My point is that you and I have no idea whether a mission to capture al-Awlaki is "what they do or not". To know whether such a mission is possible or realistic requires knowledge that few people in the world actually have. Whether to deploy SOF or not is a command decision made on a case by case basis. We can't know sitting behind our computer terminals whether it was a realistic option or not. I assume it wasn't, otherwise why wouldn't they have tried to capture him? I imagine he would have been a very valuable source of intel.

There are a lot of people out there who seem to feel pretty strongly about sending our armed forces in harms way in this type of situation. I can't help but wonder if any of those people stand to lose anything if such an operation were to go poorly. It just boggles my mind that we would risk American lives and millions of dollars of training and equipment when we have other legal options that are less risky.