Mission Unnecessary?

Yochi Dreazen has an interesting piece in the National Journal questioning whether SEAL Team 6 should ever have been deployed on the mission last week that led to the fatal helicopter shootdown.  Dreazen notes that on Wednesday the military said the SEALs were not dispatched to rescue the Rangers, as originally reported, but rather to pursue a local Taliban commander.  He then quotes a former SEAL commander who questions whether it was worth risking so many SEALs (SEAL Team 6 only has a total of 300 operators) for such a low-level target.

I can not offer a judgment on the wisdom of this decision, not having been there to assess the tactical/operational situation, nor being as experienced as the commanders who decided to deploy the SEALs.

However, this episode is somewhat reminiscent of the second-guessing that emerged in the wake of the Paitilla Airfield disaster during the hunt for Manuel Noriega. On December 20, 1989, four members of SEAL Team Four were killed and eight wounded when they were caught in the open on the airfield's tarmac while trying to cut off one of Noriega's avenues of escape by destroying his personal Lear jet. Some special forces leaders reportedly questioned the use of SEALs for the Paitilla mission during the early stages of Just Cause planning, with some attributing the assignment to SEAL Team 4 to bureaucratic politics within the military community. Although LTG Carl Stiner (overall planner of the Panama invasion) and U.S. Special Operations Command (USASOC) Commander General James Lindsay claimed the Paitilla mission was a suitable one for SEALs, in his memoirs, Colin Powell (Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the time of the invasion) reflected: “We made the mistake of assigning the SEALs, however tough and brave, to a mission more appropriate to the infantry.” In the end, exhaustive after-action reviews by the Joint Chiefs of Staff and USASOC determined that the SEALs had simply made a critical tactical error by standing up on the open tarmac.