131–140 of 278 posts
For anyone with direct knowledge, what's up with current military culture regarding secrecy? I knew SF guys from the Vietnam era and they didn't talk with outsiders. In fact, I can't think of any prominent "tell all" books from SOF operators from before the 21st century. Now we have ex-SEALs doing book deals.
It's funny how people are so surprised? This story was already fictionalized in 2004's "Team America - World Police". SEALs, North Korea, it's all there. 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.
When incidents like this happen, it gives credence to North Korean propaganda portraying the US as an imperialist aggressor.
The US is pretty clearly an imperialist aggressor? Latin America is littered with the bodies of those who didn't conform to US economic dictates.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe Putin's 2007 Munich speech and 2008 Russian war with Georgia had something to do with that.
Is there any way all those involved in the killings can be prosecuted for murder?
The US has threatened the ICC with violence to prevent criminal charges against US military members.
So in short, no.
When incidents like this happen, it gives credence to North Korean propaganda portraying the US as an imperialist aggressor.
"An X country's covert operations team landed on country Y's shores, opened fire on a boat in which an innocent fisherman lost lives and left" 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…
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.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe Putin's 2007 Munich speech and 2008 Russian war with Georgia had something to do with that.
"A North Korean boat appeared out of the dark. Flashlights from the bow swept over the water. Fearing that they had been spotted, the SEALs opened fire. Within seconds, everyone on the North Korean boat was dead." Seeing as how this was right where this entire mission turned into a lethal clusterfuck, you'd think rigorously trained, carefully coordinated and disciplined SEALs would just try the incredibly sophisticat…
(Assuming you also weren’t in the armed forces, so correct me if I’m wrong.) I don’t think it’s worthwhile for laypeople to armchair quarterback the decisions of possibly the most elite soldiers in the US armed forces. By the time the mission was given to them, the collateral risk had already been accepted by JSOC, national security advisors, and likely Trump. I could feel more comfortable questioning their judgment,…
But who is going to question these decisions, then? Can we trust the elected leaders to do so? I don't think so (not being partisan here, this goes for Trump, Biden, Obama, Bush, whomever); they don't want to look bad in the eyes of voters, so they're going to keep these sorts of outcomes classified if they can. Can we trust non-political military leadership? To some extent, I think so, but they (especially those involved in planning and approval for these missions) will still have incentives to downplay any failures.
This is a classic problem, of course: you can never fully trust the people involved to police themselves. But I also agree that most civilians won't have the experience, context, and training to evaluate what happened and come to a reasonable and fair conclusion.
So... I'm not sure what the solution is. The bottom line is that collateral civilian deaths are a tragedy. The fact that it happened is awful, and that operation should be gone over with a fine-toothed comb to determine if the soldiers involved could and should have done something differently in order to avoid those deaths. Whether or not that will happen, in an objective, unbiased manner, by people who are qualified to do so, is unknown. I'd like to think there were better options here, and that those people didn't need to die, but I really have no idea.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Maybe Putin's 2007 Munich speech and 2008 Russian war with Georgia had something to do with that.
Which were also tit-for-tat responses to the US & NATO (US involvement & funding in 2004 Ukraine Orange Revolution, 2006 Georgia bid for NATO, 2008 NATO Bucharest Summit).
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> And their success rate should be and is, pretty high. 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 i…
Emphasis added. Is the death of Osama bin laden under any serious dispute? It's been 14 years.