121–130 of 278 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
How are you relating NSA with the Navy?
The Navy isn't in the wiretap business.
When incidents like this happen, it gives credence to North Korean propaganda portraying the US as an imperialist aggressor.
If X is Iran/Russia/North Korea/ 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.
This botched operation shows how representative government has been subverted in America. Power should flow bottom-up, rather than top-down. Would putting this operation to a democratic vote ever result in approval? Highly doubtful. This suggests our current form of democracy is deeply broken and urgently needs fixing. IMO the issue is how we think about power itself. The assumption underneath it all is that once we…
you make it very clear that you have zero understanding of what republican democracy is in the United States.
If you can stomach the bravado and unclear factual accuracy, the 2007 book Lone Survivor gives an account of a similar failure, in Afghanistan, where a SEAL team was discovered early in their mission. But, it devolved into a running battle and a disaster for the US special forces where most of the team and many rescuers also died. As a result of those prior events, I can imagine they have different rules of engagemen…
2007 was the crazy Bush days. In 2008 Bush wanted a missile defense shield in Poland, pointed at Russia, and made a point of declaring Ukraine would join NATO.
https://www.cnn.com/2020/12/10/politics/pentagon-cia-counter...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
From the NYT article: "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."
If he leaked intel of the operation, he plausibly would decline to comment on the article. That said, Bolton doesn't seem like the type to leak information about a Navy SEALs ops.
This botched operation shows how representative government has been subverted in America. Power should flow bottom-up, rather than top-down. Would putting this operation to a democratic vote ever result in approval? Highly doubtful. This suggests our current form of democracy is deeply broken and urgently needs fixing. IMO the issue is how we think about power itself. The assumption underneath it all is that once we…
Putting special ops up to democratic vote is absurd.
I was reading about special operations in WWII and these kinds of missions always seem to be on a knife's edge. This mission seems more akin to a WWII operation with the team and their immediate support being entirely on their own. >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 sec…
It’s important to clarify that yes, they’re more comfortable with risk taking but they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand. 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 Ho…
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.