Retired Lt Gen Vaught was right.

General Vaught during his active duty days...

Lets take a step down memory lane...via ABC News...

A retired general today assailed the commander of the Navy SEAL raid that killed Osama bin Laden for drawing too much media attention to operations that he argued should be kept under wraps.
Special Operations Commander Adm. Bill McRaven was confronted by retired Lt. Gen. James Vaught, who said he didn't understand why the recent raids by the Navy SEALs, such as the one to kill Osama bin Laden or to rescue U.S. hostage Jessica Buchanan, were all over the media.
"Since the time when your wonderful team went and drug bin Laden out and got rid of him, and more recently when you went down and rescued the group in Somalia, or wherever the hell they were, they've been splashing all of this all over the media," Vaught, 85, said. "I flat don't understand that.
"Now back when my special operators extracted Saddam [Hussein] from the hole, we didn't say one damn word about it," he continued. "We turned him over to the local commander and told him to claim that his forces drug him out of the hole, and he did so. And we just faded away and kept our mouth shut.
"Now I'm going to tell you, one of these days, if you keep publishing how you do this, the other guy's going to be there ready for you, and you're going to fly in and he's going to shoot down every damn helicopter and kill every one of your SEALs. Now, watch it happen. Mark my words. Get the hell out of the media," he concluded, as laughter broke out at a meeting of the National Defense Industrial Association in Washington, D.C.

Wow.  Just plain wow.  My first thought when I saw this awhile ago is that this guy, LTGen Vaught is spot on.  My second was that these so called defense journalist are fucking idiots.  Below is  the vid of the event...


ABC Breaking News | Latest News Videos

Why am I posting this?  Because Carter just announced that a "Specialized Expeditionary Targeting Force" would be deployed to Iraq.  I believe SOCOM is flying into trouble..

Think about it.  Iraq is hardly reliable.  Turkey has been shown (conclusively in my opinion) to be supporting ISIS and the same can be said of Saudi Arabia and the other GCC states..the Kurds are good to go,  but the other people that we could expect to get help from...the Russians  are listed as enemies.  So we're in a hurt locker before we even deploy these guys.  One slip in protocol when it comes to intelligence handling and an ambush can be setup.  Poor intel on a target can have our forces flying into a situation with ISIS having only two goals...to kill as many of our people as they can, with a secondary bonus of capturing one alive so that they can torture and kill him for broadcast on YouTube.  This is risky beyond belief.

Retired LTGen Vaught is right, but just like other elder warriors, his council is being ignored.  This crop of military leaders think they know better.  They're wrong.