphs, it becomes clear someone leaked this to harm the current administration. Their motive can also mean they left out detail. For example, Obama may have done a similar successful operation but that will not be leaked here. As OP said, usually you need decades to get the truth vs the little reporters can harvest

> it becomes clear someone leaked this to harm the current administration

Did you think that about Watergate too? Unless the entire story was manufactured I don't see how you could possibly reach that conclusion.

The Lone Survivor story is pure propaganda and mostly inaccurate. You can easily look this up. That entire operation was a F up from the beginning, and had nothing to do with being discovered early. It created proper propaganda fuel though, so mission partially accomplished I suppose.

Unless you were there, there is no reason to think any of the stories (good or bad) are anything other than propaganda.

The US navy literally wrote the book, and gave it to Luttrell. This has recently come to light. Now if that’s not propaganda then I don’t know what is.

I'm not trying to be a jerk here, but source? Genuinely curious.

I don't have a link handy, but I recall seeing on YT a clip of Luttrell basically outright stating that the Navy "handed him the book pre-written" in an interview.

I'd get to steppin' and find it. Compelling statements need compelling sources.

Not OP, but here:

https://youtu.be/yZ6mgltPclk

And the other Valhalla VFT one, and the Team House podcast, and just all over the place…

Luttrell didn't have anything to do with it. The writer is a British fiction writer. He did a one hour interview with Lutrell, that's the entire involvement Luttrell had with it.

That sucks if true, although I don't expect everyone military special forcers operator to also be a great author on top of their other amazing skills, I expect it to be somewhat ghost written, but one hour? Perhaps the ghostwriter used other interviews and had access to other reports?

Oh I'm sure he read about it somewhere. But the book is simply fiction. Most of the story as Luttrell tells it to this day is false, but the book is even worse.

The link I posted earlier tells the real story.

The public should be hearing about these failures when they involve an almost entirely opaque nuclear-armed state having their sovereignty violated.

It appears that people involved in the operation feel the same. The stakes in a failure like this are far higher than most SOC missions.

Lone Survivor is simply a work of fiction.

http://www.darack.com/sawtalosar/

Another thing we could do is watch the documentary 300 to learn about how the Spartans fought off Xerxes.

I can’t tell if this is subtle dry humour or serious.

SEALs are macho glory hounds. Army special forces are so much better at mission and role focus.

The SEALs talk in open media constantly. There's a reason you have no idea what the Green Berets do.

Green Berets are not tier 1 though compared to Seal Team Six mentioned in the article. I think, you meant Delta Force.

JSOC units, including Delta Force, carried out raids in Iraq and Afghanistan that killed many civilians, often women and children. We cannot measure the exact ratio of civilian-to-combatant deaths, but multiple investigations show civilians bore the brunt, often children.

In these expeditionary wars, the only good guys were groups like MSF, WFP, and the ICRC.

I think this has fairly recently been outed as being almost all fiction.

2007 was the crazy Bush days. In 2008 Bush wanted a missile defense shield in Poland, pointed at Russia, and made a point of declaring Ukraine would join NATO.

Maybe Putin's 2007 Munich speech and 2008 Russian war with Georgia had something to do with that.

Which were also tit-for-tat responses to the US & NATO (US involvement & funding in 2004 Ukraine Orange Revolution, 2006 Georgia bid for NATO, 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit).

Oh no they donated to a political campaign. Better start shelling villages and displacing a quarter million people. Tit for tat.

And funny thing they aren't shelling the Americans who supposedly wronged them.

Hope you realize that once you subscribe to this naive-mechanistic view of politics all American wars and actions abroad also become justified.

How dare you suggest Putin is not doing things because he’s just crazy and wants to take over Europe??

If I was a superpower I would just be really nice and have good policy so that people wanted to join my country

I am not sure why none of the big three have put this into practice yet

Those are the kinds of things you do when you CAN’T get what you want through PR and sheer bullshit (or violence). And assume you don’t already feel like you have the best people.

That tends to not align very well with being a ‘superpower’. That kind of self doubt and reasonableness is what makes you stop being a superpower.

It’s similar with Empires. You don’t get to be (or sustain) being an empire by giving a shit what anyone else thinks. You get to be (or sustain) being an empire by doing whatever the fuck you want, regardless of what anyone else thinks. And if anyone tries to stop you, figuring out a way to get them out of your way/conquer them.

It’s a variant of ‘reasonable people conform to reality, unreasonable people make reality conform to them. therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable people.’

Of course, if you fuck it up, you potentially die. So none of this is for the faint of heart, or weak of arm (as it were).

Isn’t that what the EU is doing? Getting counties to join them by being nice

I guess the crazy part is he was 100% correct too

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