U.S. Navy SEALs: The American ninjas

Tuesday, 17 May 2011 02:29

Written by Marvin Bionat

No, they don’t exactly have the apocryphal skills of the ancient ninjas that included walking on water and disappearing into thin air, but the U.S. Navy SEALs that got Osama bin Laden can pull some pretty dramatic stuff. In 2005, four members of SEAL Team 10 were on a mission to kill a high-ranking Taliban in Afghanistan when they were ambushed by up to 150 enemy fighters. Despite the overwhelming Taliban firepower, the SEALs managed to hold them off for more than 2 hours in a running firefight over rough terrain. The U.S. commando team fought on and killed an undetermined number of the Taliban fighters before three of its members succumbed to gunshot wounds, leaving Marcus Luttrell as the only survivor. Luttrell himself was blown off a cliff by a rocket-propelled grenade. Badly wounded, he staggered and crawled 7 miles to safety, killing 6 more Taliban combatants along the way.

More recently, America’s elite special operations forces reportedly killed or captured close to 3,000 Taliban and al Queda fighters in Afghanistan within a 90-day period.

Considered as some of America’s finest soldiers, the SEALs are trained to operate in three environments: sea, air, and land (thus the name). Their training is extraordinarily rigorous, reaching fitness levels that approach the human maximum and developing the character and iron determination to plan and execute any mission. Luttrell reportedly trained every day since he was 15 in his desire to join the SEALs. Those accepted into the program undergo 2 years of grueling training, and only 10 to 25 percent of applicants survive it.

What makes the weeding-out process so effective that up to 90 percent fail or quit? Here’s a sampling of the training regime:

Drown proofing: With your hands and feet bound, you are unceremoniously thrown into deep water. You task is to return to the surface and then swim 50 meters while still tied up.

Sugar cookie drills: You are forced to roll in the sand and then do marathon push-ups, sit-ups, and sprints until your body chafes and bleeds.

Hell week: You are kept awake for 20 hours straight—doing physical drills that stretch the limits of human endurance. As every inch of your muscle ache, be prepared to be hosed down with freezing water and/or thrown into the ocean to swim up to 2 miles.

The brutal training certainly makes the SEALs fearless and often successful in their sometimes impossible missions, but unless they can walk on water or disappear into thin air, it is important to point out a key lesson from Luttrell and his team’s experience: that getting local support and intelligence is critical to any mission, regardless of a commando’s skill set. The reason why his team was ambushed and almost completely decimated was because their location was accidentally discovered by goat herders. They considered killing the herders, but unable to determine whether the herders were Taliban sympathizers, the team voted to let them go. Within an hour, the SEALs were attacked by the local Taliban forces.

Not all locals were on the enemy camp, however. After staggering and crawling for 7 miles, Luttrell was sheltered in a village where tribesmen provided him with medical aid and resisted Taliban demands that he be turned over to them. Several days later, an elderly village leader travelled 20 miles to a U.S. base to alert the Americans of Luttrell’s location. A rescue team was quickly dispatched.

I don’t think the SEALs team that got Osama bin Laden operated without any local assets. While the upper rungs of the Pakistani intelligence were rightly kept in the dark (bin Laden’s sympathizers were most probably at a very high level), the surgical precision with which the operation was executed suggested access to information that only local informants could provide. Clearly, local support and intelligence are critical to deploying even the best-trained and the most fearless soldiers. A policy shift from gunboat diplomacy to the smart use of soft power (influence through respectful diplomacy, strategic communications, foreign assistance, civic action, and economic reconstruction and development) will naturally make it easier for the U.S. to gain and nurture local intelligence and support as it continues to deploy its forces around the world.

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