Baghdadi's death: More details emerge from US raid

[Dill]

(10-31-2019, 04:58 PM)fredtoast Wrote: I have to agree with SSF regarding credit for the actual raid.

I don't care for Trump's 48 minute stroke off session for the media, but that really doesn't have anything to do with the actual raid.

If you judge such raids simply in terms of domestic impact they may or may not have for a president, you will indeed find they are pretty much alike--a "win" for the president if successful and a "big loss" if not (e.g., think of Carter and Operation Eagle Claw). This is mostly how such raids are discussed in the news.

But if you are tasked, at the operational level, with assessing the degree of risk in each case to those engaged, how such risks were vetted before hand, and their consequences for foreign policy, you are likely to see degrees of difference beyond "successful"--sometimes rather large.  

Once such special operations are over, the people who plan them don't quickly set about assessing their domestic impact. They care little about that. Rather, they go back over every part of the raid to see what worked and didn't.  If a helicopter almost collided with another at some point, they don't say "so what; the raid worked didn't it?" They want to prevent such close calls the inevitable next time. If there were enemy units in the area that weren't supposed to be there, they want to know why the failure of intel. Even a "successful" raid can look very scary from this perspective, with misjudgments in the chain of command.

Move up a level to policy planning, and people are looking at timing and consequences, and a strategic level of risk, recognizing that the danger to a US helicopter operating on the border of Turkey is rather different from the danger to one operating in Iran or Abbotabad, as will be the political consequences.  Whether the order to "go in" was off the cuff, hastened by earlier blunders, or the result of careful planning and deliberation--all that makes a very big difference to those tasked with carrying out such raids from the planners to the troops on the ground, even after a successful mission.  People who discern problems in strategy aren't dismissed as boo birds just looking for the dark lining of a silver cloud, but people insuring the next mission is successful and achieves the desired end. They can't be satisfied with successful="the same."