It would have been nicer to kidnap the fishermen.
Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
81–90 of 278 posts
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the alternative, ask them not to tell? If you had to make the decision in the moment how would you weigh compromising the chance to prevent thousands or millions of deaths for advanced warning of nuclear or other attack using your ability to install that monitoring equipment now or in future, versus the lives of potentially hostile people who show up in your mission area? You have to live with the moral cost,…
False dichotomy. There were many other options available.
Such as?
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Meanwhile hollywood will churn out another hundred films about how Captain America would never let something like this happen because murdering innocents is not a line America would ever cross. FWIW, Captain America's character arc throughout the MCU, at least (which is what I'd assume we mean by "Hollywood"), has largely been to realize that he can't actually trust the government and that not only is the governmen…
A lot of people bash the Marvel content for essentially having the depth of an arcade beat-em-up, but the character arcs of Cap and Iron Man alone through the movies is something to behold IMHO
That's not much an arc, at least as described. He starts with one set of principles, and he stays with those same set of principles, but just changes his methods. A more interesting (IMO) arc would be to realize that principles should be guidelines, not strict rules, and that those guidelines can sometimes be bent in order to accomplish goals. "I can't trust organizations anymore" is not character growth; the character is not learning anything about how his decisions affect the world.
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#84>you woke up before dawn with your companions to go diving in the freezing cold ocean, in hopes of putting some mussels on your family's table. But suddenly, you die. A man you have never met and whose presence you did not know about has shot you with his rifle. His companions stab your lungs so that your body will sink to the bottom of the sea. Your family will likely never know what happened to you. Man, fuck these…
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Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#85If 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…
> In Marcus Luttrell's original after-action report, he stated that he and his teammates were attacked by 20–35 insurgents, while his book places the number at over 200....military journalist Ed Darack cites a military intelligence report stating the strength of the Taliban force to be 8–10.
> 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_...
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#86I 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…
This is my best understanding as well.
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.
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#87If anyone is interested, but didn't read it because it looked long-form... it's only ~3,500 words, and is a very accessible writeup about this serious matter.
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.)
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#88This 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 vote, power becomes fully vested in our elected officials rather than remaining with the people who conditionally granted it to them. The "representative" part of our democratic republic has become the hack that allows crappy politicians to take over and use power for their own benefit.
We grant power through voting, but that power should stay accountable to us - not disappear into secret operations that would never survive public scrutiny.
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#89It would have been nicer to kidnap the fishermen.
And take them where? Bear in mind the seal team came in on a sub that didn't even have air. They probably don't have restraints of any kind or a way to keep them from shouting...
Which is not to say what they did do was right, but "just kidnap some people" is not really a practical reality.
Re: Navy SEALs reportedly killed North Korean fishermen to hide a failed mission
#90Earlier quoted context omitted.
What is the alternative, ask them not to tell? If you had to make the decision in the moment how would you weigh compromising the chance to prevent thousands or millions of deaths for advanced warning of nuclear or other attack using your ability to install that monitoring equipment now or in future, versus the lives of potentially hostile people who show up in your mission area? You have to live with the moral cost,…
What happens if you just abort the mission? Probably nothing, and certainly doing nothing is less likely to provoke war and further escalation than murdering civilians, hoping no one notices, and then having a front page NY Times article published about it later If North Korean spies murdered fisherman off the coast of California on a failed mission, you bet there would be blowback If they were simply noticed, the US…
That's one way to assess it. Can you take the cost if your presence is detected?
Maybe nothing happens. How likely is nothing? And if your presence finds it ways to the authorities, what's the cost? Likely, NK will patch what might be your best chance at advance warning.
As fishing is dangerous and many never return, their plausibly 'accidental' deaths provide cover to keep the secrecy and your future access intact.
Now the story leaks out from inside - what are the consequences? I don't know.