“What if I told you that the US owes a lot of its military successes to Iran? Iran is the reason why a 70 lb dog was strapped into a Kevlar vest, fitted with night vision goggles, and helicoptered into Pakistan to help kill Osama bin Laden. Iran is the reason Saddam Hussein got pulled out of a hole in the ground by a bunch of guys in beards and Oakleys.”
“Iran is also the reason every high-value target on planet Earth has spent the last two decades sleeping with one eye open and one foot pointed towards the nearest exit. Iran is ultimately the reason the United States now operates the most lethal special operations command in human history. And it all started because eight Americans died in a sandstorm in 1980.”
“This is the story of Operation Eagle Claw. The mission that failed so catastrophically, so publicly, and so embarrassingly that the United States military said, ‘Yeah, we’re never doing that again.’ And then proceeded to build from scratch the most terrifying door kicking machine the world has ever seen. Okay, it’s 1979.”
“The Shah of Iran, who had been America’s guy in the Middle East for about 30 years, gets overthrown by a religious revolution led by a guy named Ayatollah. Khomeini comes back from exile in France, takes over the country, and immediately starts giving speeches about how America is the great Satan and Western influence is a disease that needs to be purged. Cool, whatever.”
“We’ve all heard this before. But the Shah, who at this point is dying of cancer, asks if he can come to America for medical treatment. And Carter thinks about that for a second and then says, ‘Yeah, sure. Come on in. We are the US. We help out an ally when we can.’ But that one decision changed everything because the Iranian revolutionaries completely lost their minds over it.”
“Just 13 days later on November 4th, 1979, about 3,000 Iranian quote unquote students stormed the gates of the United States embassy in Tehran. They climbed the walls, overpowered the Marines guarding the gates, who understanding orders did not open fire. You see, embassy guards are prohibited from using lethal force unless lives are in immediate danger.”
“Specifically to prevent a diplomatic incident from escalating into global war. Iranians round up everyone inside, diplomats, secretaries, marines, communication staff, and take 66 American citizens hostage. The original plan, as the students themselves later admitted, was a symbolic sit-in. 48 hours, maybe 72. Their stated demand was simple.”
“‘The United States hands the Shah back to Iran to stand trial for crimes against the Iranian people, and they walk out as heroes.’ That was it. But within 24 hours, two things happened that turned a publicity stunt into a 444-day international crisis. First, Ayatollah went on Iranian state radio and publicly endorsed the takeover.”
“He called it the second revolution and labeled the embassy a den of spies. Second, when the demand for the Shah’s return came in, Carter refused. The Shah was a dying man receiving cancer treatment in a New York hospital, and handing him over to a revolutionary tribunal would have been a death sentence and a betrayal of a 30-year ally. So Carter said no.”
“The students, now backed by Khomeini, escalated their demands to include the return of Shah’s wealth, an apology from the United States for decades of supporting the monarchy, and a promise of non-interference in Iranian affairs. Carter responded with everything short of war. He froze Iranian assets, expelled Iranian diplomats from US soil, severed diplomatic relations entirely, and banned all Iranian oil imports.”
“But none of this worked as he had hoped. So America tried diplomacy. A UN commission was offered to hear Iran’s grievances on a global stage, but Iran rejected it. America offered third party mediation through Algeria. Iran rejected it. The Vatican tried, rejected. Every back channel collapsed because the one demand Iran refused to drop, the Shah, was the one demand America could not meet.”
“By mid-November, the Iranians released 13 of the hostages, all of them women and African-Americans. Khomeini personally ordered the release, and the reasoning he gave on state radio was pure propaganda theater. Women, he claimed, held a special place in Islam and could not be held captive. African-Americans, he claimed, were themselves victims of American oppression and therefore not enemies of the revolution.”
“The unstated goal was to drive a racial and gender wedge into American public opinion, peeling off sympathy from black communities and women’s groups at home, and to reframe the crisis as a fight between the Iranian people and white American power. But it fooled nobody. The released hostages came home and immediately told reporters they had been treated exactly the same as everyone else, blindfolded, threatened, and kept in isolation.”
“The PR stunt collapsed within days, but 53 Americans were still in there, blindfolded, beaten, paraded in front of cameras with their hands tied and signs hung around their necks. They were subjected to mock executions where captors would line them up against walls, [ __ ] rifles, and tell them this was the end before laughing and walking them back to their cells.”
“And the entire planet was watching. Every single night on every single news broadcast in every single country, you’d see footage of Americans being humiliated and the United States government doing absolutely nothing about it. ABC literally created a nightly program called ‘America Held Hostage’ that ran every evening, counting the days, day 50, day 100, day 200.”
“That program eventually became ‘Nightline,’ which ran for the next 25 years. That’s how big the story was. Meanwhile, Carter is dying politically. The country is furious. Yellow ribbons start appearing on trees in every American town. And after about 5 months of failed diplomacy, the president finally walks into a room with his top military advisers and basically says, ‘All right, let’s go get them.'”
“But there is just one tiny problem. America in 1980 had no idea how to do this. Now, before we get into the actual operation, I first need you to understand the state of the United States military in 1980. Because if you grew up watching modern war movies, this is going to blow your mind. In 1980, the US military operated as four separate branches.”
“The Army, the Navy, the Air Force, and the Marines. And they all acted like rivals competing for the same Pentagon budget. They used different radios that couldn’t talk to each other, different doctrines, different chains of command. They trained separately, they planned separately. They actively, openly hated each other.”
“The Air Force was secretly trying to dump its special operations aircraft because it didn’t think they were worth the budget. The Navy considered Marines to be glorified ship security. The Army thought everyone else was useless. And the Marines thought the Army was a bunch of soft-handed paper pushers who couldn’t find their own boots in the dark.”
“There was no joint special operations command, no special operations command of any kind, no agreed upon doctrine for how the military’s four branches were even supposed to work together on a single mission. And yet, the mission Carter just signed off on was going to require all four of them working together in coordination, plus the CIA, plus a brand new and barely tested unit called Delta Force.”
“In fact, Delta had been founded only 3 years ago by a Vietnam veteran named Colonel Charlie Beckwith. Beckwith had spent a year embedded with the British SAS in the 1960s and came back to America completely convinced that the US military needed its own version, a small, handpicked, surgically precise counterterrorism unit that could deploy anywhere in the world on short notice.”
“But the Pentagon kept saying no. For over a decade, senior officers thought the SAS model was a foreign gimmick and that conventional army rangers and green berets could handle whatever came up. Beckwith kept fighting. He wrote papers. He briefed the generals. He testified before Congress. And finally, in November of 1977, he got approval to stand up the first special forces operational detachment, Delta, better known as Delta Force.”
“They had been fully operational for about 5 months when Carter came in knocking. These men had never run a real world mission. And now their very first one in front of God and everybody was going to be the most complicated hostage rescue in modern military history. They would fly 6,000 miles from home, drop into a country where America had literally zero intelligence assets on the ground, and somehow get 53 people out of the most heavily guarded compound in the capital city of an actively hostile regime.”
“But why did the US have zero intelligence assets on the ground? Well, because earlier in the Carter administration, the CIA had gotten into trouble for various Cold War shenanigans. Public trust in the CIA was at an all-time low. And Carter, who had campaigned on restoring American moral authority, came into office determined to clean house.”
“He appointed Admiral Stanfield Turner as director of central intelligence in 1977. And Turner promptly fired or forced out over 800 officers from the agency’s director of operations. These officers were the actual spies. The covert network that had taken 30 years to build was dismantled in 18 months. When the embassy was taken in November of 1979, the United States had functionally zero spies inside of Iran.”
“So, the Pentagon had to plan a rescue operation in a country it could not see into. With no intel, Beckwith and his team had to plan around the possibility that the hostages might be in any of six different buildings inside of the embassy compound, which meant they needed more men to clear all six, which meant they needed more helicopters to carry them in, which meant they needed more fuel to fly the helicopters, which meant they needed bigger refueling logistics on the ground.”
“Every additional requirement triggered three more, and the operation got more complex with every revision. What started as a clean snatch and grab ballooned into a two-night multi-stage multi-base multi-aircraft monster involving over 130 operators, eight helicopters, six C130s, two airfields, two Iranian safehouses, AC130 gunships, Army Rangers, CIA paramilitary, and a freaking aircraft carrier.”
“What could possibly go wrong, right? Well, turns out everything. You see, the finalized plan was that on night one, eight RH53D Sea Stallion helicopters would take off from the deck of the USS Nimitz parked in the Arabian Sea and fly low 600 miles into Iran. They would land at a remote salt flat about 200 miles southeast of Tehran.”
“The salt flat was codenamed Desert 1. There they would meet up with six C130 transport planes flying in from Masirah Island in Oman, carrying fuel, the Delta operators, and a Ranger security element. The helicopters would refuel from the C130s, load up the operators, and fly them another 50 miles to a hideout in the mountains called Desert 2.”
“The C130s would peel off and head home. Everyone at Desert 2 would hide the helicopters under camouflage netting and wait out the day. On the second night, a few CIA agents who were already in Tehran would drive trucks out to Desert 2, pick up the Delta operators, and drive them straight into the city. At midnight, Delta would hit the embassy.”
“Simultaneously, a separate team would knock out power to the surrounding neighborhood to slow the Iranian response. AC-130 gunships would circle Tehran overhead for fire support. Army Rangers would seize a nearby air base called Manzarieh, 50 miles south of the city to secure an extraction runway. The helicopters would lift off from Desert 2, fly into Tehran, and land at a soccer stadium directly across the street from the embassy.”
“They would swoop up the hostages and the operators, fly them to the captured air base, and load everyone onto C141 Starlifters waiting on the runway to take them home. That was the rescue plan. They named it Operation Eagle Claw. And on April 16th, 1980, Carter gave it the green light. 8 days later, as the sun set on April 23rd, US assets began moving into position across the region.”
“The C130s lifted off from the Masirah Island in Oman. The Nimitz steamed into launch position in the Arabian Sea. At roughly 3:00 a.m. Iranian time on April 24th, eight RH53D Sea Stallion helicopters lifted off from the Nimitz’s flight deck and turned north towards Iran. But almost immediately, one of them got a warning light for a cracked rotor blade, meaning it could fail at any moment.”
“The crew set the bird down in the desert, abandoned it, and got picked up by a different chopper. And just like that, they were down to seven. But then it got a lot worse because the remaining seven helicopters flew directly into a haboob. A haboob is an Arabic word for a wall of sand the size of a city. And that is not a metaphor.”
“We are not talking about a dust cloud. We are talking about a thousand ft tall 50 miles wide rolling tsunami of fine particulate matter that gets into your engines, your instruments, your radios, your eyes, everything. The pilots had been briefed on the possibility of some dust along the route, but nobody mentioned anything about flying straight into a biblical sandstorm.”
“Within seconds, visibility went to zero. The helicopters got separated. Two of them picked their way through it on instruments and prayer. A third turned around entirely and flew all the way back to the Nimitz because the pilot was convinced his instruments were failing. And they were failing because the haboob was clogging the cooling vents on the avionics.”
“Six was the magic number. Beckwith, Carter, and the planners had decided in advance that the mission needed at least six functional helicopters to make it to Desert 1. Five or fewer, the mission would be aborted automatically. After a 2-hour war with God’s own sandstorm, the six remaining helicopters limped into Desert 1 90 minutes behind schedule.”
“The C130s were already there. Everyone got to work. Refueling hoses came out. Fuel started flowing. But for one brief moment, it looked like the mission might still be salvageable. But then another helicopter failed. While sitting on the salt flat waiting to top off, one of these six surviving birds developed a hydraulic failure in its second stage flight control system.”
“The crew worked on the problem for several minutes, but the helicopter could not be repaired in the field. So, the mission was dead. This should have been the worst part of the night, but it wasn’t because US planners somehow failed to account for the most obvious thing in the world. Desert 1 was sitting right next to a public road in the middle of a salt flat at night, which meant any civilian driving past was going to immediately notice a bunch of C130s and helicopters sitting out in the open and could obviously just call it in. And as luck would have it, a civilian Iranian bus came down the same road with 45 souls on board. The Rangers stopped the bus by firing a 40mm grenade round across its bow, hauled all occupants off at gunpoint, and detained them inside of one of the C130s. Then just minutes later, a fuel tanker came down the same road. The driver was smuggling gasoline because of course he was. This is rural Iran in 1980.”
“Everybody’s smuggling something. Post-revolution Iran was rationing fuel so hard that black market gasoline runs were one of the most common nighttime activities in the desert. He sees the armed soldiers blocking the road, and his survival instincts kick in. He hits the gas and tries to blow past the roadblock.”
“A Delta Force intelligence officer named Wade Ishimoto ordered one of his men to take the truck out with an anti-tank weapon. The Ranger fires a light anti-tank weapon, basically a one-shot disposable rocket designed to crack open Soviet tanks. It hits the tanker dead center. The truck explodes into a giant fireball that lit up the desert for miles.”
“The shock wave rattles the C130s parked at Desert 1, and the burning fuel pours across the road in a river of flame that lights the desert for miles in every direction. Ishimoto’s exact words afterward on the record, ‘Holy mackerel, a fuel truck.’ The driver somehow is not in the fireball. He bails out the second the rocket hits, sprints away from the burning wreck, and jumps into a pickup truck that had been following his tanker, likely his smuggling partner.”
“Then they drive off into the darkness in the opposite direction. The fuel truck’s passenger, however, was instantly killed. So now America has a dead Iranian civilian, two escaped witnesses driving back towards civilization, and a salt flat lit up like a bonfire visible for miles, and 45 detained passengers sitting in the cargo bay of a C130, wondering what the hell was happening to their country tonight.”
“Beckwith, watching the Inferno, reportedly turned to one of his officers and said, ‘Welcome to World War II.’ He gets on the radio with Washington one more time. And the final order comes back: ‘Abort, pack up, evacuate, get out before the Iranian military figures out what is happening.'”
“And this is where the night goes from bad to historically catastrophic. Three weeks before the mission, US planners needed to find a remote landing site inside of Iran that could handle six C130s and eight helicopters with zero infrastructure. The CIA flew a small twin otter aircraft on a covert reconnaissance run, picked up a salt flat 200 miles southeast of Tehran, landed on it, took soil samples, and confirmed it was hard-packed and clean. It was perfect for the landing.”
“They named it Desert 1. But in the intervening weeks, the same sandstorms that produced the haboob blew a thick layer of fine ankle-deep dust across the entire surface. By the time the Americans actually landed there on April 24th, the floor of Desert 1 was likely less of a runway and more like a giant ashtray.”
“The C130s and the surviving helicopters had been parked tightly together to keep the operation compact. To get the C130s airborne, one of the helicopters, Blue Beard 3, piloted by Marine Major Jim Schaefer, needed to reposition out of the way of the EC130 directly behind it. Normally, a helicopter would just ground taxi a few yards, but the dust on the salt flat was too soft for that, so Schaefer had to hover taxi instead.”
“But the moment Blue Beard 3 took off, the rotor wash created what pilots called a ‘brown out,’ a swirling cloud of dust so thick that the pilot can’t see anything outside of the cockpit. Schaefer had only one visual reference, an Air Force combat controller standing in front of the helicopter, signaling directions. But when Schaefer lifted into the hover, the rotor wash blasted the controller backwards.”
“Schaefer, watching his only reference point appear to move away from him, interpreted it as his own helicopter drifting backwards. So, he applied the forward stick to compensate. The controller, sand in his eyes, kept staggering back. Schaefer kept correcting forward. Bluebird 3’s main rotor blade clipped the vertical stabilizer of the EC130 parked behind it.”
“The helicopter then pitched forward and crashed directly into the wing root of the C130, a Combat Talon designated Republic 4. This aircraft had been carrying collapsible rubber fuel bladders inside the cargo bay holding thousands of gallons of helicopter fuel on top of its own internal tanks. So when Schaefer’s rotor opened up the wing, the entire aircraft actually turned into a bomb.”
“Both aircraft went up in a single fireball. The explosion was so violent that it physically rocked the other C130s parked nearby. Five Air Force airmen aboard the Republic 4, Major Richard Bakke, Major Harold Lewis, Major Lynn McIntosh, Captain Charles McMillan, and Technical Sergeant Joel Mayo were killed instantly. Three Marines aboard Bluebird 3, Staff Sergeant Dewey Johnson, Sergeant John Harvey, and Corporal George Holmes Jr. were also killed.”
“Schaefer and his co-pilot dove out of the cockpit window and survived with serious burns. Five other servicemen were seriously injured. But the night was still not done. Inside the burning EC130 were every weapon Delta had brought along. Redeye anti-aircraft missiles, 40mm grenades, M72 LAW rockets, fragmentation grenades, and thousands of rounds of small arms ammunition.”
“As the fire reached the ordinance, it all started cooking off. Tracer rounds shot out of the fireball in every direction. A Redeye missile actually launched itself out of the burning fuselage and flew off into the desert. Anyone still on the salt flat was sprinting for the surviving 130s while live ammunition was detonating behind them.”
“Beckwith, his men, and the surviving air crew loaded into the remaining C130s and flew out of Iran. They left behind five fully intact RH53D helicopters. They couldn’t destroy the burning wreckage of Blue Beard 3 and Republic 4, eight dead Americans whose bodies couldn’t be recovered from the fires. And inside the abandoned helicopters, classified mission documents, photographs of the embassy compound, and the names of the CIA agents operating undercover inside Tehran.”
“The Iranians arrived at the wreckage at sunrise. They paraded the bodies of the eight Americans on state television. They published photographs of the abandoned helicopters in their state media. Khomeini gave a speech declaring that God himself had stopped the mission, sending angels in the form of the haboob to protect Iran from the great Satan.”
“The hostages were immediately scattered across the country, broken into smaller groups, and moved between safe houses to make any second rescue attempt mathematically impossible. The classified documents recovered from the helicopters would be used by Iranian intelligence for years afterward, and the names of the CIA assets in Tehran were eventually published, ending those careers and putting some of those agents in seriously genuine danger.”
“Carter went on television on April 25th and personally admitted the whole thing to the American people. The hostages would not come home for another 9 months. On January 20th, 1981, just minutes after Ronald Reagan was sworn in as the 40th president of the United States, an Algerian mediated deal that had been finalized in the final hours of the Carter administration finally took effect.”
“The 52 remaining hostages walked off a plane in Algeria free for the first time in 444 days. Carter, who was no longer president, flew to Germany the next day at Reagan’s request to personally greet them. He would later write in his memoir that losing the rescue mission was the single biggest factor in losing the 1980 election. It was by any measure the worst night in modern American military history.”
“And it was about to be the most important. The world watched Desert 1. Our enemies laughed. Our allies winced. The Soviet Union spent the next several weeks rubbing it in our face on every diplomatic channel they had. The Iranians treated it as proof that God was on their side. The Pentagon was furious.”
“They wanted answers and they wanted them fast. So, the Joint Chiefs of Staff convened a six-man commission of senior flag officers and put it under retired four-star Admiral James Holloway III, the former chief of naval operations, a man with 30 years of combat experience who had no political career left to protect and no service rivalry left to defend.”
“His job was simple. Figure out exactly what the hell happened in that desert. Then figure out how to make sure it never happens again. 4 months later in August of 1980, the Holloway report landed on every senior desk in Washington, and it was brutal. The report identified 23 specific issues with the operation, 11 of which the commission flagged as major, meaning they had directly affected the outcome and absolutely had to be fixed before the United States ever attempted anything like this again.”
“Some of the issues were minor in their own, like a weather forecast that didn’t predict the haboob, a hydraulic system on Blue Bear 2 that should have been flagged for replacement weeks earlier. A couple of communication procedures that had not been rehearsed enough. But the bigger findings weren’t tactical. They were structural.”
“The four services literally could not talk to each other on the radio because their communications equipment used incompatible frequencies and encryption systems. They had different chains of command, different operational doctrines, different abort criteria, and in some cases, different definitions of basic terminology. They had been thrown together for Eagle Claw with no shared training cycle, no shared rehearsals, and no shared standard operating procedures.”
“The Marine pilots flying the RH53Ds had been pulled from a regular Navy fleet squadron whose normal job was shipboard mine countermeasures off of carrier decks. They had limited experience with the long range low-altitude overland flight profile that Eagle Claw demanded and almost no experience operating in desert conditions at all.”
“The mission itself had been planned by an ad hoc joint task force assembled from scratch in a Pentagon basement with no permanent staff, no dedicated budget, no institutional memory, and a mandate that would dissolve the second the mission ended. There was no single commander with full authority over all four services.”
“There was no permanent organization in the entire United States military whose job was to plan, train for, or execute this kind of operation. It was, in Holloway’s polite language, a ‘self-imposed disability.’ In other words, we did this to ourselves. The enemy didn’t beat us, we beat ourselves. Within months of the report’s release in December of 1980, the Pentagon created something called the Joint Special Operations Command, JSOC.”
“Headquartered at Pope Field in North Carolina, right next to Fort Bragg, JSOC’s entire job was to make sure that the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Special Operations trained together, lived together, and could actually function as a single fighting force when the next no-notice crisis hit. Delta Force was placed directly under JSOC’s command.”
“The Navy got its own version almost immediately. In November of 1980, a SEAL officer named Richard Marcinko was tasked by the Chief of Naval Operations to build a dedicated counterterrorism SEAL unit from scratch. He called it SEAL Team 6. But the name was actually a deception. You see, at the time, the US Navy only had two SEAL teams.”
“Marcinko named his Team 6 specifically to trick Soviet intelligence into thinking America had three other SEAL teams that they didn’t know about. SEAL Team 6 was placed under JSOC and became its maritime counterterrorism element. Three decades later, it would be the unit that put two rounds into Osama bin Laden’s head. Then came the air component.”
“In October of 1981, the Army activated the 160th Aviation Battalion at Fort Campbell, Kentucky. The unit that would become famous as the Nightstalkers. They were created for one reason. Desert 1 had proved that special operations couldn’t keep borrowing fleet pilots trained for completely different missions. They needed pilots who flew nothing else, trained for nothing else, and answered only to the special operations community.”
“The 160th standard for hitting a target is within plus or minus 30 seconds of planned time. But there’s still a critical weakness: the Pentagon. It’s slow, incredibly slow to JSOC standards. At this point, Delta was sharper than ever. SEAL Team 6 was operational. The Nightstalkers were flying. But the four services were still acting like rivals.”
“And this costs them heavily. October of 1983, the United States invades Grenada, a tiny Caribbean island where a Marxist coup had just put about a thousand American medical students in danger. This operation is called Urgent Fury. And from the moment planning starts, every single mistake from Desert 1 shows up again. Army Rangers, Navy SEALs, Marine helicopter pilots, and Air Force special tactics teams all converged on the same island with incompatible radios and divided chains of command.”
“In fact, there’s a famous story repeated for years in military reform circles about an American soldier on Grenada having to use a pay phone and a credit card to call Fort Bragg from the battlefield because his radio couldn’t reach the Air Force jets directly above his head. There’s more to the story, but people definitely got killed in Grenada, who shouldn’t have.”
“And seeing this, Congress snapped. In October of 1986, Congress passed the Goldwater-Nichols Act. It is, by no exaggeration, the single most important piece of military legislation in modern American history. It rewired the entire Department of Defense from the ground up. It forced the four services to operate jointly. It made the chairman of the joint chiefs the principal military adviser to the president.”
“It created one clean chain of command running from the president down to the guy on the battlefield. It demanded that any officer trying to make general or admiral first spend time in a joint duty position. And it ended by force of law the ‘four services as rival companies’ model that had killed eight men in the Iranian desert.”
“Then in 1987, Congress went a step further. Two senators, Sam Nunn of Georgia and William Cohen of Maine, pushed through what is called the Nunn-Cohen Amendment. This amendment created the United States Special Operations Command, SOCOM, a four-star unified command headquartered at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, that owned every Tier 1 special operations unit in every service.”
“Delta, SEAL Team 6, the 75th Rangers, the Green Berets, Air Force Special Tactics, the 160th SOAR, all of them under one roof, one budget, and one command. SOCOM was officially activated on April 16th, 1987, almost exactly 7 years after Desert 1 went up in flames. That’s the real moment the modern American special operations community was born.”
“For the next decade, this whole new machine basically just trained and waited. The Cold War ended. The Gulf War came and went. Somalia happened, Bosnia happened, Kosovo happened, and SOCOM was there for all of it, but mostly in the background, refining the craft, building muscle memory, waiting for the kind of war that would actually put everything it had become to the test.”
“Then 9/11 happened, and the entire architecture that had been built out of the ashes of Desert 1 was suddenly handed the most expensive blank check in American history. What followed was the longest, most intense special operations campaign of all time. These are the guys who went into Afghanistan in October of 2001 with 12-man Green Beret teams from the Fifth Special Forces Group riding into combat on Afghan horses borrowed from local warlords because the terrain was too rough for trucks.”
“Calling in B-52 strikes from the saddle and toppling the Taliban government in roughly 2 months with a total ground force of 4 to 500 American operators. They became known to history as the ‘Horse Soldiers.’ And there’s a 16-ft bronze statue of one of them at Ground Zero in New York to this day.”
“These are also the guys who hunted Saddam Hussein for 9 months across Iraq, working off interrogations of his inner circle and finally pulled him out of a 6-foot spider hole at a mud-walled farmhouse near Tikrit in December of 2003. These are the guys who between 2003 and 2010 dismantled Al-Qaeda in Iraq through a campaign of nightly door kicking that the enemies themselves later described in their own captured documents as a war of extermination they could not win.”
“General Stanley McChrystal, who took over JSOC in 2003, basically invented modern industrial scale counterterrorism over there. He fused intelligence, surveillance, and a direct action into one closed loop. Every raid generated the intel for the next raid, which generated the intel f…”
Disclaimer : This content may be created by AI for entertainment purposes. Any resemblance to real persons, events, or places is coincidental.
