SEAL Team Six had rotated home not long before. The men on these elite special operations teams went to war in shifts. For most of the last ten years they had been regularly deploying to Iraq or Afghanistan for three to four months, where they maintained a very high tempo, going out on missions every night, sometimes two or three times a night. Each unit had its own embedded combat support, administrative staff, and logistical teams that traveled together, every one of them handpicked. When deployed they lived for the most part sequestered from conventional troops, either at their own forward operating bases or on a portion of a larger base that was sealed off. The work was deadly serious. The men would spend the day getting their rest, cleaning their weapons, working out, and getting ready to go back out. They had their own TV and Internet access, but under rules that were far more restrictive than for most soldiers. Their pace and discipline were severe. They would blow off steam for a few months at home and then go back. When they were deployed, it was all business.
It was a demanding but extremely satisfying way of life. The men who achieved membership in these units tended to stay. Many found it hard to adjust to doing anything else. The skills required were not readily applicable to other kinds of work. And when you have been part of life-and-death operations for years—adrenaline-pumping missions where you risked your life, shot to kill, and where some of your good friends gave their lives—and when you believe that your work is vital to the security of your country, it is hard to find anything else that compares. When you work every day with people who are the very best at what they do, and when you enjoy the silent admiration of everyone you meet, even if they had only a vague idea of what you do—well, there is nothing quite like it.
On average, the operators were a decade or more older than most soldiers. Most were in their early thirties, veterans of several tours in regular units or “vanilla” special forces teams, as opposed to “black ops.” Some were in their forties, which skewed the average age to thirty-four. Some of the men in these units would joke that their biggest worry wasn’t so much getting shot by the enemy as it was throwing their back out. They excelled at a lot of things, but particularly at doing exactly what would be called for in Abbottabad: hitting a target fast and hard, making correct split-second decisions about whether to shoot or not to shoot, and distinguishing between friend and foe, combatant and noncombatant. They usually did their work in the dark, wearing night-vision devices, but had in recent years been mixing it up with day raids, partly to vary the pattern and partly just because of the demand to move quickly on fresh intelligence—staying inside the information cycle of the enemy.
Being called in like this to begin rehearsals after just rotating home was enough to tip them off that the mission was special. When they were told that they were going after bin Laden, the men cheered.
They reassembled for a second week of rehearsals in Nevada, where the heat and altitude—about four thousand feet—were similar to Abbottabad’s. Again chairman Mullen and Vickers and the others came out to watch. This time the rehearsals were designed to duplicate the conditions they would be flying in. On the real mission the helicopters would have to fly ninety minutes before arriving over Abbottabad. They would be flying very low and very fast to avoid Pakistani radar. Mission planners had to test precisely what the choppers could do at that altitude and in the anticipated air temperatures. How much of a load could the choppers carry and still perform? Originally they had thought they might be able to make it there and back without refueling, but the margins were too close. The choppers would have been coming back on fumes. So the refueling area was necessary. In Nevada they went through the entire scenario. The mock-up of the compound was much cruder. They had already practiced storming it again and again at Fort Bragg. This time the buildings were just Conex containers, and instead of stone walls around the compound there was a chain-link fence. The purpose of this rehearsal was not to duplicate the storming of the compound. The purpose here was to simulate the stresses on the choppers. It came off smoothly. The Black Hawks handled the job well.
Again, McRaven wanted Mullen and Vickers and the others to be impressed, because he wanted his own confidence in his men and the mission to be fully conveyed to the president. The best way to do that was not just to tell him about it. He understood that confidence was key if the SEALs were going to get the job.
Because the alternative, the drone strike, was tempting. It was so much less risky. The air option offered a kind of magic bullet, in the form of a small guided munition that could be fired from a tiny drone. No one involved with planning the mission would discuss its particulars, but the weapon sounded very much like a newly designed Raytheon GPS-guided missile about the length and width of a strong man’s forearm. General Cartwright was its chief advocate in the White House. Designed to help reduce the collateral damage that had always been an inevitable consequence of air strikes, the missile could strike an individual or a single vehicle without damaging anything nearby. Called simply an STM (small tactical munition), it weighed just thirteen pounds, carried a five-pound warhead, and was fired from under the wing of a drone that itself was no larger than a model airplane, small enough to escape the notice of any country’s air defenses. It was a “fire-and-forget” missile, which meant you could not guide it once it was released. It would find and explode on the precise coordinates it had been given. Since the Pacer tended to walk in the same place every day, Cartwright believed the missile would kill him, and likely him alone. It placed no American forces at risk. If the missile missed, or if the Pacer turned out not to be bin Laden, well, then it would just be an unexplained explosion in Abbottabad. No one need be the wiser. And if the missile did kill bin Laden, any Pakistani anger over an unauthorized U.S. drone strike would likely be offset by the embarrassment of revealing that the world’s most wanted terrorist had been living safely not just in Pakistan, but only a short drive from Islamabad and less than a mile away from its national military academy.
The weapon had yet to be used in combat, although the technologies involved—drones and missiles—were hardly new. The only difference with this one was its size. Still… did you want to hinge such a critical opportunity on one shot, with a missile that had never been fired in anger? The drone option also robbed the strike of certainty. To his followers and to those who thought as he did, bin Laden still had tremendous influence, even though he had not been seen in years. If there was no proof he was dead, the organization could theoretically keep issuing statements and pronouncements to the faithful, raising contributions, urging and planning future attacks as if he were alive. And Obama would become the third U.S. president to have let him slip through his fingers. Arguments in favor of the drone kept coming back to these two things. What if the missile missed? And, if it killed bin Laden, how would you know for sure?