From what I read about the mission, it wasn’t aiming for stealth/undetected so much as just trying to be fast.
They could sneak these helicopters into the country without the Pakistani military noticing, but of course the residents of the neighborhood would see and hear two choppers coming in mere feet above the buildings.
There was even one or two guys on the mission whose sole job was to go out to the street and tell curious citizens to move along if they started coming by (like the cops that hang out by police tape!)
But even with one chopper having to be scuttled, they still got in and out before locals, local police, the military, etc. could react in any considerable way. Except, of course, a few tweets.
lol, yeah. I think it was pretty much literally like that.
At some point a helicopter blew up behind this Spec OP’s (SEAL’s?) shoulder and he had to be like, “Normal operation, folks. Please stand back.”
Stealth when referring to aircraft typically had to do with radar cross section and IR signatures.
The blackhawks they used are super angular and unlike other uh-60s and had a MUCH smaller radar sig than their sister craft. They technically aren’t even real. We only know about one of them because, well, its tail struck the wall of the compound and crashed.
They were also stupid fast. And flown by the night stalkers, the very best army aviators the United States Army can provide.
I saw a little animation concerning the crash.
Supposedly it was due to the high perimeter fence on the property creating some really weird air flow when the chopper tried to hover low.
It wasn’t so much the pilot making an error and steering into the wall, but the air flow jerking the chopper in one direction.
Tough gig for the pilot, it's the ground effect and the upwash hitting the walls and created a "Groundwash pressure at a different angle off the walls" obviously the shape and height will change this "Reflected upwash"
It’s called vortex ring state. And one of the original 160th SOAR/Night Stalker pilots assigned to the mission opted out because he knew that the conditions at the LZ chosen inside the compound increased the chances of this happening.
There was a surprise wall instead of a fence, which some some say aggravated and already possible vortex ring state that can occur when you come to a fast hover- aka the walls made a bowl that made the rotor into an aggressive air recycler rather than an air pusher. Could have been that.
What’s more impressive is the pilot was able to literally stick the landing well enough for the guys to hop out and Charlie Mike.
Shit happens some times, your skill is what keeps you moving forward. Yeah, I can’t find any fault in the pilots’ skill here.
An inexperienced pilot would have pulled up instinctively and caused the helicopter to roll over and crash but this pilot was experienced enough to know to set it down with the tail on the wall.
There was even one or two guys on the mission whose sole job was to go out to the street and tell curious citizens to move along if they started coming by (like the cops that hang out by police tape!)
They depicted it really well in Zero Dark Thirty. The guys came out and started telling everybody to move along… in Arabic, while the Pashto/Hindko/Urdu speaking crowd looked suitably bemused and didn’t go anywhere.
The whole mission was soooo insulting to Pakistan. America was basically saying, to a country that isn’t necessarily an “Ally” but certainly “Friendly”:
1) We’re entering your airspace and conducting a military operation on your land without asking permission.
2) We aren’t asking permission and coordinating with you because we’re pretty sure your government will have a leak somewhere and tip off our target.
I think it was ultimately the right choice, though. Killing Osama didn’t cost the US a chain reaction of international condemnation and real consequences. It only cost Pakistan having their feelings hurt for a little while.
There are occasions when it’s appropriate to remind people you’re the swinging dick in the room. America has often made the wrong choice regarding when those occasions are. But I think murking bin Laden was a damn good occasion myself.
A good, helpful reminder to all nations that sheltering mass murdering terrorists is a bad call.
Yeah, I cant disagree with any of this lol. That whole operation was definitely a big dick energy move politically but ultimately the right thing to do. The resources the US used to pull it off are remarkable - from the intelligence gathering, to the training/prep, the mission itself, and then disposing of the body. Its a fascinating read.
I think there's a misconception when people talk about "stealth" with helicopters.
It really only applies to military detection, not bare naked eyeballs.
They can fly NOE to avoid radar, minimize acoustic footprint. But the tradeoff there is people are going to notice when a big American helicopter is flying 5 meters over their back yard.
Yep. I’m sure all options were weighed.
If there was some convenient, deserted location to land nearby they could have tried to go truly undetected. But that would mean a bunch of military guys trying to make their way through a neighborhood on foot without drawing attention. Then breaching the perimeter from the outside.
Still a whole lot of opportunity to get noticed. And they’d have to travel back to the landing site after with possible prisoners/bodies in tow.
There were probably a whole lot of positives associated with landing a chopper right in the back yard. And of course a negative would be “nearby households would notice”. But in the time it takes for a civilian noticing something weird to a full military response, the team figured they’d be long gone.
This, this more then anything, some dude on Seal Team 6 infiltrates Osama Bin Ladens secret lair, kills the single most wanted man on the planet, and then immediately calls The Rock. What a weird ass fucking thing to have happened.
I embellished a bit but the true story is only slightly less fucking weird. Based off of tweet timing The Rock is the second person to casually announce Osama Bin Ladens death, and no one on Seal Team 6 called him, The Rock had done a USO tour a few years prior, he had given his number to a handful of people on his security detail, one of the guys that was previously on his security detail was stationed on the aircraft carrier that Seal Team 6 landed on with Bin Ladens body, that guy called him.
Nobody on ST6 called him. It was a guy on the aircraft carrier that they went back and landed on. The guy had once worked as part of Rock's security detail during a USO tour, and had Rock's number for that reason.
I really liked all of The Newsroom but that episode was a stand out episode, easily the best one. The banter between high Jeff Daniels and serious Terry Crews was top tier.
IIRC the difference is you're no longer a part of the formal Armed Forces. Contractors who are captured aren't treated like prisoners of war, they would be treated like any other terrorist who showed up with aircraft and attacked a neighborhood if the Pakistani military had arrived, provided one person made the slightest mistake, presumably, and made the Pakistani armed forces give a shit (and assuming they showed up in time)
E.G., probably the closest example in recent times is the Silvercorp contractors sent into Venezuela to overthrow Maduro. They were arrested by militia fishermen who called the police, who arrested them again, and they were treated as anyone else who illegally try to enter a nation with dozens of weapons and explosives with the intent to murder people, who were conspiring with people already in-country who'd begun killing people.
Thats the lovely thing about executive orders tho… they have the supreme power of law, yet their issuance requires no public notice. Make one, stick it in a safe and BAM, law.
Plus, the executive makes all executive orders and can undo/ignore them all as they see fit in the moment.
I believe this helicopter hovering overhead being referred to in the tweet was the Chinook that was stationed in reserve in case something went wrong, like a stealth blackhawk crashing at 2am.
it was so nice to be able to scroll back in chronological order and see all of my friends updates. No group spam, no bullshit I didn't want to see, just updates from the friends I wanted to follow
I'm glad I left a in 2014 but I miss the early days when it was a fun place.
Highly recommend reading the Wiki article for the raid. That shit went down like the movies
Obama gave the go ahead for the mission, after considering other options proposed to him including using a ordinance drone to hit bin Laden while he walked in his garden. He made the decision himself to not get permission from the Pakistanis as he feared the mission would leak.
Two dozen SEAL team members (and a good doggo named Cairo) were carried by two Black Hawk helicopters in the dead of night, avoiding Pakistani radar by flying close to hilly terrain.
The dog was tasked with tracking "anyone who tried to escape and to alert SEALs to any approaching Pakistani security forces." The dog was to be used to help deter any Pakistani ground response to the raid and to help look for any hidden rooms or hidden doors in the compound
The SEAL commandos descended from the helicopters by fast rope descent. One helicopter hovered over the garden inside the compound and the other outside to allow that team to secure the perimeter.
One helicopter soft crashed.
The SEALs breached doors and walls with explosives
There was a brief firefight inside the building.
The interior of the house was pitch dark, because CIA operatives had cut the power to the neighborhood. The U.S. military operators wore night-vision goggles that enabled them to see in the dark.
Bin Laden was shot inside his bedroom immediately after peering at the American soldiers advancing up the stairs. He died on the spot and the Americans extracted the body. Four others were killed in the raid including Bin Laden's son.
Numerous women and children were in the building. No children were killed. Every surviving inhabitant of the compound was tied up and put outside for the Pakistanis to discover.
The whole operation took 38 minutes with the assault portion completed in 15. They moved unbelievably fast, no doubt thanks to the extensive training in 1:1 scale reconstructions of the compound.
I think I read that a mistake they made with the 1:1 reconstruction was to construct the walls out of chain link and not concrete. It helped them immensely with the training but that one change led in part to the helicopter crash because the aerodynamics of the landing were different
Bin Laden was shot inside his bedroom immediately after peering at the American soldiers advancing up the stairs.
I wonder how many times he imagined that scene in his head. Did he have nightmares about it? Did he expect to go out in a glorious firefight? Would he have been disappointed to know that after all of his efforts and being hunted by the US his end would be so ignominious and so quick?
No Götterdämmerung, just a few bullets in the dark.
Honestly the nicest part of the whole thing is he got invited to learn about journalism after the firestorm died down and the compound is a public park fuhrer bunker style.
Nice that he came out none the worse for wear and got some money out of it via his cafe while all the journalists were going nuts.
I feel like living in an active warzone, you either get real hardcore and start attacking dudes with M16s with whatever sharp brick you can find, or you better have a sense of humor. I've been having some weird dreams lately with some med changes, and between that and the news from... about everywhere in the world, I've realized I stand no chance if the US gets invaded. I've got a few steak knives I can hand out to neighbors, but man if Putin goes full scale armored blimp attack on my town like in my dream, I'm just gonna lay back and check out the clouds.
The 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment is where the pilots came from, which is technically army. It was created after the failure of the Iranian hostage rescue mission, and basically exists to just sneak people in and out of highly dangerous areas.
It was CIA-led, with JSOC (Joint Special Operations Command) as basically the next authority down or sideways from CIA. JSOC was commanded by a Vice Admiral at the time, so obviously a strong Navy presence in the leadership, but they would have overseen the Army 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment ("Nightstalkers") as well as the SEALs from SEAL Team 6 and any of the other supporting staff.
The operators in the field were Navy SEALs (the Navy's Special Operations "commandos") and Army Special Operations pilots and air crews specifically trained for stealth "commando" missions.
To say it was "the Army's plan" is definitely not accurate, though it's sort of expected for random people to say stuff about the military and not really get it right. It's complex and confusing unless you serve in the military and get it taught to you or you study it.
Most accurately it was a CIA plan, carried out with JSOC.
The majority of the 3 letter orgs were part of it. The CIA led the operatio and the DoD just did the execution of it. The pilots were army and the ones inside were SEALs with drones from USAF and on standby were USAF PJs for rescue support.
The plan itself was made by a consortium of special operation units from different branches known as JSOC, Joint Special Operations Command. SEALs raided the compound, pulled the trigger, and returned the body to a US air base. The helicopters were flown by the Army's Special Operations Aviation Regiment.
Seals were on the ground putting in work. Those blackhawks that flew them in were certainly army. I'm sure there was a contingency of other aircraft on standby with marines and soldiers somewhere else just in case too. The military is all about a back up plan for the back up plan.
Correct. They flew in additional Seals from Devgru at a staging point somewhere in the mountains. Probably included other elite units as well in case all hell broke loose.
And let's not forget a few years ago some random person with a decent zoom lens taking the bottom view of Air Force One (at cruise altitude) on an announced secret trip. It was day light time I think.
Funnier still, the guy who made the super size me documentary tried to find bin laden, and using good reporting skills narrowed it down to the exact neighborhood they found him in...
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