Posted by nomilk 9/7/2025
But, what's most crazy to me is that these details are being published in such a short time. My impression is that these clandestine forces used to have much more strict control, and details would not emerge for many decades or even during the lives of the participants?
> Luttrell's book and the film both suggest that the SEALs decision to release the goat herders led to their subsequent ambush - yet according to Gulab, people throughout the area heard the SEALs being dropped off by helicopter, and the Taliban proceeded to track the SEALs' footprints.
Yeah, I'm going to go with the reason these details are "emerging" (aka published in coordination with the DoD) is the aforementioned "unclear factual accuracy".
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lone_Survivor#Historical_accur...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcus_Luttrell#Operation_Red_...
Did you think that about Watergate too? Unless the entire story was manufactured I don't see how you could possibly reach that conclusion.
The link I posted earlier tells the real story.
And the other Valhalla VFT one, and the Team House podcast, and just all over the place…
It appears that people involved in the operation feel the same. The stakes in a failure like this are far higher than most SOC missions.
The SEALs talk in open media constantly. There's a reason you have no idea what the Green Berets do.
In these expeditionary wars, the only good guys were groups like MSF, WFP, and the ICRC.
I am not sure why none of the big three have put this into practice yet
That tends to not align very well with being a ‘superpower’. That kind of self doubt and reasonableness is what makes you stop being a superpower.
It’s similar with Empires. You don’t get to be (or sustain) being an empire by giving a shit what anyone else thinks. You get to be (or sustain) being an empire by doing whatever the fuck you want, regardless of what anyone else thinks. And if anyone tries to stop you, figuring out a way to get them out of your way/conquer them.
It’s a variant of ‘reasonable people conform to reality, unreasonable people make reality conform to them. therefore, all progress depends on unreasonable people.’
Of course, if you fuck it up, you potentially die. So none of this is for the faint of heart, or weak of arm (as it were).
>But the episode worried some experienced military officials with knowledge of the mission, because the SEALs have an uneven track record that for decades has largely been concealed by secrecy.
This seems to be a trait many special operations groups have. Type A personalities that you want in that job, but that bring with it a willingness for big risk taking and fantastical type missions.
That's not to say their success rate should be super high, these are difficult missions, but some like the failures in Panama were a case of ambition over common sense. Granted this mission they made the right call to leave when they were discovered.
It’s not just “lol, let’s try it. If we die, we die!”
And their success rate should be and is, pretty high. That said, this was a National Command Authority (came down from the White House) mission and those tend to be the riskiest.
I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT.
Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt, including the claim that they were even SF in the first place.
However, they all describe the selection processes similarly. And, my educated assumption is that this part is probably too dull for them to lie about, much less lie about in unison across many accounts and years. So I have a decent level of confidence in that aspect of their tales.
Anyway, the common threads are that while they do want highly confident and confident types who are also outliers in terms of physical ability, the selection process is HIGHLY geared towards selecting intelligent team-oriented individuals. Without those two traits you are going to get you and your squadmates killed in a hurry. These missions are highly planned but due to the inherent ambiguity and difficulty the SF guys have to make a LOT of autonomous decision making on the fly when things (inevitably) deviate from the script.
You hear very similar stories from other "elite" types in the military, like combat pilots. While you have to be sort of a highly talented "alpha" type you also need to be professional and team oriented. No loose cannons allowed, either on the individual or squad level.
I think it needs to be said that people who choose those careers are probably one of the worst kinds of people. They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command. And then you select out of those the ones that think being interviewed on YouTube about that is a good idea. They should be studied anthropologically not listened too.
I’m guessing you’ve never met any special operations people, much less folks from the SMUs. I have met many. 100% A+ people. I’m sure there are bad apples, but I’ve never met one.
> They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command.
Rules of engagement are a thing — a very real thing.
For those who are interested, here is an interview with a very active former Delta Force operator. There are interesting stories about selection, rules of engagement, the stresses of doing the type of work he did, and life after the military.
Do you have any other similar podcasts, videos, etc. to recommend that feature interviews with former operators?
They should be studied anthropologically not listened too.
I think it needs to be said that people who
choose those careers are probably one of the
worst kinds of people
And then you select out of those the ones
that think being interviewed on YouTube about that
is a good idea.
In terms of military history this is not strictly true. In past conflicts where personnel was limited and compromises had to made these types of soldiers were often given solo or special assignments and very often excelled in that environment, with more than a few of our highly decorated soldiers from WWII having served in this way.
Peace time militaries tend to get bogged down with this strict squadron type of thinking and in that context you are not at all wrong, but it is interesting that when push comes to shove, the military rediscovers that there's more than one way to win the battle.
What specific channels would you recommend?
The majority of them also have views that I find pretty problematic.
Is it?
We obviously don't get most reporting, but of the publicly known missions, the success rate is abysmal, and even the "successes" are disasters.
Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed, it was operationally questionable _and_ it was 9 years after another spectacularly failed mission involving SEALs ("Operation Anaconda") allowed bin Laden's escape, which in turn was following the disastrous Battle of Tora Bora which was the first major failure in a war respite with them.
None of these operations were daring acts of brave men. They were all - like the one in the article - full of cowardly acts and human rights abuses, from deliberately killing civilians to using fake healthcare workers to collect DNA samples (which has caused and continues to cause thousands of deaths due to the ongoing suspicion of childhood vaccines in Pakistan) to the torture of enemy soldiers and civilians alike in secret prisons to shooting an eight-year-old girl in the neck (Nawar al-Awlaki).
> they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand
That's certainly the Hollywood version, but the reality doesn't match up.
Emphasis added. Is the death of Osama bin laden under any serious dispute? It's been 14 years.
Died peacefully in his sleep was not a suitable ending for the mastermind of 9/11, so it would never have been allowed to happen, even if the truth had to be bent to achieve it.
- On-scene & eyewitness identification by the SEALs (including identification by a wife). [1]
- CIA facial-recognition match to known images. [2]
- Rapid DNA testing matching bin Laden to family members. [3]
- Existence of classified post-mortem photos/videos acknowledged in court. [4]
- Official U.S. account of Islamic-rite preparation and burial at sea. [5]
- Al-Qaeda’s public acknowledgment of bin Laden’s death. [6]
- Large intelligence haul from the Abbottabad compound (letters, books, documents).
- Pakistan’s Abbottabad Commission findings and related interviews/documentation.
Taken together, this evidence is certainly more than "a press release." Do you have stronger evidence that he wasn't killed?
Sources: [1] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/docs/UBLDocument...
[2] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/docs/UBLDocument...
[3] https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB410/docs/UBLDocument...
[4] https://law.justia.com/cases/federal/appellate-courts/cadc/1...
[5] https://www.cpf.navy.mil/Newsroom/News/Article/2755760/bin-l...
[6] https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/al-qaeda-confirms-os...
[7] https://www.dni.gov/index.php/192-dni/resources/1198-bin-lad...
https://ctc.westpoint.edu/letters-from-abbottabad-bin-ladin-...
[8] https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2013/7/8/document-pakistans-b...
The Letters from Abbottabad also fall into this category. Their timing and content are unusually convenient for the U.S. narrative, and there is no independent verification of their authenticity beyond U.S. release.
The Abbottabad Commission’s findings were limited. It was unable to independently verify bin Laden’s residence in Abbottabad except via U.S. assertions. What it did conclude was that Pakistani authorities had no prior knowledge of his presence or of the American raid.
It’s also worth noting that the claim bin Laden was “martyred” by U.S. forces was desirable for Al-Qaeda’s own propaganda purposes. It provided them with a rallying narrative regardless of the underlying facts.
So when you ask whether there is “stronger evidence he wasn’t killed,” the point is that there is no independent evidence either way. What we have are uncorroborated U.S. claims and propaganda statements from Al-Qaeda for whom his death at the hands of the US was a propaganda boon. Neither of which can be treated as reliable proof.
In fact, the level of evidence is comparable to other cases where U.S. authorities presented certainty that later collapsed - such as the claim that the Al-Shifa plant in Sudan produced VX nerve agent, or that Pat Tillman was killed by enemy fire. Both were asserted as fact by the U.S. military and government until contradictory evidence made the truth undeniable. It would be naïve to assume we are working with reliable sources here.
And it is tragic that we are so deeply buried in arrogance and propaganda that we cannot see this.
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/our-blessed-homeland-their-ba...
"Two of his top national security officials at that time — his national security adviser, John Bolton, and the acting defense secretary, Patrick M. Shanahan — declined to comment for this article."
https://web.archive.org/web/20070203165457/http://www.defens...
If X is Iran/Russia/North Korea/<current choice> and Y is US/UK/Canada etc, the whole *mainstream* media would be calling for war. But in this case, its just called a failed operation. Even if it was an allied country and the SEAL was caught, US would threaten the country with war to get the person back.
US has always been an agressor to small countries, big countries, allies i.e rest of the world. Americans can accept the fact or stay in denial but it doesn't change other countries' experience or how they feel about it.
Russia had killed UK nationals on the British soil in covert ops and exactly the opposite had happened. The establishment and the media categorically did not want this to go anywhere let alone to a war.
In 1952 there were 326,863 US troops in South Korea. Last count there is 28,500 US troops. I struggle to fathom any definition of full of US military personnel that could possibly be true.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Forces_Korea#Num...
"The sight of US tanks on streets is considered normal."
I've been in Seoul over three months, I've never seen a military tank on the street. In fact, I've never witnessed a tank on a street in my entire life in any country anywhere.
"War is like the main industry of the US, ..." Nope, not even close. https://axiomalpha.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/Screenshot...
"... it's very profitable to have military bases in 55 countries, with a $1 trillion annual pot to draw from. " US Spends over 150 billion annually on overseas base. https://www.mintpressnews.com/214492-2/214492/
Can you provide any source that verifies any of your post? I can't seem to find anything I can point to and say, yes this is true.
The bulk of the piece is also a more sympathetic reporting of the story (e.g., the alleged importance of the mission, and allegedly why things happened) than previous reporting I saw. (The end of the piece switches to criticism beyond this story, though.)
Their reasoning was that these boats could have alerted the Americans about the impending attack.
It's interesting to see the US more or less committing the same crime, even if it was just a bug planting mission.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warf...
Heck, I think that the US treatment of the Nazis after the second world war should make it pretty clear what "side" of that conflict they were actually on.
The actual ops on the field is very wide gray spectrum, and one of the reasons so many are traumatised upon return to civil life.
Special Forces are secretive, and almost as a law of nature that leads to them being inept.
There is a long list of these special operations in the book "Rogue States: The Rule of Force in World Affairs" by Noam Chomsky.
> There is a long list of these special operations in the book...
And I'm sure there's a list orders of magnitude longer that we'll never hear about, and there's no way to judge if the ops in his book are representative of the whole.
