Trying to Understand a Loss

This weekend is the UDT/SEAL West Coast Reunion in San Diego, and Julio and I will be joining our comrades past and present to rekindle old friendships and to mourn a great loss. This Reunion is somewhat unprecedented in that there hasn’t been one following a loss of 11 SEALs in combat before. I really do not know what to expect or if anything further has been planned except to just drown our sorrows in beer and cigars. One thing that I do know about the Teams, the Navy, and the military in general is the tendency to look at a situation that went awry and to try to assign accountability and responsibility to some person or decision. This is an institutional problem that is rooted in the idea that lessons must be learned from every experience, and that someone is always ultimately responsible for every action good or bad.

While I am not privy to the deliberations that are certainly ongoing about why we lost 19 SOF operators or what could have been done to prevent it, I suspect that there are many at SOCOM and elsewhere contemplating exactly that. I have received an unofficial “debrief” account of what happened on the SR mission and the subsequent actions of the QRF that went in to save them. I am not going to go into that here in an open forum, but I do want to address the broader issues of the operation.

SR teams sometimes get compromised. That’s just the way it is. The fact that these guys got caught in the Taliban’s backyard in and of itself is not necessarily an indictment of their tactical proficiency or fieldcraft, but it’s more likely an issue of insufficient or incorrect intelligence. The problem with intel is that you often don’t find out that you don’t have enough of it until it’s too late to do anything about it. My understanding of how they were compromised amounts to basically a freak occurrence. I don’t want to elaborate any further, but when you are snooping around near where people live, sometimes those people will stumble upon you.

When the SR team was compromised and engaged by a vastly numerically superior force, they called for assistance. The Taskforce Commander can do one of two things in that situation: assist them or not. Chances are good that the TF Commander had some kind of UAV surveillance in the area, and he therefore knew essentially how grave the SR team’s situation really was. Since LCDR Kristensen was on the bird that crashed, it is clear that the SEAL leadership element at the TF had no qualms about going in to get the SR team. Since the Nightstalkers flew the mission, it is clear that their leadership element was willing to take the risk of a daytime insertion in order to rescue their SEAL brothers. And since the QRF did in fact launch, it is clear that the TF Commander decided in his experience that he had to make the attempt to get his men out of there. The fact that people died as a result of those decisions does not make them incorrect. Soldiers and Sailors die in war, that’s just the way it is.

In my opinion, there was no recklessness demonstrated by the TF leadership in this situation. That Mr. Kristensen jocked up and went in with the Boys indicates that he was putting his money where his mouth was. As an O-4, he was not a member of any SEAL Platoon. Navy SEALs, SOF, and the US military are not in the habit of leaving men on the battlefield to be killed or captured if there is anything that can be done to prevent it. That is why US troops demonstrate the esprit de corps and aggressiveness in combat that they are renowned for… because each serviceman knows that his unit and his buddies will do whatever it takes to save him if necessary.

Is this a weakness? I could be considered as one from a certain point of view. We know that UBL trained the Somalis to shoot down helos in Mogadishu so that he could kill Americans converging on the crash site. While 18 US soldiers died in that battle, I have never considered it a failure, but rather a badge of honor that so many would give so much to save so few. As an American fighting man I am expected to perform at a level above all soldiers in the world, in exchange for that I expect that my comrades and government will back me up when I am at my point of need. That is just the way it works.

It is sad that so many outstanding men died on that day to save one exceptional man’s life, but as the Admiral said at the Memorial in Hawaii, “If no one had been rescued, the effort would have been worth it.” He is right.