I would also like to add that in a number of missions like this, yes, they do have plans in place for equipment failure and loss of life....
The most impressive thing about the mission was that they pulled it off successfully and without a casualty despite a major fugg up. This kind of thing (helicopter loss) is what ruined the Desert One rescue in 1979 and the Black Hawk Down affair in 1993. These guys were prepared for it, adapted, and overcame.
no i didn't say they just ran it into the ground, I said sh!t happened and they adapted, and that I bet a crashed chopper was not how it was drawn up.
please pay attention. they had extra choppers packed with seals waiting for **** much worse than this! they had planned for this and they managed it easily! let me ask u something? why do you think the backups chopppers were there? what do you think was the objective? how was the objective not accomplished? all enemies were crushed and no americans were hurt at all! again, it couldnt be more perfect! thats how missions are defined! if dirk nowitzki gets hurt and cant play, but the mavs still win the title, because of a strong bench, isnt that what they planned? isnt that why they have bench players? or is that a failure?
Ok poor choice of words. How bout this. Plan was botched mission was a success? Ok, I understand what you are getting at, but once again, you are so hellbent on getting your point across you ignore everything else. Now... All I was saying, was that the plan.....did not go like it was drawn up. Now I don't know what the Seals knew. Did they know that there weren't tunnels under the complex that could be used as an escape route? Did they know how many people were inside the complex? Did they know if the complex was rigged up with explosives in case it was breached? Crashing the chopper eliminates the element of surprise. If the element of surprise was extremely important, why is in anyway wrong to say that this thing could have ended up very bad with it's elimination by crashing a chopper. What I was saying, and as I stated, maybe botched was too hard a word, which is why I came back and corrected myself in the same sentence, which seems to be getting ignored here, but anyway, what I was saying, is this was originally a mission of stealth. The chopper crashing was not in the cards, and the seals adapted.
who says it was? they had 2 dozen seals in backup choppers. the best fighters in the history of warfare. i think they could take out the 6 porn-loving potheads at the compound regardless of suprise, eh? again, you can say lots of things "could" happen. but you will need to come up with something much further outside the parameters of what was allowed for and guarded agaisnt with backups to pretend anything was botched. if i have 100 coins and i plan to flip them until i get a heads, i dont get upset if it takes me until the third coin, because i had backups, i expected things would work the way they did and i was thoroughly prepared. it was, and thats why we are here helping you.
They executed the plan they rehearsed over and over and over, including contingencies. Of course no one wanted to lose an aircraft. But it was planned for and rehearsed, and you see the results. That's what those guys get paid for - it's high risk, at night, in a close-in area, with a desert floor and rotor wash. All of those things go into the planning process. Don't get me wrong, I'm not busting on you. I saw above where you said "botched" was too strong a word. It also was not a matter of adapting and overcoming because that assumes a downed aircraft was not part of a contingency. They just executed an alternate plan they had anticipated might occur. Chances are we will never hear if it was pilot error or mechanical; they aren't going to voluntarily give that up.
of the 100 things that could have gone wrong, only one thing went wrong. so you could say the mission was a 99% success. If you scored a 99% on a test, you wouldn't be kicking yourself for that one question you didn't get right
not sure if its official but I saw something the other night where the tail clipped the embankment around osama's dorm as it went over and tried to land. it was the lead chopper. they spoke like it was official but who knows. well a search finds that it was true: Helicopter Carrying SEALs Downed by Vortex, Not Mechanical Flaw or Gunfire - Bloomberg
