http://weaponsman.com/?p=19459
Quiet Professionals, Noisy Machinery
Hognose’s Rules, from Luke Somers’s Sad Fate
Luke Somers reportedly died Friday, murdered by Islamic terrorists when a hostage rescue attempt kicked off. Somers was an American photojournalist working in Yemen, who had been taken hostage, and his captors had scheduled his execution. When the rescue attempt landed, his captors did what they always threaten to do, and murdered him. A South African hostage, Pierre or Pieter Korkie, was also murdered.
This is going to occasion a lot of breast-beating in the media by people who don’t know the facts. So lets’s start with Hognose’s First Rule of Clandestine Operations: The People who Know Don’t Talk, and the People Who Talk, Don’t Know.
First Rule: The People who Know Don’t Talk, and the People Who Talk, Don’t Know
That includes us! We’ll cheerfully admit that, despite a career in special operations, and despite having completed a CT training course and having been in the CT intel loop, we have no idea about which actually went down Friday. We get the same media reports you do. You know what? The retired generals and former SEALs who will be strutting their stuff on TV for the next few days don’t know, either.
The people who do know exactly what went down probably number fewer than 200. Except for the ones in Washington, DC, they are professionals who care more about the success of these and future operations than about personal aggrandizement. So they not only won’t talk, they’ll limit and even alter what those read-on in DC are told. The operational and analysis sides both know that the NSC appointees and the oversight committee staffers have journalists on speed dial, and they work to limit the damage the self-absorbed DC drones do. Most leaks are not done to blow a whistle, or to send some message: the vast majority of leaks happen because those political folks can’t restrain their desire to boast and preen before people like themselves, to wit, journalists.
So you’ll hear a lot about this raid. The press will be full of comments from A Senior Defense Official and A Washington Official Who Asked Not to be Named. Most of it will be bullshit. Thank God.
Second Rule: Some Kinds of Ops are Harder than Others
Some ops are harder than others. Ops at the end of a long logistics train are always challenging (study the failure of the Iran hostage rescue to see a textbook case of that). But the second hardest op is hostage rescue. To plant and remove wiretaps, a now deprecated SF mission, was tough — if done right, it was clandestine, not just covert — but not as hard as HR. SOG teams in Vietnam planted and retrieved hundreds of taps on what the PAVN thought were secure landlines. (Sorry about that, Nguyen). But do you know how many American hostages they rescued?
Zero.
There were a handful of POWs that freed themselves1 and constant attempts and planning (the Son Tay raid was only the most complex, and most famous of these) but the best the raids were able to do was occasionally free an ARVN captive.
The hardest mission, harder than personnel recovery, is POW seizure. It’s like hostage rescue with an unwilling-to-be-rescued hostage.
Third Rule: The Enemy is as Smart and as Brave as We Are
There is a tendency to fail to appreciate ingenuity and courage in the enemy (or, alternatively, to overstate it). If the enemy has hostages, he knows we are coming for them. He knows our intelligence sources and methods (in general), and he will take great pains to minimize his signatures and hide any signals in the noise of cities. He generally believes that he is on a mission from his god and he will fight to the death for his beliefs.
The fact that we do not share his beliefs, or even take them seriously, is immaterial. What matters is that he believes. On the Eastern Front in WWII, neither side was fighting for freedom; each army served a dystopian terror state. But they believed they were fighting for freedom, and that was enough to keep the bloodbath going.
You have to try to understand and respect the enemy. Only then can you have the best chance of killing him and/or thwarting his plans.
Fourth Rule: Hostage Rescue Depends on Enemy Hesitation
There’s an ugly little fact about hostage rescues, and it’s this: for you to succeed, the guards have to hesitate before whacking your hostage(s). You can see it in the successful ones, like the rescue of BG James Dozier from the Brigati Rossi in Italy in 1981 (an operation a very young Hognose was on the outer fringes of), or the rescue of Kurt Muse in Panama in 1989 (an operation we had nothing whatsoever to do with): if the enemy really wants to kill the hostage, he can. Some enemies hesitate; it’s only human, and that gives us a chance.
The Panamanian guards holding Muse may have been an exception: they had no orders to kill him. (That didn’t save them from the assault element). The communist terrorist assigned to whack Dozier did have orders to kill him, but hesitated just long enough for a couple of beefy Carabinieri to whack him upside the head with their weapons. (An American SOF element would have shot them dead even faster; lawmen like the Carabinieri tend to want live prisoners).
The guard(s) on Luke Somers had seconds to decide: Fight, Flight, or Follow Orders. They went with #3 and prioritized killing him (and his fellow hostage) over trying to save themselves or engage the rescue force. We needed a minute’s, or a second’s, or a split-second’s hesitation, and we (and poor Luke) didn’t get it.
Fifth Rule: No Choice But to Try
Even this administration, where there’s more sympathy for the hostage-takers than for our own operators, has to try, because if you don’t rescue them or try to, bad things happen. For one thing, leaving them in the hands of hostage takers is a propaganda defeat for our side and a win for the terrorists. They can turn this propaganda victory into credibility, funds and further operations. For another, sooner or later, the hostages will sicken, or the hostage-takers, who have already proven they’re hostis humani generis, will murder them. National credibility hinges on an attempt, and an attempt is a success on the credibility axis even if it fails. (Sun Tzu can explain, but for now, bear with us).
It’s sometimes incumbent on a nation-state to send the message that, as Lady Thatcher is rumored to have once said, “That is something up with which we will not put.” That’s one reason why the inept Russian Spetsnaz theater rescue attempt that left most of the hostages as dead as the Chechen terrorist hostage-takers was not entirely a failure: the Chechen leaders made the best propaganda of it that they could, but they didn’t crawl back in their caves thinking Ivan is a push-over.
The Hagel DOD undistinguished itself (what? no, that’s totally a word) by trying to ransom hostages, indicating that their ignorance of Kipling extends past The Gods of the Copybook Headings on to Dane-Geld. But even they know that you have to plan to rescue hostages, and when a deadline is set to kill them, or when the enemy actually begins to harm then, you have to act. In 1981 the trigger for initiating a rescue, even if you were still in the hasty-plan stage, was an imminent deadline, or actual injury to the hostages. It was a good idea in 1981, it’s a good idea today.
The other problem with ransom, of course, is that you’re trying to cut a deal with violent and usually religiously-motivated hostage-takers of all people. Only a for-sale Washington corruptoid, who’s projecting his own unprincipled nature onto our enemies, would think that you can buy them. (Or the corruptoid’s foreign equivalent: the other hostage who was killed with Somers had reportedly been “ransomed” by his NGO or his nation, but there were no indications that he would actually be released as promised).
Sixth Rule: The Hostages are a Bonus
This sanguinary idea came from the Israelis, originally, and reached us, in the early days of national CT planning, via our British cousins: the second most important thing is to rescue the hostages. The most important thing is to kill all the hostage takers. In this, hostage-takers are different from enemy soldiers and different from ordinary criminals. Unlike soldiers, they are not protected by international conventions, and because they train and operate in a cellular organization, and are considered expendable by their leaders, they are unlikely to possess worthwhile actionable intelligence. Unlike criminals, they are likely to be disruptive and recruit more terrorists in prison, and their at-large confederates are highly likely to commit more atrocities in an attempt to secure them release.
So, if you’re taken hostage, every reasonable effort will be prepared to free you. But if the raid goes down, your survival for the next few minutes depends on taking cover, having a little luck, and the existence of a flicker of humanity still unextinguished in the guy who’s got the blowing-you-away duty. Which flicker will kill him, but he was almost certainly going to be killed, anyway.
Seventh Rule: Planning & Training Never Stops
No doubt the men who hit that target in Yemen are beaten-up and depressed right now. They will be looking at what parts of the raid went right, and which didn’t, with a professional’s eye. They’ll figure out where mistakes were made, and where the problem was just the very tough nature of the task and the breaks. They’ll study, and think, and rework their SOPs and drills, and be ready when the call comes to do it again, whether that’s tonight or ten years from now.
There is no show on TV called Retirement Homes of the Great Hostage Takers. Never will be.
Notes
1. The escapees included at least two who wrote books, SF officer Nick Rowe (Five Years to Freedom) and Navy A-1 Skyraider pilot, Dieter Dengler (who wrote two books). Both are since deceased. One of Dengler’s books was made into a quirky movie about his escape with Christian Bale as Dengler; the same director made a documentary about Dengler.
This entry was posted in Uncategorized on December 6, 2014.
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