by Mark Moyar
President Obama, who normally shunned public mention of armed conflict, was eager to speak to the world about Operation Neptune Spear. A few hours after receiving confirmation of the raid’s success, he went on television to deliver an address that achieved instant notoriety for its profusion of first-person references. “Shortly after taking office, I directed Leon Panetta, the director of the CIA, to make the killing or capture of Bin Laden the top priority of our war against Al Qaeda,” the president announced. “Last August, after years of painstaking work by our intelligence community, I was briefed on a possible lead to Bin Laden.… I met repeatedly with my national security team as we developed more information about the possibility that we had located Bin Laden hiding within a compound deep inside of Pakistan. And finally, last week, I determined that we had enough intelligence to take action, and authorized an operation to get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice. Today, at my direction, the United States launched a targeted operation against that compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan.”
One day before Operation Neptune Spear, Obama’s national security team had taken a solemn vow to keep the raid’s details secret in order to safeguard the tactics, techniques, and procedures of US special operations forces. Within hours of Bin Laden’s demise, however, some of Obama’s lieutenants were spilling information to the press, mainly, it seemed, to bolster the popularity of the raid and the commander-in-chief who had authorized it. Gates was infuriated to see the leakers divulge sensitive operational methods, as he believed it would compel JSOC to shelve those methods in planning future operations. What was more, the leaks were giving away clues about the identities of the raid’s participants, causing those individuals to fear for the safety of their families.
Gates went to National Security Adviser Tom Donilon to register his displeasure with the leaks. “I have a new strategic communications approach to recommend,” Gates told Donilon.
What was it, Donilon asked?
“Shut the fuck up,” the secretary of defense said.
The killing of Osama bin Laden did improve Obama’s popularity among an American public hungry for the punishment of the lead architect of 9/11. It also added to public admiration, even veneration, of the SEALs. Motion picture studios scrambled to produce new feature films on the SEALs and their exploits. Disney attempted—although futilely in the end—to obtain a trademark for “SEAL Team Six” that would have given the corporation exclusive rights to slap the team’s name on action figures, games, snow globes, and the like. SEAL veterans wrote books, starred in workout shows, consulted on military videogames, and hawked paintball games offering participants the opportunity to kill Al Qaeda.
Some SEAL leaders fretted that narcissism and greed were overpowering the SEAL ethos, which held, “We do not advertise the nature of our work, nor do we seek recognition of our actions.” In September 2012, Rear Admiral Sean Pybus, head of the Naval Special Warfare Command, told the 2,500 SEALs and 5,500 support troops under his authority, “We must immediately reconsider how we properly influence our people in and out of uniform NOT to seek inappropriate monetary, political, or celebrity profit from their service.” The message may have had some effect on the 2,500 active-duty SEALs, but it did little to impede former SEALs.
Within Pakistan, the unauthorized incursion of American special operations forces sparked anti-Americanism of an intensity that few in the Obama administration had foreseen. A slew of retaliatory measures ensued. The Pakistani government evicted US special operations forces who had been sent the previous year to help Pakistan’s military conduct counterinsurgency operations. As a consequence of the eviction, Pakistani counterinsurgency capabilities declined noticeably, to the benefit of several extremist groups deemed high threats to the United States.
Pakistan’s government also demanded that the United States remove all its armed drones from Pakistani skies. Those drones had been America’s main instrument for surgical strikes against extremists in the country; Pakistani officials had readily authorized American drones to fire missiles into certain regions, whereas they had steadfastly refused permission for raids by American ground forces. When the Obama administration insisted that the drones would keep operating, the Pakistanis booted the CIA out of the Shamsi Airfield in the Balochistan desert, necessitating reductions in the number of American drone strikes. Pakistani intelligence operatives harassed CIA personnel and denied the visa applications of individuals whom the CIA wished to send to Pakistan, diminishing the CIA’s ability to obtain information on Al Qaeda and other extremist groups and thereby facilitating the resurgence of those groups in Pakistani cities.
In public, the Obama administration downplayed the harmful side-effects of Operation Neptune Spear, while playing up its immediate result in support of an impending overhaul of America’s national security strategy. According to administration officials, the Bin Laden raid had shown that small, elite teams of special operations forces could take the place of conventional military units in solving the nation’s security problems. In the official national security strategy promulgated at the end of 2011, the Obama administration stated that the United States would use surgical counterterrorism by special operations forces and drones to suppress what terrorist threats remained, obviating the need for large-scale counterinsurgency campaigns. The end of the counterinsurgency era was in turn invoked as justification for cutting America’s conventional ground forces by 100,000 troops.
In accordance with this new strategy, President Obama withdrew the last US troops from Iraq at the end of 2011. The CIA and American contractors, Obama vowed, could maintain pressure on remaining terrorists in Iraq in the absence of a US military footprint. He shrank the American presence in Afghanistan at such a pace as to force the cancellation of the US military’s plans for a large counterinsurgency campaign in eastern Afghanistan, where the Taliban and other miscreants were still skulking in large numbers. According to senior White House officials, the high tallies of enemies neutralized by special operations raids in Afghanistan had proven that surgical strikes were a viable substitute for a broad counterinsurgency campaign. American military leaders in Afghanistan, both those of special operations forces and those of conventional forces, disagreed with that interpretation, convinced that the counterterrorism raids in question could have lasting effects only if they were conducted in conjunction with counterinsurgency. Where surgical strikes took place without counterinsurgency operations to control territory and people, the enemy continued to recruit local men to offset their losses.
The ability of Afghan insurgents to replace low-level fighters in areas that had not been secured through counterinsurgency, in fact, was having a detrimental impact on JSOC morale. By 2011, one Ranger officer said, “I have to convince NCOs to go out. I have to yell at them to go on a mission. They’re like, ‘Sir, fuck this. It doesn’t matter. I don’t want to do this. This raid, for this low-level guy is not going to change anything.’”
Adding to JSOC’s troubles were improvements in the enemy’s capabilities for evading and counterattacking the raiders. On August 6, 2011, a Ranger platoon was searching a compound in Wardak Province when overhead surveillance detected several individuals fleeing the scene, triggering the dispatch of a SEAL quick-reaction force to intercept them. Seventeen SEALs, along with five Naval Special Operations support personnel, three US Air Force Special Tactics airmen, and seven Afghan soldiers, were rushed to the scene in a Chinook. The aircraft flew “blacked out,” without any visible lighting or external beacons that would give its location away. The Chinook approached the landing zone at an altitude of 150 feet, the pilot slowing to 50 knots in preparation for landing.
From a two-story mud-brick compound approximately 220 meters away, a previously unnoticed person fired two rocket-propelled grenades at the helicopter. The first missed. The second hit the aft rotor and detonated. The aircraft spun violently for a few seconds and then the blades separated from the rotors. Plummeting into a dry creek bed, the helicopter burst into fl
ames, which licked higher as fuel and munitions ignited. None of the thirty-eight people aboard the helicopter survived.
On October 7, 2013, a line of Rangers inched forward along the outside wall of a compound in Kandahar Province, where US intelligence had pinpointed a Taliban leader. What awaited them had apparently been arranged ahead of time by a smart enemy who was expecting them and had studied their operational methods. A suicide bomber darted from a hiding place into the middle of the American line and blew himself up. Before the Rangers could regroup, someone else detonated a dozen IEDs that had been planted in locations where the Americans were expected to move after the suicide blast. When it was all over, four American special operators lay dead and thirty were injured.
The number of such setbacks was quite small, considering the number of raids launched night after night. Nevertheless, a decade of unstinting combat deployments was wearing down the special operators as a whole, physically and mentally. Overseas deployments, combat stress, and casualties far outpaced those of any other period in SOF history. In the decade after 9/11, total SOF strength increased by 66 percent, from 38,000 to 63,000, while the number of deployed SOF personnel increased by 335 percent, from 2,886 to 12,560. The Ranger Regiment alone sustained 64 killed and 672 wounded in action between 9/11 and the middle of 2014.
In America’s earlier wars, such heavy burdens rested on the shoulders of millions of young American men, a large fraction of them draftees. Most of those men were able to endure the physical and psychological strains of one or two combat tours. But in the all-volunteer force of the twenty-first century, America’s armed forces did not receive a large influx of new draftees each year, necessitating that a much smaller group of men bear the burdens, and in a period of war longer than any other in US history. The weight fell especially heavily on special operators, since they accounted for a disproportionate share of combat troops in the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and were also the principal operators and combat advisers in other countries like the Philippines, Yemen, Syria, and Mali.
Special operators, their political leaders, and the nation became inured to a world in which an individual with five combat deployments was unexceptional and someone with ten was increasingly common. Sergeant First Class Kristoffer Domeij, of the 2nd Battalion, 75th Ranger Regiment, was on his fourteenth deployment when a booby-trapped bomb took his life in October 2011. The condolence letter from President Obama to the Ranger’s mother, Scoti Domeij, illustrated the extent to which the sacrifices of America’s special warriors had become matters of dreary routine to the nation’s political leadership. The envelope arrived in Mrs. Domeij’s mailbox long after her son had died—many days later than the handwritten letter sent to her by former president George W. Bush—and the letter appeared, in the mother’s estimation, to have been “signed by an automatic pen.”
Under stress so protracted, the superior mental toughness of special operators could not prevent rates of mental illness, alcoholism, suicide, and divorce from climbing to levels that deeply troubled the senior SOF leadership. But, despite living in a society where people could be found complaining about trivialities on twenty cable television channels at any one time, most of the special operators kept quiet about their woes, out of fealty to a warrior culture that extolled stoicism. The public therefore remained largely unaware of the price of sending the same men into war over and over.
For several years, the occasional operational setbacks and the quiet suffering of troops did little to dim the glamor that special operations forces had acquired as a result of Neptune Spear. By late 2011, the public acclaim showered on SOCOM for killing Bin Laden, together with the shift in national strategy toward light-footprint counterterrorism, had put special operations forces at the pinnacle of US national security for the first time in the nation’s history. Admiral McRaven, who became SOCOM commander in August 2011, capitalized on these developments and the popularity accruing from his role in Neptune Spear to mount a campaign aimed at expanding the authority and influence of special operations forces.
Soon after his assumption of command, McRaven formed several operational planning teams in Tampa to orchestrate this campaign. He enjoined these teams to consult with the regular SOCOM staff, but the principal reason he had created them was to bypass that staff, for the Tampa headquarters was populated mainly by military personnel with no SOF experience and by civil servants with a reputation for inertia. Most prominent among the new planning teams was the Global SOF Network team, led by one of McRaven’s favorite officers, Colonel Stu Bradin. A JSOC veteran, Bradin had impressed McRaven in prior tours by interweaving the multinational strands of NATO special operations forces in Afghanistan and at the NATO special operations headquarters in Mons, Belgium.
One objective of Bradin’s team was to increase SOCOM’s authority over forces deployed overseas. With the US military drawing down in Iraq and Afghanistan, opportunities to move special operations forces into new countries would abound, and McRaven was keen to be the ringmaster who decided where all the special operators would go and what they would do. Gaining control of deployed forces was a tall order; McRaven’s immediate predecessor, Admiral Eric T. Olson, as well as General Charles Holland at the beginning of the century, had not sought it because they did not want to become enmeshed in a bureaucratic brawl with the regional military commanders.
Another objective of Bradin’s team was to justify greater resources for special operations forces. By enlarging and enriching the SOF presence overseas, McRaven sought to make SOF the “force of choice” for regional commanders who had a variety of forces at their beck and call. It, too, was a tall order, for steep budget cuts were forcing the military as a whole to make do with less, and the rest of the military was certain to cry foul if SOF were taking additional marbles instead of giving up marbles like everyone else.
In Washington, Bradin set up a large SOCOM office to coordinate SOF activities with the rest of the US government and foreign allies and to oversee SOF personnel stationed in the national capital region. As the office grew in size, it was moved under the authority of the SOCOM vice commander, who served as McRaven’s senior representative in the nation’s capital. The office became a new power center in Washington, taking on resourcing functions that had previously belonged to the assistant secretary of defense for special operations and low-intensity conflict.
McRaven was able to find supporters for his new vision among the Joint Chiefs and the regional combatant commanders. At lower bureaucratic levels, however, sparks were soon flying as his fast-moving initiatives banged into the plodding hull of the national security establishment. The hard-charging JSOC veterans who spearheaded McRaven’s programs in Washington were accustomed to getting their way, and to getting it without having to answer a lot of questions or caress other people’s egos. Veterans of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, they had risen through the ranks in a wartime environment in which rules could be bent or broken in the name of expediency without adverse consequences, and they presumed that the continuation of war in Afghanistan meant that the same lenience would prevail in Washington. When confronted with congressional staffers, Pentagon officials, conventional military officers, or State Department diplomats who asked for information or raised objections, McRaven’s emissaries in Washington had a tendency to ignore them, or to brush them off with a reminder that special operations forces had killed Bin Laden.
This behavior, of course, did not go over well with those on the receiving end, who in many cases did not share the same sense of wartime urgency and already resented SOCOM for seeking additional resources while the rest of the military was hemorrhaging. At first, McRaven appeared to enjoy so much support from the White House and so much prestige from the Bin Laden raid that no one dared fight back. During his first two years in command, McRaven made significant headway in obtaining the funding and authorities he desired. Special operations forces were set on a path to increase from 64,000 to 70,000 troops, at a time when the Army and Marine Corp
s were being cut by a combined 100,000 troops. He gained combatant commander status with respect to the theater special operations commands, which enabled him to achieve efficiencies by reconfiguring those organizations. Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta authorized Colonel Stu Bradin’s team to craft a Global SOF Network Campaign Plan that would increase the global reach of special operations forces and the authority of SOCOM.
As McRaven’s three-year tenure progressed, however, the opposition forces coalesced, emboldened by the knowledge that the sand in his hourglass was running down, and by the perception that his presidential top cover was fading because of declining White House interest in special operations. McRaven’s efforts to increase his control over deployed units ran into resistance from other four-star generals, of the sort that had dissuaded General Holland and Admiral Olson from seeking a more powerful SOCOM. Generals and ambassadors foiled many of McRaven’s attempts to expand his command’s overseas presence and authorities.
The most formidable opposition came from Congress. The institution that had given birth to SOCOM in 1986 had been a doting parent throughout the organization’s childhood and early adulthood, warding off bullies when they tried to steal the youth’s lunch money. Now, however, Congress had reason to believe that its offspring had strayed so far off course that the time had come for tough love. Members of the House Appropriations Committee were miffed when they learned that SOCOM had decided to form the new office in Washington without notifying them. Moving additional military personnel inside the Beltway required legal authorities that belonged to Congress, not SOCOM or any other component of the Defense Department. When congressional staff members requested information and explanations from SOCOM, their emails and phone calls received incomplete or contradictory answers, or no answers at all.
