Navy SEALs: Obama's Secret Army

Navy SEALs: Obama's Secret Army
http://www.thedailybeast.com/newsweek/2012/02/19/navy-seals-obama-s-secret-a
rmy.print.html
At a time when many Americans think their government is inept, the 'Special
Operators' get the job done. Just ask the President, who is doubling down on
the Navy SEALs.
by Daniel Klaidman  | February 20, 2012 12:00 AM EST

One of President Obama's earliest kills came in April 2009. Somali pirates
had stormed the Maersk Alabama, a U.S. container ship steaming across
lawless waters off the Horn of Africa. The American crew of the ship had
tried to overwhelm the pirates, who fled on a covered lifeboat, taking with
them a 53-year-old hostage: ship captain Richard Phillips. Armed with AK-47s
and pistols, the pirates stashed Phillips below deck and threatened to kill
him if they didn't get $2 million in ransom.

Barack Obama, not yet three months into his presidency, had already
undergone a crash course in battlefield management. He had authorized drone
strikes in Pakistan and sent 17,000 troops into Afghanistan. But until now,
he had not experienced the personal immediacy and political risk of a kill
operation involving an American hostage-one that would play out largely in
public view. Nor had he worked with SEAL Team 6, the elite "tier one"
commandos who carry out many of the darkest missions in the shadow wars.

Early on in the standoff, the Navy had requested permission to use force,
but the White House held back. Military commanders had already dispatched a
small armada to the scene, including a destroyer, the USS Bainbridge, and a
frigate, the USS Halyburton. Transport planes ferried in the SEALs, who
parachuted into the Indian Ocean with inflatable boats. On April 11, three
days after the hostage taking began, Obama agreed to the use of military
force-but only if the captain's life was in imminent danger.

As Obama's military advisers monitored events in the White House Situation
Room, the president popped in for regular updates. SEAL Team 6 snipers were
positioned on different ships to maximize the chances of getting off clean
shots. At one point, the Navy laid a kind of a trap for the hostage vessel,
but the pirates, by sheer luck, "waltzed" around it, according to a source
involved in the operation. All the while, the pirates were drifting toward
shore. If they were able to reach a Somali beach with their hostage, a
rescue operation would be much more difficult. SEAL boats began zooming
around the pirates, using "shouldering and blocking" tactics to keep them
away from shore.

By dusk on April 12-Easter Sunday-SEAL snipers on the fantail of the USS
Bainbridge were in position to shoot the pirates. But with the covered
lifeboat bobbing on the water, it was still difficult to get clean shots.
They attached night-vision scopes to their rifles and waited. At one point,
two of the pirates came into plain sight. The sharpshooters could see a
third pirate through a window pointing his gun at Captain Phillips. Each
sniper fired a single round, and it was over. Three shots, three dead
pirates. A SEAL assault team boarded the lifeboat and took Phillips to
safety.

Back in the White House, officials quietly celebrated. So much could have
gone wrong. For a young president with little experience overseeing military
operations, a botched job would have invited charges of fecklessness from
Republicans and drawn inevitable comparisons to Jimmy Carter. The generals
also expressed relief. "Mr. President, it worked out. But if it hadn't, it
would have been my ass," one military adviser told Obama. "It would have
been our ass," the president responded.

Obama has come to rely more and more on "special operators" for many types
of missions. In an era of dwindling budgets and dispersed, hidden enemies,
when Americans have become fatigued by disastrous military occupations, the
value of pinprick operations by elite forces is clear. The budget for the
Special Operations Command has more than doubled since 2001, reaching $10.5
billion, and the number of deployments has more than quadrupled. Now the
head of that command, Adm. William H. McRaven, is calling for more resources
and more autonomy. The New York Times reported on Feb. 12 that McRaven is
"pushing for a larger role for his elite units who have traditionally
operated in the dark corners of American foreign policy." He wants to expand
Special Operations Forces in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, and have the
authority to move forces and equipment as needed, assuring greater
flexibility and speed.
Photos: Navy SEALs
navy-seals-fe04-klaidman-main-tease

sealswcc.com

Who can blame him? This is a Special Ops moment. The Navy SEALs, in
particular, have never appeared so heroic and effective. They killed Osama
bin Laden in Pakistan last year, and just last month rescued two aid workers
held hostage in Somalia. At a time when many Americans think their
government is incompetent, the SEALs are public employees who often get the
job done. They're a morale booster, and they know it. Which may help explain
why they collaborated in an upcoming full-length feature film starring
active Navy SEALs called Act of Valor-a controversial undertaking,
originally intended to bolster recruitment, that some in the military regard
as foolish and helpful only to the enemy.

Obama wants to balance the need for the increasingly valuable services of
special operators with a clear-sighted assessment of the strategic
implications of expanding their missions. He's right to be mindful of the
dangers: mission creep, hubris, a messy "Black Hawk Down" disaster. Act of
Valor represents its own kind of overreach: the military knows little about
moviemaking, and the film reflects that. The kinetics will doubtless
impress, but the acting and the script will not. (One SEAL, about to
parachute into a dangerous mission, says to another: "I'll tell you what,
the only thing better than this right here is being a dad. Except for that
whole changing-diapers thing.") A better movie is likely to be one starring
Tom Hanks, scheduled for release in 2013, about the Maersk Alabama episode.

Other kinds of hubris get people killed, and can tarnish America's standing
for years. That's partly why some U.S. diplomats, and even a few officers
among the military brass, have expressed misgivings about expanding the role
and power of Special Ops. Some of these critics worry that the Special
Forces, if their numbers bloat further, won't be so special anymore. "The
whole idea of Special Ops is quality, not quantity," says Peter Singer of
the 21st Century Defense Initiative at the Brookings Institution. "But there
are concerns in that community of, how big could it reasonably get before it
gets bogged down?"

The challenges of secret missions are many: legal, moral, practical. Few
people are more aware of that than the man who ultimately pulls the trigger.
Obama's generally balanced approach to such missions is captured in the
story of an operation against a key al Qaeda terrorist in September 2009.

The CIA and military had been hunting Saleh Ali Saleh Nabhan for years. He
was a suspect in the 1998 bombings of the American embassies in Kenya and
Tanzania, and had been directly implicated in other deadly terrorist attacks
in East Africa, including a suicide bombing of an Israeli-owned resort in
Mombasa. He was an important link between al Qaeda and its Somalia-based
affiliate, and a potential wealth of information on how the jihadist
networks operate. Killing him would have been a significant victory, but
capturing him alive could have been even better.

After months of patiently watching him, American intelligence officers
suddenly learned that Nabhan was preparing to travel along a remote desert
road in southern Somalia. There wasn't much time to act. Early one September
evening, more than three dozen officials assembled by secure videoconference
to consider options. The meeting was led by Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of
the Joint Chiefs. After a short introduction, he called on Admiral McRaven,
then head of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) and one of the
military's most experienced terrorist hunters. Nabhan had been under close
surveillance for months. He had stayed mostly in heavily populated areas,
where the risk of casualties, either to civilians or American soldiers, was
too great to launch a raid. But now it looked as if Navy SEALs had the
narrow window of opportunity they'd been hoping for.

McRaven told the group that Nabhan's convoy would soon be setting out from
the capital, Mogadishu, on its way to a meeting of Islamic militants in the
coastal town of Baraawe. The square-jawed Texan and former Navy SEAL crisply
laid out the "Concepts of Operation" that had been developed in anticipation
of this moment. Several options were spelled out, along with the military
hardware that would be required for each, as well as collateral-damage
estimates:

The military could fire Tomahawk cruise missiles from a warship off the
Somali coast. This was the least dangerous option in terms of U.S.
casualties but not the most precise. (Missiles have gone astray, hitting
civilians, and even when they strike their target, they don't always take it
out.) Such missile strikes had been a hallmark of the Bush administration.
For all of its "dead or alive" rhetoric, the Bush White House was generally
cautious when it came to antiterrorist operations in anarchic areas like
Somalia. The second option was a helicopter-borne assault on Nabhan's
convoy. There was less chance of error there: small attack helicopters would
allow the commandos to "look the target in the eye and make sure it was the
right guy," according to one military planner. The final option was a
"snatch and grab," a daring attempt to take Nabhan alive. From a purely
tactical standpoint, this was the most attractive alternative. Intelligence
from high-value targets was the coin of the realm in the terror wars. But it
was also the riskiest option.

Unstated but hanging heavily over the group that evening was the memory of
another attempted capture in Somalia. Many on the call had been in key
national-security posts in October 1993 during the ill-fated attempt to
capture a Somali warlord that became known as "Black Hawk Down," after a
book of the same name. That debacle left 18 dead Army Rangers on the streets
of Mogadishu, and inspired al Qaeda leaders to think they could defeat the
American superpower. As Daniel Benjamin, the State Department's coordinator
for counterterrorism, said during the meeting: "Somalia, helicopters,
capture. I just don't like the sound of this."
navy-seals-fe04-klaidman-2ndary

sealswcc.com

As everyone left the meeting late that evening, it was clear that the only
viable plan was the lethal one. Obama later signed off on Operation
"Celestial Balance." The job was given to SEAL Team 6, officially known as
United States Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, under the
command of JSOC. (DEVGRU is the most elite team in the SEALs; its members
refer to others as the "vanilla" teams.) The next morning Somali villagers
saw several low-flying attack helicopters emerge over the horizon. Several
AH-6 Little Birds, deployed from U.S. naval ships off the Somali coast,
approached the convoy, strafing Nabhan's jeep and another vehicle. Nabhan
and several other militants were killed. One of the helicopters landed just
long enough for a small team of commandos to scoop up some of Nabhan's
remains-the DNA needed to prove he was dead.

One of the debates around such operations, then and now, concerns something
called Sensitive Site Exploitation (SSE). From their experiences in Iraq and
Afghanistan, Special Ops Forces had learned that the best intelligence often
comes from sifting through after-action debris. They wanted not just to kill
terror targets but to rummage through their belongings-what the spooks call
"pocket litter." "This is where the [political] fight comes," says a
Pentagon official involved. "From that day forward we wanted to put our
boots on the ground to do SSE, but the president was not supportive ... That
would become the issue between Special Operations Forces and the
administration." An official involved in such issues says the Pentagon
misinterpreted many of the questions the president had about such
operations. He was not opposed-as the Nabhan case illustrates-he just wanted
to do cost-benefit analysis on a case-by-case basis.

Obama has certainly been impressed with the Special Ops-their precision and
their professionalism. A wooden board that hangs above the SEAL training
grounds in Coronado, Calif., is inscribed with a line that all newbies
internalize: "The only easy day was yesterday." Instructors make sure
"everything goes wrong" on a training mission, says Don Mann, 53, a retired
SEAL and author of Inside SEAL Team Six. Mock raids include surprise booby
traps, faulty equipment, and unexpected snipers. Special operators "will get
off [a real] mission and say that was a piece of cake, only because they
were used to difficult training," Mann says.

Still, no amount of training can teach fighters what they can learn in
life-and-death situations. Better-honed skills are one clear benefit of the
wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, where special operators carried out mission
after mission. Some of those went badly, of course. In one such case in
2010, SEAL Team 6 conducted a predawn raid to rescue Scottish aid worker
Linda Norgrove and three Afghan colleagues from their Taliban captors.
Tragically, a grenade thrown by one of the commandos killed Norgrove. Many
special operators have also sacrificed their lives, including 22 on a
helicopter that was shot down in Afghanistan last August. Howard Wasdin, a
former SEAL whose memoir, Seal Team Six, came out a week after the bin Laden
raid, says the high risk of death is built into the job. "We used to have a
saying," he remarks: "Live fast, die young, and leave a good-looking
corpse."

The wars in Iraq and Afghanistan also accustomed the special operators-and
their political bosses-to cross-border operations. There was hesitation at
first. In 2007, for instance, when the insurgency was raging in Iraq, al
Qaeda fighters were pouring across the Syrian border to join the fight
against America. U.S. intelligence believed the Syrian government had either
helped or looked the other way. The Bush administration placed diplomatic
pressure on Damascus to try to end the terror pipeline, but the problem
persisted. Something had to be done.

In October 2008 Gen. David Petraeus ordered a bold helicopter-borne assault
inside Syria. Two dozen commandos dropped out of Black Hawk helicopters into
the village of Sukkariyah, about six miles from the Iraqi border. Their
mission was to kill or capture Abu Ghadiyah, an al Qaeda cell leader who was
coordinating the movement of foreign fighters into Iraq. A gun battle
erupted and as many as nine terrorists were killed, including Abu Ghadiyah.
The Americans returned to base unharmed. Syria closed down several U.S.
institutions in Damascus and protested to the United Nations.

There were more such raids that the military has never discussed. Over time,
the al Qaeda pipeline was effectively shut down, at least for a while.

In some lawless places, or countries that harbor terrorists, such operations
may be necessary. But what about elsewhere? The Act of Valor movie shows the
SEALs moving from place to place-Costa Rica, the high seas, Somalia,
Mexico-treating the world as their war zone. (They cooperate with Mexican
forces, but elsewhere they seem to march to their own music.) In real life
they do a lot of collaborating, but there are risks even in projecting a
more aggressive Hollywood image to the rest of the world.

The Rambo approach doesn't always sit well with diplomats. "If you start
taking out people all over the world in other people's countries, some of
whom we are at peace with, I think you'll get into some serious diplomatic
issues of people saying the U.S. isn't the global police," says Ronald
Neumann, a former deputy assistant secretary of state who now runs a
Washington nonprofit. "There is also the risk a mission will eventually go
wrong and we'll end up with lots of prisoners somewhere in the world."

Others worry that the military is conducting spy missions without the same
kind of scrutiny that is given to the CIA or other civilian agencies. "The
challenge is, how do you balance operational efficiency, JSOC's main talent,
against the need for oversight?" says Marc Ambinder, coauthor of a recent
e-book on Special Ops. Military critics have their own concerns. "One of
these days, if you keep publishing how you do this, the other guy's going to
be there ready for you," fumed retired Army Lt. Gen. James Vaught at a
recent conference in Washington. He was speaking directly to Admiral
McRaven: "Mark my words. Get the hell out of the media!" Vaught knows a
thing or two about how things can go wrong. He ran the task force that tried
to rescue the U.S. hostages in Iran in 1980, which became a fiasco after
aircraft ran into dust storms and encountered other unexpected problems.

McRaven responded to Vaught's criticism by saying that the military is in a
different era now and needs to be more open. "With the social media being
what it is today, with the press and the 24-hour news cycle, it's very
difficult to get away from it," he said, adding that "not only does the
media focus on our successes, we've had a few failures. And I think having
those failures exposed in the media also kind of helps focus our attention,
helps us do a better job." McRaven also defended Act of Valor as a natural
progression from earlier portrayals of Special Ops in Hollywood. He
recognized the value of such images as a recruitment tool, and related them
to his own experience. His infatuation with the military and Special Ops
began, he said, when he saw John Wayne in The Green Berets.

With Daniel Stone and Aram Roston in Washington, D.C., and R.M. Schneiderman
in New York

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