The very idea of “special ops” had long been regarded critically by the conventional military. The elite, secret units that conducted these operations sucked up enormous resources and key personnel for occasional acts of amazing derring-do. When such missions worked they seemed almost magical, as in the Entebbe raid, where Israeli commandos flew 2,500 miles to Uganda, surprised a much larger force, and rescued 102 hostages, killing all of the Palestinian hijackers who had seized a commercial French airliner. When they failed, as in the rescue mission to Iran in 1980, they nearly always seemed harebrained in retrospect. They were daring by definition. The idea was to attempt something bolder than the enemy could reasonably anticipate. The men involved accepted great personal risk, and those in command gambled their reputations and careers on the outcome. And it was in the nature of the work that failures made a huge splash while successes, except in rare instance like Entebbe, were often, by design, unadvertised and unnoticed.
The debacle in the Iranian desert had prompted the creation of JSOC, which is based at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. Much blame for the failure fell on the clumsiness of efforts to borrow from various service branches unused to working together. So the mission had navy helicopters flown by marine pilots carrying army special operators deep into Iran to link up with air force piloted planes and crews. This motley force had left behind a desert staging area littered with destroyed aircraft and incinerated American bodies. Though one of the most spectacular failures in American military annals, the effect was not to kill special ops but to expand it. JSOC was created to integrate elite units from every branch into a smooth fighting force, and to equip them with the kind of vehicles and weapons needed for small, unorthodox missions. It brought together the army’s Delta Force and 75th Ranger Regiment, the air force’s Special Tactics Squadron, and Navy SEAL teams. Since the Iran mission had broken down trying to deliver the force to the target, the Night Stalkers, the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, was stood up at Fort Campbell, Kentucky, where special choppers were designed and tested, and where the military’s best helicopter pilots trained specifically for special ops missions.
McRaven’s thesis, which would become part of the curriculum at the Naval Postgraduate School, set out the core concept of special ops: that a small, well-trained force can deliver a decisive blow against a much larger, well-defended one. He defined such a mission as one “conducted by forces specially trained, equipped, and supported for a specific target whose destruction, elimination, or rescue (in the case of hostages), is a political or military imperative.” Refining the key elements to success for such missions, he prescribed, in a nutshell, “A simple plan, carefully concealed, repeatedly and realistically rehearsed, and executed with surprise, speed, and purpose.”
President Bush’s two large wars, each requiring hundreds of thousands of conventional soldiers, gradually proved the point that special ops was the most useful tool against al Qaeda. The tremendous effort and innovation that went into finding and fixing a target relied on men capable of executing the third F in the acronym F3EAD, the finish. The model McRaven had developed in his thesis primarily dealt with assaults on larger, well-entrenched enemy positions, but the principles of the lightning raid—simple, secret, and well rehearsed, executed with surprise, speed, and purpose—would prove devastatingly effective against an enemy that hid itself in a civilian population, in large part because pinpoint raids, as opposed to aerial attacks or direct assaults by conventional forces, avoided killing and injuring innocent bystanders. It also allowed for onsite collection of intelligence, which was essentially for feeding the target engine. Over the next decade, McRaven would get a chance to refine his strategies and put his theories into practice at a pace he had never imagined.
His two years in Washington before returning to a field command enabled him to combine necessary physical rehab with some high-level career rehab, developing the kind of relationships that are necessary to achieve flag rank. Rank was not something McRaven actively sought—indeed, years earlier, even before his accident, he regarded himself as the last person in the navy likely to become an admiral. But in just a few years he was back on his feet, serving in Iraq as deputy to JSOC commander General McChrystal, admiring the fusion of rapid intel and shooters his commander had implemented, and occasionally accompanying his men on night raids—the kind where you could drive or walk to the target. No more jumping out of planes, roping out of helicopters, or long marches in full pack for McRaven. During those years, first under McChrystal and then commanding JSOC himself, the admiral would help forge this new capability into the nation’s premier war-fighting instrument. The JSOC force itself doubled in size, to nearly four thousand men and women. It became, in effect, a fifth branch of the U.S. military, an army within an army. It was global, operating in secret in more than a dozen countries, and had been freed from strict mission-by-mission oversight from Washington. The need for speed trumped the desire for close control, so commanders like McChrystal and McRaven were given the authority to launch at least routine strikes without seeking approval all the way up the chain.
Through the first decade of the century, McRaven and his men had carried out more special ops missions than any such unit in history. He estimated that by the time he was summoned to Langley in January 2011 to be officially briefed on the Abbottabad discovery, he had been personally involved, commanding either remotely or on the ground, in thousands of them.
By early 2011, the CIA had its own small armies in the field. After 9/11, the nation had recovered quickly from its misgivings about spying and covert action. Agency operators, most of them former military, had worked ever more closely with JSOC throughout the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. When Panetta and Morell returned from the White House meeting with Obama in December, the one where he directed them to start thinking about taking action, the first units they considered were their own.
The two broad options were to bomb the compound or to send a raiding party in. The latter would be far more complicated. It would require planning and rehearsal, and involve a variety of special talents, so the instinct was to develop that option in-house. This had the advantage of keeping the now four-month-old secret contained. Outside the agency, those who knew about the compound, or who were supposed to know, could still be counted on two hands. There was the president, of course, and a few top members of his foreign policy staff, including Brennan and Donilon. The director of National Intelligence, James Clapper, had been told. At the Department of Defense there were only four people, Secretary Robert Gates, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs Michael Mullen, Vice Chairman General James “Hoss” Cartwright, and Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence Michael Vickers.
The CIA teams were excited about the mission and were ready to do it themselves… soon. But Panetta and Morell had time. The president had also told them to work harder on identifying the mystery man. Before committing themselves to using their own operators, they wanted to at least consult with McRaven.
All the JSOC commander knew before getting the call was that the CIA had a new lead on bin Laden. He had heard that before over the years, and in each case the lead had failed to pan out. Early in the war in Afghanistan his men had spent a lot of time chasing bin Laden’s ghost. This time he was told that the lead seemed better than most, but McRaven didn’t think much of it until he was summoned to Langley. That had not happened with any of the previous leads. At the conference table in the deputy director’s office, McRaven and one of his top aides met with Panetta, Morell, and the heads of the CIA’s own strike force. He was shown pictures of the compound. No one had glimpsed the inside of the buildings. Everything was heavily couched in maybes. Morell made it clear that they were not certain that bin Laden was really there, and they weren’t sure yet what course the president would decide to take, if any. But on that qualified basis, they launched into a tactical discussion. If you were going to hit that target, how would you do it?