Are there any tougher, bad-ass warriors than America’s special forces groups? By now you’ve heard that the last thing to go through Osama Bin Laden’s mind was most likely a NATO 5.56 round. In a lighting strike that took only forty minutes, a team of Navy SEALs assaulted a fortified compound in Abbotobad, about 50 miles from Pakistan’s capitol of Islamabad. A firefight ensued in which they dispatched four goblins including Bin Laden and his son. One woman who was used as a human shield (did you expect any less?) was also killed . . .
Fortunately, there were no American casualties. The SEALs accomplished the mission even after one of their three helicopters was forced down with mechanical problems. There a appears to be no truth to the rumor the SEALs’ unofficial motto is, “we don’t have time to bleed.”
The Washington Post reports that the Navy’s “Team 6” did the dirty on the 9/11 plotter.
The elite team of Navy SEALs tapped for the job were a group who were stationed at Naval Air Station Oceana in Virginia Beach.
The team is part of a counterterrorism group so specialized that no one can apply to join it. The operatives are recruited from existing SEAL teams. They are an elite group within the elite.
The team was formed in response to the 1980 American hostages rescue attempt in Iran, which had been a huge failure and showed the need for a counterterrorist team that could operate under the utmost secrecy.
They exist outside military protocol and engage in operations that are at the highest level of classification and often outside the boundaries of international law.
Initially, the group was known as Team 6, a name that was created to confuse Soviet intelligence about the number of SEAL teams in operation at the time. (There were only two others.)
The name was changed in 1987 to the Naval Special Warfare Development Group, but the group is still commonly known as Team 6.
It’s still very early days, so we’ll surely hear more about the details of the assault, the compound and the rather uncomfortable questions it raises about our, um, friends the Pakistanis. It seems that the only other major facility in the town is Pakistan’s equivalent of West Point so there’s the little question of how the hell they didn’t know this heavily fortified compound with eighteen foot walls was there.
In the mean time, congratulations are due to the SEALs, America’s intelligence community and President Obama for a job well done.