Bin Laden raid a triumph for Spec Ops - Army News | News from Afghanistan & Iraq - Army Times

Bin Laden raid a triumph for Spec Ops

The moment a Navy SEAL forced his way into Osama bin Laden’s bedroom and put two bullets into the al-Qaida leader was not only the culmination of a manhunt that stretched back to the 1990s, but also Joint Special Operations Command’s finest hour.

JSOC is an organization that, like others involved in the raid on the bin Laden compound, was born out of the ashes of an equally high-profile mission that ended in abject failure one week and 31 years earlier.

On the night of April 24, 1980, the U.S. launched Operation Eagle Claw, an audacious plan to rescue 53 American hostages held captive in the U.S. Embassy in Iran.

A team of Delta Force commandos assembled in the Iranian desert, preparing to fly into the Iranian capital of Tehran, take back the embassy and bring home the hostages.

The mission was scrubbed when one helicopter slammed into a C-130 Hercules aircraft, killing eight service members and destroying both aircraft, after which the commandos abandoned the helicopters and left Iran in another C-130.

It was a catastrophic blow to American morale at home and prestige abroad.

The history of U.S. special operations since then can be summed up as a 31-year effort to ensure that when the nation called again, the military’s most elite units would be up to the task.

“Those of us who bear the burden of having failed at Desert One, but having now seen what it resulted in over a 31-year-period, are very proud of what has come out of the ashes of those helicopters and C-130 on the night of the 24th of April, 1980,” said retired Lt. Gen. William “Jerry” Boykin, who was a Delta Force officer on the hostage rescue mission.

It is in the nature of the secretive missions that are JSOC’s raison d’etre that the organization’s many successes remain hidden while its reverses and failures — such as the recent attempt to rescue British hostage Linda Norgrove from Afghan insurgents that ended in Norgrove’s death — are sometimes revealed to the world. The raid on bin Laden’s compound provided JSOC a rare opportunity to showcase its abilities. This time, JSOC did not miss the opportunity to impress.

A hard lesson learned

The bin Laden raid took advantage of earlier lessons learned. In the years since the failure at Desert One, the Defense Department stood up several organizations, filling capability gaps exposed by the Iranian hostage rescue mission.

In 1987, over the objections of the Joint Chiefs, Congress created U.S. Special Operations Command, a four-star headquarters to oversee the military’s burgeoning special operations capabilities. But that was more than six years after the Pentagon established what was to become arguably the pre-eminent three-star command in the U.S. military: Joint Special Operations Command.

When it stood up in December 1980, JSOC was a two-star command designed to command and control Delta Force and other elite units in the conduct of counterterrorism missions. It later added operations to counter weapons of mass destruction to its mission profile, with regular exercises aimed at neutralizing the nuclear forces of a country such as Libya.

The command had some early successes, notably the rescue of American Kurt Muse from Panama’s Modelo prison during Operation Just Cause in December 1989.

• Mission helo was secret stealth Black Hawk

• SEALs from bin Laden raid drawn from Red Squadron

But it suffered a setback in October 1993 in the Somali capital of Mogadishu when a daylight operation to capture leaders of the Habr Gadir clan was thrown off course by the downing of an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.

In the ensuing battle, the JSOC task force killed hundreds of Somali militiamen, but 19 U.S. troops also died, the vast majority of them members of the task force.

The JSOC commander at the time, and the man who ran the U.S. side of the battle, was Army Maj. Gen. Bill Garrison. Despite the Mogadishu experience, Boykin, who commanded the Delta troops in the battle, said Garrison was the leader who began the process of turning JSOC into the formidable force it is today.

“Bill Garrison did a great deal to improve the headquarters by getting beyond a strict focus on just the operator in the Rangers or the SEALs or Delta or anything like that,” Boykin said.

Garrison “established a strong ethos of, ‘Everybody’s a team and you all contribute to the success or the failure of this organization, so even if you’re not in the battle space, necessarily, your contribution is equal.’ ”

Turning point

But the biggest turning point in JSOC’s history occurred when then-Maj. Gen. Stan McChrystal took command in 2003, a recently retired SEAL officer said.

“Look at JSOC from 1980 to 2003, and there was a series of progressions that was on a very similar path, … and then look what happened starting in 2003 to today, how radically different it is,” he said. “Look at the level of respect it gets in the interagency. Look at the level of respect it gets in the conventional forces.”

Before McChrystal, who spent much of his career in the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment, “we were really good at what we did [in JSOC], but we were pirates and totally disorganized,” the retired SEAL officer said. “McChrystal took the Ranger discipline, applied it systematically to the organization and then completely changed the way the organization works within the government, within the Defense Department and then within the greater interagency.”

McChrystal’s vision and force of personality molded JSOC, its component units — and, crucially, its partners in the intelligence community — into a force that took its ability to conduct precision raids to an industrial scale.

This led to multiple task forces across Iraq conducting dozens of raids nightly to destroy Abu Musab Zarqawi’s al-Qaida in Iraq network, finally killing Zarqawi himself in a June 2006 airstrike.

Under McChrystal, who led the command for almost five years from 2003 to 2008, JSOC expanded its reach, becoming a global actor with small elements deployed to distant countries outside the combat theaters and raised its status to a three-star command in 2006.

McChrystal “came up with a way to command and control his forces so that with a limited number, he could service efforts in truly a global game,” said retired Army Capt. Wade Ishimoto, who was on the ground at Desert One as Delta’s acting intelligence officer and is now an adjunct faculty member at the Joint Special Operations University at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla.

Vice Adm. Bill McRaven, a SEAL who took command of JSOC from McChrystal, has continued where the latter left off, according to special operations sources, honing JSOC into an even more capable organization.

As JSOC has drawn down its forces in Iraq and redeployed assets to Afghanistan, it appears to be re-creating the sort of operational tempo for its task forces there that existed at the height of the Iraq war in 2006 and 2007. It is the main force going up against the Haqqani network, which U.S. commanders consider the most dangerous Afghan insurgent group.

“McRaven’s going to get the credit [for the bin Laden mission], and he deserves it because he’s continued the legacy,” said the recently retired SEAL officer. “But make no mistake, this house was built by Stan, was developed over five years of blood, sweat and tears to reforge completely the way people operate.”

Ishimoto also paid tribute to McRaven, but said that others beyond the past two JSOC leaders played key roles, including Boykin, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence under President George W. Bush, and McChrystal’s intelligence chief at JSOC, now-Maj. Gen. Mike Flynn of the Army.

“We had a good cast of the right people in the right places at the right time to make this kind of progress,” Ishimoto said. “It’s not luck. There were some decided efforts to make things happen that way.”

The special operators

The Obama administration has not identified the units that took part in the mission to kill bin Laden.

But the stealth MH-60 Black Hawks that carried the SEALs to the compound were almost certainly flown by crews from the Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), another unit created in the 1980s, this time to fill the need for an elite helicopter force that had been underlined by the debacle at Desert One.

The unit went by a series of different names in the 1980s before acquiring the 160th SOAR(A) moniker in 1990.

The SEALs who killed bin Laden, his son and two male couriers — as well as, accidentally, one of the women in the compound — came from another unit formed to fill a capability gap identified after Operation Eagle Claw: Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, popularly known as SEAL Team 6.

“DEVGRU was created specifically as a result of [Eagle Claw],” Boykin said. “It was created to give this new joint command a maritime capability.”

Multiple sources in the special operations community said the operators who conducted the bin Laden mission were drawn from DEVGRU’s Red Squadron, chosen because it was ready at DEVGRU’s Dam Neck, Va., headquarters and available for tasking.

“It was Red Squadron,” said the recently retired SEAL officer. “They were not on alert and they weren’t deployed.”

Each squadron has about 50 operators, “of which they picked about half … for this thing,” he added.

But the selection of DEVGRU to conduct the bin Laden mission has irked some in Delta, who are miffed that their organization — traditionally considered the pre-eminent special mission unit for direct action operations on land — was overlooked for such a prestigious tasking.

“The infighting between the tribes is at an all-time high,” said a field-grade Army special operations officer. “People [in Delta] are livid.”

Some Delta personnel think that the fact that SEALs command both JSOC and U.S. Special Operations Command — Adm. Eric Olson in the latter case — was a critical factor behind DEVGRU’s selection for the mission, the field-grade Army special operations officer said.

But other sources said a bigger factor was likely the fact that DEVGRU has worked nonstop in the Afghanistan theater since 2001, while Delta spent much of that time focused on Iraq.

“We deployed for 10 years to Afghanistan,” said the recently retired SEAL officer. “When Delta left, we stayed. They got to chase the better shiny object in Iraq … so we were the guys that slogged and fought and stayed there [in Afghanistan] the whole time.”

Almost since SEAL Team 6’s creation, Army special operations personnel have criticized the SEALs’ Tier 1 outfit as lacking in the areas of planning, leadership and operator maturity.

During the past two decades the unit has been involved in several episodes that provided grist for the critics’ mills, with the Norgrove rescue attempt, which was conducted by a DEVGRU element, being the most recent example.

But while the intramural competition between Delta and DEVGRU remains fierce, improvements made by the Naval Special Warfare community in general and DEVGRU in particular have done much to mute the criticisms, said retired Army special ops officers.

“The success of this is really a testament to some extraordinary efforts on the part of the SEAL community to enhance the professionalism and capabilities of the SEALs,” Boykin said.

“The leadership in the SEALs is excellent today and that is evidenced by the fact that SOCOM is commanded by a SEAL, JSOC is commanded by a SEAL, the next SOCOM commander will be a SEAL,” Boykin said, in reference to the fact that the Obama administration has nominated McRaven to replace Olsen later this year.

In another sign of rise of the SEALs, the Pentagon announced May 4 that the administration had nominated Vice Adm. Robert Harward, a DEVGRU alumnus and former deputy JSOC commander, to be the next deputy commander of U.S. Central Command.

“So the fact that they have targeted vast improvements in the leadership, that’s probably made as much difference as anything,” Boykin said. “The Naval Academy is now agreeing to allow more of their graduating class to go into the special warfare community, which was quite unusual for them in the past, and when I go out and do leadership seminars with them, over half of the SEAL officers at the lieutenant level are Naval Academy graduates.

“That is probably their single biggest improvement. Guys like Eric Olson had a vision for what they wanted the SEAL community to be, and they have been very vigilant in implementing their vision and I think their first focus was leadership. Across the board, I think that’s the single biggest thing that they’ve done.”

Ishimoto, an adviser to the Naval Special Warfare community, said the complaints he hears about Delta not being selected for the mission come from people “who don’t know how far DEVGRU has come.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re better than [Delta], but it does mean they’re not the SEAL Team 6 that Dick Marcinko put together,” Ishimoto said, referring to the controversial, hard-drinking first commander of the unit. Ishimoto identified “planning, command and control and working in a joint environment” as the key areas in which DEVGRU has made major improvements.

The recently retired SEAL struck a conciliatory tone in discussing the tensions with DEVGRU’s Army counterparts. “The reality is, all of us have bled, all of us have worked together, collaborating on the same targets in both Iraq and Afghanistan … for a long time now,” he said.

But he took umbrage at any suggestion that the SEALs were a dubious choice for the mission.

“The results speak for themselves: not a single U.S. casualty, four dead enemies, body positively ID’d, on and off the target in 40 minutes,” he said.

“From an execution standpoint, it could not have gone better, and that hasn’t always been the case for all of us, we’ve all had mistakes, but that op was flawlessly executed on every level.

“So this is good closure for us, for sure,” he said. “It’s closure for everybody, make no mistake. … This is big. It’s big for all of us. It’s a lot of funerals … a lot of failures kind of vindicated.”