U.S. Navy SEALs: The Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden

The Mission to Kill Osama bin Laden

Hans Halberstadt

• Publisher: Zenith Press
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781610599986
• Topic: Historia
• Subtopic: Historia moderna

Updated and expanded to include activities and operations in Afghanistan as well as: • The Osama bin Laden mission • SEALs at war • Counter-piracy ops • Weapons and equipment The U.S. Navy SEALs—named for the three environments from which they operate (SEa, Air, Land)—derived from the Underwater Demolition Teams (UDTs) and other specialized units created during World War II. During the Korean War, UDTs operated as part of the Pacific Fleet and conducted such perilous missions as demolitions, reconnaissance, and hydrographic surveys while dodging water-based mines and enduring frigid water temperatures. Today's Navy SEALs have incredibly advanced mission capabilities compared to their predecessors, but the character and drive it takes to become a SEAL remain the same. To join the ranks of these brave, unconventional warriors, one must go through months of deliberately brutal training designed to break down the weak and leave only the strongest, most capable men. That is just to qualify for an additional training period, eventually leading to the moment when the coveted gold "Budweiser" is pinned to his chest. This revised and expanded edition of U.S. Navy SEALs contains more than 100 color photos of today's Navy SEALs, including six months of BUD/S where trainees are pushed to their limits and real missions where the old SEAL saying—"The only easy day was yesterday"—is proven time and time again.

Chapter 1

LET SLIP THE FROGS OF WAR

An essential part of NSW are the unsung heroes, the special boat squadrons (SBSs) and their assortment of heavily armed boats. The boat guys share much of the danger, discomfort, and adrenalin, but without all the public acclaim. SEALs, however, are usually careful to give them credit for their critical role in accomplishing the mission.

Naval special warfare (NSW) has been a very important and much abused subject for more than sixty years. For the U.S. Navy it goes back to the Underwater Demolition Teams of World War II, who cleared beach obstacles and surveyed gradients for amphibious landings in the Pacific and against European shores, many dying in the attempt. It is an extremely dangerous set of missions that cannot be practically executed with other, less demanding means.

The organization and the people of the NSW are actually two communities, one being the men in the water, the Sea/Air/Land commandos (SEALs), and the other being the men on the water, the special boat squadrons (SBS). Both have a long and distinguished combat record, and both communities have been linked together as NSW for more than forty years. While the SEALs get most of the attention and notoriety, SBS crews have been doing a lot of the shooting and bleeding over the years. While most of the SBS crews are not graduates of the basic underwater demolition/SEALs (BUD/s) training program the boat officers are SEALs, and SBS personnel are held to the same high standard of performance as the more notorious part of the team. This story is about both.

The men in NSW are just one part of a big, broad spectrum of American combat power—in fact, a tiny slice of the pie. There are only about 2,000 of them in the U.S. Navy, far fewer than the U.S. Army’s 7,000 or so Green Berets (active and reserve). SEALs, along with the U.S. Army’s Ranger regiment and Green Berets, comprise the United States’ most elite surface combat operations resources. All are masters of basic infantry tactics; each has its own area of expertise. All train together at some points of their qualification. All, despite their parentage as components of the Navy or Army, are really on-call assets for the highest levels of the national command authority (NCA)—the president, the secretary of defense, and the Joint Chiefs of Staff. When they go to war, their mission will probably start at MacDill Air Force Base, Florida, where U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM) is headquartered. It is that kind of organization: powerful, dangerous, expensive, and above all, special. There is also something traditionally a bit odd about these special forces soldiers and sailors. They are isolated and aloof from the rest of the military and especially from the public, partly by design and partly by tradition.

The great virtue of NSW is the ability to execute military missions anywhere on the globe, particularly on the world’s oceans. Here a SEAL team clambers up the side of a ship, something they can do without warning, even in the middle of the Pacific, even in the middle of the night.

The process of preparing for SEAL missions never ends. When a team returns from one deployment, they begin the process of refreshing their skills for the next. And among the skills that must be the freshest are those involved in close quarters battle, or CQB. Here an instructor reminds SEALs of the fundamentals associated with the M4 carbine. Eric Logsdon, U.S. Navy SPECWARCOM

The Big Picture: SOCOM

SOCOM is one of the best funded, most secure, most competitive parts of the U.S. force structure. All the services, including the Coast Guard, have been caught up, to some extent, in the post–Cold War reorientation away from “high-intensity combat,” with its need for nuclear weapons, long-range bombers, numerous tank divisions and aircraft carriers, to “low-intensity combat,” where combatants are harder to identify, therefore requiring the work of small teams of extremely adept people like SEALs and Green Berets.

SOCOM is just one of eight unified commands within the U.S. armed forces and has been a major player in the defenses of America since 1987. It integrates assets from all the services into one organization with one commander and with the same basic set of missions for everybody. That doesn’t mean that everybody does the same thing; rather it means that the navy, army, and air force pool their talents and resources for planning, training, and executing missions. The navy’s contribution to SOCOM is NSW command, comprised of SEAL teams, special boat squadrons, and swimmer delivery vehicle teams.

Special operations forces have traditionally been the “bad boys” of all the services. Many senior officers have, over the years, been candid about their loathing of the “cowboys” within their large, conservative organizations. Special forces training and missions produce a kind of lunatic intensity that is accepted within these groups but that clashes badly with the larger navy or army community within which it is supposed to function. Special operators have a reputation (well earned by an earlier generation) of using their own independent criteria for acceptable behavior. Green Berets used to say, when asked if they were in the army, “No, I’m in special forces.” Some still do.

Becoming a SEAL or a Green Beret has never, as a result, been considered the fast track to high rank. It was, and still is, a special place for special men (and, very rarely and not in the SEALs, a few incredible women) who consider these extremely demanding roles a kind of calling. They aren’t in the business to get rich or famous but to be measured by the highest standard of military performance and found acceptable. That is the real lure and the real reward of the special forces.

SEALs never operate alone and every man has a buddy to watch his back and to haul his carcass back to the beach if necessary.

The buddy team concept begins in BUD/S and lasts as long as a man is on a team. The fundamental building block of SEAL missions is the swim pair.

While the special operators may not always be personally popular within their services, the additional stress and funding for such missions has made for a very competitive budgetary environment. Both the Army and the Marine Corps compete with the Navy for the missions carried out by the SEALs. In fact, you could stand on a beach being infiltrated by combat swimmers and be very hard pressed to know who was about to kill you—U.S. Army Green Berets or Rangers, Marine Corps Force Recon, or U.S. Navy SEALs. All use precisely the same weapons, boats, dive gear, radios, and uniforms—and all train for what sometimes looks like the same exact mission. But it turns out that the missions do have distinctions and the overlap is not as great as it initially appears.

The foundation of NSW is based on the combat swimmer skills developed by the UDT frogmen of World War II. They remain important today for covert insertions on targets near the water.

Joint Special Operations Command

Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) is a kind of planning and coordination cell, headquartered at Pope Air Force Base, North Carolina, (co-located with Fort Bragg). It was created in 1980 as a joint headquarters designated to study the techniques and requirements of all the Special Operation Forces (SOF) components, including NSW—in other words, to ensure that everybody’s playing off the same sheet of music.

NSW Development Group (NSWDG), formerly known as “SEAL Team Six,” is one of two units under JSOC—along with Delta Force—that are so secret the Department of Defense does not acknowledge their existence. NSWDG is responsible for counterterrorist operations in maritime environments and is one of only a few U.S. military units authorized to conduct preemptive action against suspected terrorists and terrorist facilities.

SEAL Specialties

In contrast with air force and army special operators in the ranger regiment and special forces groups, SEALs are generalists, although each will have a specialty—intelligence, submarine operations, weapons, engineering, communications—that he does in support of the organization in the planning process. But once the squad of SEALs goes off to war, he has to be able to do the job of anybody else on the team. “If I’m the platoon commander on a mission and I take a hit,” one SEAL officer says, “the assistant platoon commander can take over. It doesn’t matter if he was the corpsman or the radioman, he can take over that operation and direct it to completion. I can pick up the radio, treat a wound, use any of the weapons. Green Berets say they can do that too, but I think we build generalists while they build specialists. That’s probably because they operate in larger groups. We operate in groups anywhere from four to sixteen men, and any one of our guys can slip into the role of any other guy . . . within limitations.”

SEAL Missions

Just about all the special operations forces have the same basic list of missions. Each of them adapts these missions to the unique talents of the force. For the NSW community the list looks like this:

1. Direct action (DA)—Short-term seize, destroy, damage, or capture operations. Attacks against facilities ashore or afloat; prisoner snatch operations; small offensive combat operations against hostile forces.

2. Special reconnaissance (SR)—Reconnaissance and surveillance operations. Covert beach surveys, listening posts, observation posts.

3. Unconventional warfare (UW)—Training, leading, and equipping partisan and guerrilla forces, behind enemy lines.

4. Foreign internal defense (FID)—Training, advising, and teaching the military, paramilitary, and law enforcement personnel of allied nations. Professional development, normally in a noncombat environment.

5. Counterterrorist operations (CT)—Operations conducted against terrorist units and individuals. May be as direct responses to terrorist operations or as indirect, preventive, deterrence measures.

All these missions have implications for their missionaries. To accomplish missions like these and survive, the people and the organizations they belong to need to be agile (individually and organizationally), trained to a far higher standard than conventional military personnel, and provided with far more resources, man for man, than conventional units. This assignment makes for organizations that are expensive and exclusive.

The “Wiring Diagram”

Special warfare command (SPECWARCOM) i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Contents
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Chapter 1 Let Slip the Frogs of War
• Chapter 2 A Short History Lesson
• Dedication
• Copyright Page