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It’s important to clarify that yes, they’re more comfortable with risk taking but they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with

It’s important to clarify that yes, they’re more comfortable with risk taking but they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand. It’s not just “lol, let’s try it. If we die, we die!” And their success rate should be and is, pretty high. That said, this was a National Command Authority (came down from the White House) mission and those tend to be the riskiest.

jeffbee 1y ago
The entire story is about how you lack a rational basis for holding a belief about the success rate.
th3o6a1d 1y ago
What is their success rate? What is "pretty high?"
- Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
  We don't know. It's classified. That's the part of the point. I get why the OC might assume the success rate is pretty high because the successful missions can be talked about so the public hears about them. Very rare to hear about the failures like this one. But we just don't know if its rare because they don't happen much or because they happen a lot and are kept as a state secret.
JohnBooty 1y ago
This is my best understanding as well. I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT. Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt, including the claim that they were even SF in the first place. However, they all describe the selection processes similarly. And, my educated assumption is that this part is probably too dull for them to lie about, much less lie about in unison across many accounts and years. So I have a decent level of confidence in that aspect of their tales. Anyway, the common threads are that while they do want highly confident and confident types who are also outliers in terms of physical ability, the selection process is HIGHLY geared towards selecting intelligent team-oriented individuals. Without those two traits you are going to get you and your squadmates killed in a hurry. These missions are highly planned but due to the inherent ambiguity and difficulty the SF guys have to make a LOT of autonomous decision making on the fly when things (inevitably) deviate from the script. You hear very similar stories from other "elite" types in the military, like combat pilots. While you have to be sort of a highly talented "alpha" type you also need to be professional and team oriented. No loose cannons allowed, either on the individual or squad level.
- themafia 1y ago
  > Without those two traits you are going to get you and your squadmates killed in a hurry. In terms of military history this is not strictly true. In past conflicts where personnel was limited and compromises had to made these types of soldiers were often given solo or special assignments and very often excelled in that environment, with more than a few of our highly decorated soldiers from WWII having served in this way. Peace time militaries tend to get bogged down with this strict squadron type of thinking and in that context you are not at all wrong, but it is interesting that when push comes to shove, the military rediscovers that there's more than one way to win the battle.
- scotty79 1y ago
  > I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT. > Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt I think it needs to be said that people who choose those careers are probably one of the worst kinds of people. They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command. And then you select out of those the ones that think being interviewed on YouTube about that is a good idea. They should be studied anthropologically not listened too.
  - gwhitake 1y ago
    [flagged]
    - justin66 1y ago
      I dunno about “hard” man, it sounds like those Korean fishermen didn’t put up much of a fight.
    - BrandoElFollito 1y ago
      Hard does not mean good or useful
  - csa 1y ago
    > I think it needs to be said that people who choose those careers are probably one of the worst kinds of people. I’m guessing you’ve never met any special operations people, much less folks from the SMUs. I have met many. 100% A+ people. I’m sure there are bad apples, but I’ve never met one. > They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command. Rules of engagement are a thing — a very real thing. For those who are interested, here is an interview with a very active former Delta Force operator. There are interesting stories about selection, rules of engagement, the stresses of doing the type of work he did, and life after the military. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NAxQC1NkCxU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NAxQC1NkCxU
closewith 1y ago
> And their success rate should be and is, pretty high. Is it? We obviously don't get most reporting, but of the publicly known missions, the success rate is abysmal, and even the "successes" are disasters. Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed, it was operationally questionable _and_ it was 9 years after another spectacularly failed mission involving SEALs ("Operation Anaconda") allowed bin Laden's escape, which in turn was following the disastrous Battle of Tora Bora which was the first major failure in a war respite with them. None of these operations were daring acts of brave men. They were all - like the one in the article - full of cowardly acts and human rights abuses, from deliberately killing civilians to using fake healthcare workers to collect DNA samples (which has caused and continues to cause thousands of deaths due to the ongoing suspicion of childhood vaccines in Pakistan) to the torture of enemy soldiers and civilians alike in secret prisons to shooting an eight-year-old girl in the neck (Nawar al-Awlaki). > they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand That's certainly the Hollywood version, but the reality doesn't match up.
- richardfeynman 1y ago
  You wrote: "Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed" Emphasis added. Is the death of Osama bin laden under any serious dispute? It's been 14 years.
  - closewith 1y ago
    Neptune Spear was a culmination of intelligence failures that spanned decades, so while certainly possible, absent other evidence I don't think a press release is sufficient to say that bin Laden was successfully killed in Abbottabad, as opposed to say dying of kidney failure in the years before. Died peacefully in his sleep was not a suitable ending for the mastermind of 9/11, so it would never have been allowed to happen, even if the truth had to be bent to achieve it.
    - 1y ago

jeffbee 1y ago

The entire story is about how you lack a rational basis for holding a belief about the success rate.

th3o6a1d 1y ago

What is their success rate? What is "pretty high?"

Eddy_Viscosity2 1y ago
We don't know. It's classified. That's the part of the point. I get why the OC might assume the success rate is pretty high because the successful missions can be talked about so the public hears about them. Very rare to hear about the failures like this one. But we just don't know if its rare because they don't happen much or because they happen a lot and are kept as a state secret.

JohnBooty 1y ago

This is my best understanding as well. I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT. Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt, including the claim that they were even SF in the first place. However, they all describe the selection processes similarly. And, my educated assumption is that this part is probably too dull for them to lie about, much less lie about in unison across many accounts and years. So I have a decent level of confidence in that aspect of their tales. Anyway, the common threads are that while they do want highly confident and confident types who are also outliers in terms of physical ability, the selection process is HIGHLY geared towards selecting intelligent team-oriented individuals. Without those two traits you are going to get you and your squadmates killed in a hurry. These missions are highly planned but due to the inherent ambiguity and difficulty the SF guys have to make a LOT of autonomous decision making on the fly when things (inevitably) deviate from the script. You hear very similar stories from other "elite" types in the military, like combat pilots. While you have to be sort of a highly talented "alpha" type you also need to be professional and team oriented. No loose cannons allowed, either on the individual or squad level.

themafia 1y ago
> Without those two traits you are going to get you and your squadmates killed in a hurry. In terms of military history this is not strictly true. In past conflicts where personnel was limited and compromises had to made these types of soldiers were often given solo or special assignments and very often excelled in that environment, with more than a few of our highly decorated soldiers from WWII having served in this way. Peace time militaries tend to get bogged down with this strict squadron type of thinking and in that context you are not at all wrong, but it is interesting that when push comes to shove, the military rediscovers that there's more than one way to win the battle.
scotty79 1y ago
> I have watched a lot of ex-special forces guys on YT. > Needless to say, I take it all with massive grains of salt I think it needs to be said that people who choose those careers are probably one of the worst kinds of people. They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command. And then you select out of those the ones that think being interviewed on YouTube about that is a good idea. They should be studied anthropologically not listened too.
- gwhitake 1y ago
  [flagged]
  - justin66 1y ago
    I dunno about “hard” man, it sounds like those Korean fishermen didn’t put up much of a fight.
  - BrandoElFollito 1y ago
    Hard does not mean good or useful
- csa 1y ago
  > I think it needs to be said that people who choose those careers are probably one of the worst kinds of people. I’m guessing you’ve never met any special operations people, much less folks from the SMUs. I have met many. 100% A+ people. I’m sure there are bad apples, but I’ve never met one. > They choose to use their unique, advantageous talents to murder people on command. Rules of engagement are a thing — a very real thing. For those who are interested, here is an interview with a very active former Delta Force operator. There are interesting stories about selection, rules of engagement, the stresses of doing the type of work he did, and life after the military. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NAxQC1NkCxU https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=NAxQC1NkCxU

closewith 1y ago

> And their success rate should be and is, pretty high. Is it? We obviously don't get most reporting, but of the publicly known missions, the success rate is abysmal, and even the "successes" are disasters. Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed, it was operationally questionable _and_ it was 9 years after another spectacularly failed mission involving SEALs ("Operation Anaconda") allowed bin Laden's escape, which in turn was following the disastrous Battle of Tora Bora which was the first major failure in a war respite with them. None of these operations were daring acts of brave men. They were all - like the one in the article - full of cowardly acts and human rights abuses, from deliberately killing civilians to using fake healthcare workers to collect DNA samples (which has caused and continues to cause thousands of deaths due to the ongoing suspicion of childhood vaccines in Pakistan) to the torture of enemy soldiers and civilians alike in secret prisons to shooting an eight-year-old girl in the neck (Nawar al-Awlaki). > they’re highly-trained for high-risk missions and taking calculated risks with massive amounts of intelligence work and contingency planning beforehand That's certainly the Hollywood version, but the reality doesn't match up.

richardfeynman 1y ago
You wrote: "Take the death of bin Laden, "Operation Neptune Spear", a nominal success in that bin Laden may have been killed" Emphasis added. Is the death of Osama bin laden under any serious dispute? It's been 14 years.
- closewith 1y ago
  Neptune Spear was a culmination of intelligence failures that spanned decades, so while certainly possible, absent other evidence I don't think a press release is sufficient to say that bin Laden was successfully killed in Abbottabad, as opposed to say dying of kidney failure in the years before. Died peacefully in his sleep was not a suitable ending for the mastermind of 9/11, so it would never have been allowed to happen, even if the truth had to be bent to achieve it.
  - 1y ago