I've been monitoring the news this afternoon and the President is talking tough (or rather his version of talking tough) about going after ISIS and asking Congress for broad authority to get the job done.
The talking heads are slobbering all over the idea of sending in Special Operations to kill, or capture the enemy and rescue hostages.
But has anyone paid attention to the number of failed hostage rescue attempts over the past year?
* United States commandos stormed a village in southernYemen early Saturday in an effort to free an American photojournalist held hostage by Al Qaeda, but the raid ended in tragedy, with the kidnappers killing the American and a South African held with him, United States officials said.Has ISIS and their associates read our Special Operations playbook? Or is it finally happening just like that old skool Snake Eating General said it would. SOCOM stayed in the news and the enemy is now waiting for them when they get off the choppers.
* Elite US military forces secretly invaded Syria recently in a risky and ultimately unsuccessful attempt to free US journalist James Foley before he was killed by Islamic State (Isis) militants, the Pentagon announced on Wednesday.
* Two attempted rescue missions to save hostages held by Islamic State (Isis) in Syria ended in failure last night, according to reports. The failed operations took place in the self-proclaimed IS capital city of Raqqa on 1 January. The target was to retrieve a number of hostages including Muadh al-Kasasbeh, the Jordanian pilot who was captured by Islamic State after his plane was downed over IS territory.
Check out the film at the 3:33 mark...
"One of these days... you're gonna fly in and he's gonna shoot down every one of your helicopters and kill your SEALs...mark my words" is what the old skool snake eater warned....
The media laughed but are we seeing that today?
These failures are not due to lack of skill or tactics by SOCOM, but rather, they (with the exception of Yemen) are the direct results of crappy intel.
ReplyDeleteMay I suggest that the efforts by many in Washington to degrade our intel systems are actually working and having a detrimental effect on out ability to gather timely and accurate information?
Side Note: You only have to be slightly more intelligent than dog-shit to know that if you are holding hostages and you get raided, you kill the hostages. I don't see how it's SOCOM's fault that terrorists are not as stupid as people think, or wish, they were.
i notice that no one wants to have this conversation. no one wants to consider the words of the old general. no one wants to think that at a SOCOM numbering 66,000 that it might be too fucking big and that quality might be starting to suffer. no one wants to say that perhaps SOCOM is being used for missions it shouldn't be tasked with.
Deleteeveryone wants to simply say they're the best of the best and leave it at that.
ok.
i'll let this blog post ride but i bet somewhere someone is asking the questions that many here don't dare ask.
No one is saying that there are not areas that could be worked on, every military or government organization has areas that can be worked on, it's how they evolve to get better.
DeleteHowever, look at the three examples you cited. 2/3 were cases where SOCOM got there and there were no hostages present. Explain to me how you hang that on their head? You act like they showed up and got pushed off of an objective or were otherwise repelled by enemy forces.
The fact is that if you look for problems in those cases, you find that the fault lies with the intel community (at no real fault of their own) and Washington. Look at the last example, the hostages were moved hours before SOCOM got there. That means that someone, (i'll give you one guess who) waited too long before giving the "OK" to go and get the hostages back.
As a side note, what no one is really talking about is the fact that we have benefitted from years of ground sourced intel. When no one is on the ground, you get much less ground sourced intel.
It is no surprise that when have crap information and worse leadership, you get crap results.
I think you're absolutely right and I think that old general is right as well. SOF are being treated in the political realm as the hand of God, able to go anywhere and do anything that the government requires. Using SOF like this is rolling the dice. Sometimes you bag Bin Laden, but eventually you overestimate your capabilities and the enemy wises up and you get Mogadishu in 93. How long until an enemy leaks fake intel about a hostage location and sets up an ambush with basic RPG-7s, DShKMs, ZPUs, and ZU-23s? Last time I checked, stealth Black Hawks weren't literally invisible. 66,000 personnel at SOCOM is a joke. We're now robbing our conventional capabilities to maintain this massive SOF branch. It's like Marine Special Operations. Take from the MEU commander and give to SOCOM so that they can have another redundant unit.
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ReplyDeleteOff topic, but so cool!
ReplyDelete"A January 2015 Naval Air Systems Command test of a Tomahawk Block IV guided by a F/A-18 into a moving ship target."
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jgv5ixxgTsQ
ReplyDeleteOver a 12 foot square area.
Which means he looks like the guy on the left-
http://www.combatreform.org/infaredthellieani.gif
Killing hostages basically equates to an uncomfortable chair, Neftlix membership, six pack of soda, bottle of no-doze and a 1/8th inch, 10lb trigger letoff in a rotating shift of people.
So you DO NOT want to play ST6 coming for Bin Laden because you will lose the reaction time game at the sound of rotors overhead.
That was stupid because you don't want your 20 million dollar ride to be sitting overhead a bunch of gun toting idiots with only the team which is NOT fast roping (i.e. going round and round the perimeter) able to shoot what they can see.
OTOH, infiltration is iffy at best because the terrorists have wised up to the notion of 'in the masses vs. in the boonies' ability to disappear in a similar community. The next nearest LZ to Bin Laden's compound was in fact something like 2-3nm away and that was too far because you had to walk through civilian neighborhoods to reach the objective and a bunch of gun toting thugs in camouflage and heavy body armor, wearing googles like klieg lights are going to attract attention. This is particularly true when whites form about 16% of the global population and over 90% of SOCOM operators and so simply _do not look native_, no matter what you do to make them up.
In fact, most holdups have a combination of relative standoff from the local environment (warehouse in an industrial park bordering civilian areas or a large estate) while still looking like part of the herd-housing.
Which is where stuff like this-
http://www.amazon.com/s/?ie=UTF8&keywords=flir+thermal&tag=googhydr-20&index=aps&hvadid=28523746586&hvpos=1t1&hvexid=&hvnetw=g&hvrand=17496653821935714080&hvpone=&hvptwo=&hvqmt=b&hvdev=c&ref=pd_sl_6k4cvhin8t_b
http://www.thegpsstore.com/FLIR-MD-324-Fixed-Mount-Thermal-Night-Vision-Camera-P3552.aspx?gclid=CjwKEAiAmOymBRD0_evS4aTh2hUSJAB7Fkhyn375254WwWKZZV0PJbnnRFOW7b7CjU5aDbdOOLca6BoCwBDw_wcB
Which is _intended_ for remote area/international use and so cannot have regional lockouts, makes that self illuminating billboard of a human being as hard or harder to infiltrate the last 200m as we was the first 10,000m of a walked-in raiding condition.
Thellie suits: The above photo is not a Thellie suite, it's a ghillie suit with a liner or a yeti-suit made from branches. Real Thellie suits look like MCS on a stick with louped cutouts over an inner foam layer to provide positive circulation control diffusion from an intermediate air layer which helps contain and spread heat evenly in a coated cloth which shifts the radiation into a different waveband from that normally used by TI detectors.
Thellie is likely old school by now but the fact remains that whatever has replaced it (active peltier cells in a flexible membrane matrix, last I checked), is itself going to be limited for the simple reason that military in-field reconnaissance in a surface role seldom has to come closer than 1,000m to verify that a tank is a tank. While hunting human targets in a mixed, collaterals dense, builtup (MOUT) environment is much more challenging due to it's restricted use of cover (as compromising behavior) from other social elements and frequent LOS blocks from buildings and the like.
Which brings us to what the other poster mentioned: Intel.
ReplyDeleteBack in the day, when GWOT was stealing money and the USAF was looking for something cheaper the J-UCAS to get back capability with, USAF looked at the 'Dominator' killer-UAV concept-
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2d1ORgVjZto
Which was basically LOCAAS revisited with props instead of turbines (and fuel cells instead of avker-IC the last iteration).
DARPA looked at it and said: "But wait! That's 500ft resolution with no sound and they can only see what's outdoors! Give us five years of DARPA-Hard funding and we will give you a swarm MAV function that can bury itself in-structure to listen to the seismic keyed audibles and fly through windows to take a picture from fly-on-wall distance!). Seeded like locusts from a dispenser and repeated every 20-30 hours as needed with specialist function vehicles that are either ground, air or comms relay optimized by the /thousands/ at pennies on the dollar!
I never heard more from that effort. Which typically means it worked or it didn't.
These days, I have to wonder if we cannot do even better. Possibly with nano systems that are literally dust on the wind level and can form cortical attachments to the brains of animals or perhaps even humans to pull a Batman on everyone as passive recon tools. You still have your insectile commo relays but now your apertures are all mobile and self-generating and they use something like the lymph system to moderate bioelectric. fields which the 'bugs' listen to like coded digitals.
The other element of course is the kinetic one-
TALOS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bPjatYDHJKo
Revision
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RKcqHaPhkkM
All The Chillin's Playing Nicely Together
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ePl9TC2ySUY
It's ironic that the Army calls 'Revision' (a term for fixing screwups where I come from) a new idea for what is, essentially something that has been around since the 1980s with DARPA's Pitman suit. For THAT is now, IMO, the past-tense of capability (current soldier systems are nearly prehistoric).
At one point in the second video it talks about how the existing ways of doing things aren't good enough. How, if we continue to rely on the human being as a body, we may have to 'choose between mission and safety'.
ReplyDeleteAt which point, I know the rough lads have lost it. Because THE OBJECTIVE has no exotic armor. No cooling systems or ability to foam up bullet wounds with coagulant gel laces. It's just...silly to think in terms of Hostage Rescue as an outside-in 'protect the soldier and he will get the guy out' sense.
Remember: 1/8th inch trigger movement with a letoff of 10lbs by someone who is high on uppers and caffeine, knows he hasn't a hope in hell of living if he's forced to fight and has been told that the people he's guarding should all be dead rather than liberated.
Guess whose gonna win that fight when a frame charge blows a hole in the roof and gunfire erupts, halfway down the hall.
Hint: It's not the hostage.
What I would have liked to do instead is go to that conference with a structurally penetrating pain ray that used UWB impulse radar to go through a floor as much as a door and then, having ID'd the perps, spin-scans the room, 'bringing the beams togehter' from several apertures. And using nociceptor vulnerabilities to put everyone on the ground. Or better yet, to sleep.
"Everyone with a pacemaker or neurologic defict, leave the room. The rest of you? See you in five."
I don't know for sure if it can be done. I -do- know that the body has an insulative fat (water) later that acts as a resistor to electrical fields. The current method for overcoming this is a laser which 'flakes' a microburst plasma off the target face and then stimulates the plasma with differing wavelengths of radiation induce a response in the moderator section of your synapses. The neurotransmitters are chemically run at several hundred Hz. But the moderators which keep the chemical system working run at several /tens of thousands/ of Hertz. That's why your metabolism doesn't blitz out normally. And why nerve agent the size of a pin drop can kill a person. It's your own body running off the rails that screws you up.
WHY do you want to go busting through a door like fucking Superman with bullets bouncing /everywhere/, leaving pink smears on walls if you can _turn the knob and walk in_, like a real person, after Phasers-on-Stun putting everyone on the floor, sort the sheep and goats as you like and take some home and some to an interrogation center so that you can backtrail the chain-of-idiots to whomever first had the idea that butchery of innocents was a good idea?
POINT BEING:
ReplyDeleteIf you can do this with ray guns from soldiers shooting through doors (and I think you can). You can scale the capability to a system that shoots through a wall from a UAV. Nobody pulls that 1/8th inch, 10 pound, letoff on the trigger sear.
And all this money which is being wasted on the melohama of 'bringing our operators home' through warfighter suits composed of dozens of different systems could instead be focussed on getting TWO systems right: The Red Force Tracker. And The Ray Gun.
Both of which could be classifed to hell and back with only 1 in a million compartmented in.
We are _not_ thinking this through. We are spending money for poverty's sake on systems which will be copied and proliferated, escalating the runaway technology train for nothing.
In the final video, some crusty old scab tells us that this is 'we are spending stupendous amounts of money on systems when we could spend less on helping the individual soldier'.
What he fails to take note of is that individual soldiers are all but worthless. By the time your are in it to win it at that level, so many things have gone wrong that it's getting pretty grim and what One Man can do to stop the mess is nothing compared to the millions more set against him. And the millions who will have to be equipped /like him/ to fight the parity response is going to be anything but cheap.
SOF needs the ability to win fights without getting too deep into them. Because the objective MA goal is increasingly softer than is survivably rescuable in a ptiched fight.
Brevity be thy name.
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