Modern day Son Tay raid (as in the end result). No prisoners found but a number of bad guys whacked in the process. I’ll take it! Very interesting though…
Exactly what I thought. Wasn’t a failure - still killed bad guys without any casualties - they just didn’t achieve the original objective.
Thanks Obama.
At least something went right for a change.
At least they tried, thankfully we didn’t lose a lot of “our guys” in the process, thankfully it wasn’t a trap/setup and really this is why they just need to nuke the entire sites from orbit. I’d rather be smart bombed than have my head slowly cut off.
In all honestly this rescue attempt probably hastened his demise.
He had been held captive for two years, why then murder him out in the desert all of sudden.
Perhaps, but if I was a hostage I’d rather they take a shot then just do nothing.
While it may not have been the case here, in Vietnam the treatment of POWs supposedly improved after the Son Tay raid.
One thing I’m impressed with about this Syrian mission is the ability to shift to a second target upon finding intel at the original point. Granted, hostages weren’t at either one but the speed, stealth, and adaptability required to switch gears in the middle of a mission based upon newly discovered intel is the kind of stuff that gives me wood! Kudos guys, job well done.
The release of the attempted rescue is all political! Now the bad guys know we were there and will now be on higher alert. DUMB, DUMB releasing that info.
As for Son Tay raid, the bad guys know we were there because of the firefight. Scuttlebutt in DAO was that during the raid Russians & Chinese advisors bit the dust.
If you read the whole article at the link our guys got some “significant” bad guys, so all is not lost! Hey, if you can’t get the hostages out at least deep-six some of the shitheads.
My bad, didn’t read the whole article. Thanks for pointing that out.
Oh I agree, I don’t think it is a “bad” thing that we attempted to rescue our hostages and it looks like we took out some of their people (hopefully high value). I just have to wonder about the timing of the murder/video after two years.
I’m just concerned that releasing this info publicly as a political CYA exercise has the potential to burn assets we have within the organization - because the executive press agency hasn’t seem too concerned with this when political capital needs to be protected.
It’s so much easier to claim Obama isn’t doing anything when he doesn’t mention finished classified ops, that’s for sure.
No fear there; he’s doing a lot of stuff, its just that so little of it benefits anyone that deserves some benefits.
One thing I’ll say about that is I would assume ISIS would’ve screamed at the world that the U.S. had violated Syrian territory if they were sure it was us who pulled that raid. With all the players involved in Syria right now they just might not have known it was us until the administration announced it (?).
If this was the case then CYA is hard to deny. Even if it wasn’t the case IMHO it is poor discretion to disclose SpecOps missions, especially those in AO’s we technically aren’t supposed to be in (like another sovereign country). These types of missions are written about decades later when some retired “tip of the spear” guy writes his memoirs.
It’s now written about in seconds and blasted on Twitter it seems, potentially putting at risk individuals and on going missions. Having said that, the info supplied via public channels often incomplete, intentional misdirection, fabricated, or combinations there of I’d expect, so I tend to take it with a grain of salt until details filled in later.
Yup controled leaks, but I think there is a difference between that and Biden’s big mouth.
That’s known as uncontrolled run of the mouth. I personally don’t see any reason the public needs to know anything about the units who carry out various missions, and that’s not just Biden by any means. For example, the OBL mission should have been as detailed as “elements of the our most elite units took place in the mission” vs what seemed down to the brand of underwear they preferred of each guy from each unit, as well as kit used, etc, etc. The public’s need to know (just a want to know) seems to currently exceed the security needs of the men doing the job.
Could it be intentional misinformation? Yeah, I guess so.
If it did happen then even with Twitter and all the other bullshit out there no one (except maybe some in the Secret Squirrel community) knew about it until yesterday. It supposedly happened over the 4th of July weekend, which was a month and a half ago. Surely if ISIS knew who carried it out it would have been yelled to the mountaintops long ago. That was kind of my point…it is apparent they were at least unsure who suddenly appeared in their backyard and shot things up. Might have been better to leave it that way.