Regular Army and SOF didn't see eye to eye prior to 911, but we stayed as separate as we could. After being forced to work together, the divisions deepened.
First, conventional commanders did not approve of how SOF did business, at all. In the 'big Army', safety is everything, because casualties are to be avoided at all costs. ODAs that stopped shaving to help blend in with the local resistance fighters where sharply rebuked from on high, and forced to meet Army standards. They also chafed at the cavalier, brash manner to which the SOF teams conducted themselves, and thought that they felt above the law.
On the SOF side, well, you can imagine being used to do missions with a certain degree of autonomy and discretion, and then having general grade officers dogpile onto your chain of command. SOF HAS been hamstrung by the excessive restraints placed on us by the joint commanders. An SF group is run by a colonel, and often an AOB will only have a Major. That's not a lot of weight to be throwing around when you're attached to a division or a JSOTF. The conventional commanders feel accountable for what we do, so they neither want to take force protection risks, nor do they want to risk allowing us too much freedom to plan and execute missions.
In the several hours it took the Delta unit, based hundreds of miles away near Kabul, to review the information and prepare for the raid, Omar vanished, said the sources, all of whom advise Rumsfeld's senior aides.
This doesn't really sounds right. I'm not familiar with this particular event, but I am familiar with intelligence. There are a lot of considerations you have to make, by the collectors, analysts and commanders, before you make the call. It may very well be that, in retrospect, if they had gone with course of action A they would have got him, but they didn't. Without more info, and more importantly, more context, it's impossible to say whether or not they made the right call.
This sort of thing does happen, though. We have had some problems with other agencies or units that will stop missions or take away sources if they think that, due to political considerations, it's too sensitive for common SOF folk. That's a nice way for them to take credit for your work, or keep you from succeeding where they couldn't. But I digress.
The conventional units in the field have little trouble with SF's informality... it's the rear echelon guys that cause the problem, the many loggies hanging around the rear area, who are all bummed out cause you can't shine desert boots, and shining boots, to them, is what being a soldier is.
This is exacerbated by the Army's NCO "education" system, which produces pathetic barrack lawyers who obsess about regulation minutiae, and calls them sergeants major.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F