I'm not a combat Sailor, but I do know that sometimes crap happens in war. The enemy (Taliban) does have their own intell and often times know where a patrol or a rescue mission is going to happen either through counter-intelligence or simple ground intell or observation. Think Mogadishu.
Beside the obscene ROE and that Imman having a say, I don't see where this was just a lucky shot from the Islamists.
I'm sorry I don't have the time to listen to all the heartfelt sorrow of the families, so can you please give us a timeline of the mission and why so many elite were on that Chinook and why they and you think that particular helo was shot down in retribution for them killing bin Laden?
Maybe the video shows more, but so for I'm not seeing any culpability on anyone's part.
What I read at the time and in this video, it just looks like the bad guys lucked out after some idiot put too many elite forces into one helicopter. Being Gator Navy, I launched the Marines of LPH-11 daily and nightly after VN. I clearly remember one Ch-47 going down in training.
Please give me a time line and why this was nothing more than a lucky shot my Koranimals.
Seems everyone is speculating about that awful loss.
We speculate about a lot of things we have to because we cannot get the truth from our Government or the so-called American Press.
IMO these men were sacrificed to the Muslims.
A firefight ongoing for over three hours...All the seals on one helicoptor (against policy)...7 Afghanistanis on the flight...They were replaced with 7 other Afghanistanis at the last minute without a change in the flight manifest...No one knows who or what they were...
Seals were put into a military transport helicoptor instead of the special-ops helicoptors that they train with and use...
No drone or air support to clear the landing area...No ‘eye in the sky’ tracking or support and no air defenses...
Dropping into a ‘hot’ firefight at night with zero support in a rickety helicoptor made for transport, not battle...Suicidal...And this is just some of the information on the video...
Appears as tho they were sent in to die...
not my video
not this one :)
wish I was there, I know a few of the audience
I just listened to the whole thing while washing dishes so I didn’t take notes but will say what I can remember, so you can get a basic gist. i didn’t hear some stuff because my laptop has bad speakers.
This was an area of known high concentration of terrorists who had been known to want to shoot down US aircraft. The Afghanistani military had to be informed of all of the specifics of any operation, in advance.
There had been a 3 1/2 hour firefight before these people were called in. It was said that there was a high-value target and they had to get him right then and there. At the last minute the 7 Saudis who had been assigned to the mission were changed out by some unspecified person; the manifest was not changed and in fact the military notified the original 7 AFghans’ families that they had been killed and only told them later, when the bodies were identified, that it was somebody else who had been killed. The investigation after the event did not identify who switched out these people; the Afghanistani military was not questioned by the investigation at all.
The US military had within the month before this event averaged over 800 special op events/month. There were 60 aircraft but at any point in time 20 were for combat operations, 20 were being maintained, and 20 were being used for training. So there were 20 available aircraft at an average of close to 30 operations/day.
They were sent out into a battle that had been raging for 3.5 hours in a transport plane that had last been updated in the mid-1980’s. They had no firepower and nobody to clear the way for them. The Chinook itself was not on radar and it took 10 minutes after the shoot-down to even figure out what helo had gone down. (With no “eye in the sky”, there is no footage from which to assess what had happened. They also claim to have not found the “black box”, which is actually orange and if I’m not mistaken has GPS so it can be found. They never “found” it, so there were no provisions made from the outset to allow for objective sources of information about what happened, and what they should have been able to find they didn’t.)
The report that the families were given said that the Chinook was shot down by shooters on the top of a building - who were supposedly there at 2am to “lay down crops”. I have no idea what that means but it sounds like a bunch of hooey. The reason for not sending in a drone and/or shooting down where the fire was coming from was because we need to “win the hearts and minds” of the people in this area of concentrated terrorists. But one of the dads had a letter from a Congress-critter who said he had been in a high-level meeting to talk about the causes and the real reason was that they didn’t know where the fire was coming from. That was the point at which that dad knew he was being lied to - because the stories changed.
Just a comment here. In the middle of a 3.5-hour firefight, with known, concentrated levels of terrorists including a high-value target - is there any better time to blow the whole place up with a drone attack? Obama is losing us a lot of allies because of his indiscriminate use of drone strikes but how could you get a more-justified situation for using a drone attack? Why instead send in 25 of the very best human resources you’ve got? I would REALLY like to know how many drone strikes Obama had authorized before this mission. IIRC, there were already concerns around then about Obama having a porn-like fascination with drone strikes and watching them over and over. I’d like to see some stats on the prevalance of drone strikes over Obama’s years.
The day before Biden disclosed that it was Team 6 who carried out the Bin Laden raid, top military (and Obama regime people too, IIRC) had met and said that not only Team 6 members but also their families needed to have extra protection because somebody in the Taliban might somehow suspect who was involved and target the families. It was stated how critical it was to keep the identities anonymous. And then the next day Joe Biden told the whole world. And yet a whole group of these guys were sent out with no protection, no documenting radar, with 7 anonymous Afghanistanis substituted at the last moment, in a mission custom-built for a drone attack.
After the attack the bodies were cremated - supposedly because they were burned so badly that they had to be identified by DNA and dental records. But the dad of one of the cremated victims had asked to see the autopsy and had been given the photos of the body - intact, no need to be cremated.
At the service at Bagram Air Base an imam was allowed to chant a standard chant saying that the enemies of Allah would be defeated and go to hell and that Islam has won. Families of the fallen are ALWAYS given a copy of the service but none of these families were given a copy. The mom who brought forward this video (which was a 10-minute redaction from a several-hour video that the military had provided, not showing the imam who had done this gloating curse over the dead bodies) said she was not comfortable sharing how she was eventually able to get this video in February this year (about 2 years after the fact).
I would have liked a chance to talk to the dad who sounded like he had a Boston accent. He made some comments I didn’t fully understand, and I think he knows a lot more detail about the specifics that don’t add up. It was also said that just before the press conference other families made contact with the dad who sort of headed up this effort, and one of those dads said he found out details that made him sick to his stomach.