Isegoria

The New York Times piece on the Osama bin Laden operation mentions the final strike’s planner:

In February, Mr. Panetta called Vice Adm. William H. McRaven, commander of the Pentagon’s Joint Special Operations Command, to C.I.A. headquarters in Langley, Va., to give him details about the compound and to begin planning a military strike.

Admiral McRaven, a veteran of the covert world who had written a book on American Special Operations, spent weeks working with the C.I.A. on the operation, and came up with three options: a helicopter assault using American commandos, a strike with B-2 bombers that would obliterate the compound, or a joint raid with Pakistani intelligence operatives who would be told about the mission hours before the launch.

As Spencer Ackerman of Wired notes, McRaven’s 1995 book, Spec Ops, lays out a theory of special operations:

“Brave men without good planning, preparation and leadership are cannon fodder in the face of defensive warfare.”

At the heart of all special operations is asymmetry. Operators attack “fortified positions,” confronting a superior force. It’s a recipe for being mowed down — unless you achieve what McRaven calls “relative superiority.” It’s a slippery concept, easy to identify after the fact and more difficult to isolate before or during a mission. Basically, it’s the point at which the commandos seize the advantage, leveraging their unique assets — “technology, training, intelligence, etc.” — to turn their opponents’ superior force into a disadvantage. It doesn’t guarantee victory; but not having it guarantees failure.

What’s individually necessary and jointly sufficient for success? According to McRaven: Keeping it simple. Keeping it secret. Rehearsing thoroughly. Surprising the enemy. Getting in and out quickly. And having a clear — and simple — purpose.

Counterintuitively, what’s needed for all of those to knit together into relative superiority is a small force. ”Because of their size,” McRaven writes, “it is difficult for large forces to develop a simple plan, keep their movements concealed, conduct detailed full-dress rehearsals (down to the individual soldier’s level), gain tactical surprise and speed on target, and motivate all the soldiers in the unit to a single tactical goal.” No wonder insurgents and special operators understand each other.

The longer the attack takes, the more it risks failing.

McRaven’s book collects case studies of special operations, mostly from WWII, but two from the post-war era, including the Israelis’ 1976 liberation of hostages on board a hijacked Air France flight in Entebbe, Uganda:

Israel had to secretly insert commandos, from the air, into a guarded airport terminal packed with civilians to neutralize ten (it turned out to be seven) terrorists, after crossing an airfield peppered with untrustworthy Ugandan sentries. The famed Sayeret Matkal rehearsed tirelessly for 18 hours, reduced the number of men on the mission, and relied on freed hostages for an understanding of where the terrorists were. When the operation occurred, Israeli commandos darted “from room to room in search of terrorists,” despite the mortal wounding of their commander, Lt. Col. Jonathan Netanyahu. While three hostages died, the Israelis killed the terrorists, several Ugandan guards and extracted the remaining passengers onto C-130s in under two hours.

You can practically hear McRaven preparing for Abbottabad in his book’s praise for Entebbe. “During the execution phase, the Israelis gained surprise by using boldness and deception to momentarily confuse the Ugandans, and by moving quickly on the target, they were able to secure the hostages within three minutes of landing at Entebbe,” McRaven writes. “Throughout the three phases, the purpose of the operation was emphasized again and again, and it meant not only the rescue of the hostages, but the honor and respect of the state of Israel.”

Compare that with Abbottabad. Restoring the honor of a country vexed by a terrorist who’d escaped its grasp a decade earlier? Check. A simple plan with a clear purpose? Check — kill or capture bin Laden. Secrecy? Most of the U.S. government didn’t even know, let alone the Pakistanis. Thorough rehearsal? At Bagram Air Field, the SEALs practiced on a model of the compound they built. Surprise? Most definitely. Speed? The whole thing was over in 40 minutes. No wonder: McRaven designed the plan.

Ryan Holiday presents a different take on empathy:

There was a moment in the Civil War where Ulysses S Grant found his legs. Although he’d had experienced leading men into battle during the Mexican-American war, part of his early stumbles can be explained by fear. Or, at least, the anxiety that comes along with being uncertain of yourself. In July of 1861 he was sent to break up a notorious group of guerillas led by Gen. Tom Harris. Grant hemmed and hawed in his mind — it wasn’t the fighting, it was the fighting as a colonel. If there was some way he could be the lieutenant-colonel, he later wrote, and someone else could be the colonel he’d have been fine.

And so, racked with misapprehension, he marched his men on their mission. But when he arrived at the Harris’ camp it was empty. They enemy had left, knowing Grant was coming. Grant changed in this instant. His fears disappeared and did not return. Grant wrote later in his memoirs “it occurred to me at once that Harris had been as much afraid of me as I had been of him… from that event to the close of the war… I never forgot that the enemy has as much reason to fear my forces as I had his.”

It’s probably a strange take on this, but such a realization — the power you have over your opponent — is deeply connected with empathy. It’s understanding and acknowledging that there is a world outside your predominant emotions. And that this is a logical world, one that is ripe with people who feel what you feel not because you are special and came to it first but because we are all the same. In a perverted way, it’s very hubristic to think only you would feel fear in this situation. It is to deny, essentially, the enemy a sense of personhood or self. It is to assume that your emotions matter and nothing else does — or rather, that they do not even exist.

One reason Holiday’s take is a different take is that most of us associate empathy with empathic concern, or sympathy. But a general, or common soldier, or competitive athlete, must divorce empathy from sympathy — and even invert it, using understanding to increase fear and pain.

A general like Grant had to learn this lesson in the middle of a war, and he presumably compartmentalized this compassion-less empathy, unleashing it only in his role as general. Juvenile delinquents learn it early and often and resort to it daily.

Cameron Schaefer, who recently read The Dead Hand, notes the lack of empathy between the US and USSR during the Cold War:

As I read about the escalating tensions between the United States and the Soviet Union, the thing that stood out most to me was how little each country understood about the other’s intentions despite the massive amounts of data and anlysis coming in daily from the various intelligence agencies. Each was convinced that the other side was morally unnmoved by the prospect of a nuclear war that would kill millions of civilians.

In short, many of the tensions and misunderstandings that characterized the Cold War were due to a lack of empathy. Neither side could imagine that their opponent may be very similar to themselves. It was far easier to imagine the adversary as an immoral monster, void of feeling and emotion and hell bent on destroying civilization. Of course there were great differences in ideology, but both sides were filled with humans just the same, or as Holiday put it to me in an e-mail, “…boring, timid, self-destructive, stupid, loyal, lonely, scared and all that less than glamorous but uniquely normal human activity.”

Of course, the Cold War is famous for the cold calculations of the “rational” game-theorists, who could bring more rigor to the problem than intuitively empathetic strategists.

What could be less empathetic than a mathematical model? And yet such rationalist models often provide more perspective than simple gut-checks, even if the players aren’t intentionally playing out rational strategies any more than pool players are consciously performing Newtonian calculations.

Mackubin Thomas Owens argues that we still need the Marines, because they’re not simply a second land army:

The current Marine Corps strategic concept envisions an expeditionary force in readiness capable of responding rapidly to the full range of crises and contingencies, primarily but not exclusively from the sea, with integrated and balanced air, ground and logistics teams. To this end, the Marines provide a responsive and scalable “middleweight” force that is light enough to get to where it is needed quickly but heavy enough — and with sufficient logistics support — to prevail against an adversary upon arrival.

Wait, why do we need the first land army, again?

I kid, I kid — but it certainly seems like land troops, troop transports, and close air support should all be integrated.

(Why do we have an Air Force, again?)