When a U.S. Navy SEAL forced his way into Osama bin Laden's bedroom and put two bullets into the al-Qaida leader, it marked the culmination of a manhunt that stretched back to the 1990s, and a vindication for Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC).
Born from the ashes of Operation Eagle Claw, the disastrous 1980 attempt to rescue 53 American hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Iran, JSOC is part of three-decade effort to ensure that when the nation called again, the military's most elite units would be up to the task.
In the years that followed, the Defense Department stood up several organizations, filling capability gaps exposed by the failure at Desert One. JSOC was among the first, starting up in December 1980 as a two-star command designed to command and control Delta Force and other elite units in the conduct of counterterrorism missions. It later added operations to counter weapons of mass destruction to its mission profile, with regular exercises aimed at neutralizing the nuclear forces of a country such as Libya. It would ultimately become, arguably, the pre-eminent three-star command in the U.S. military.
The command had some early successes, notably the rescue of American Kurt Muse from Panama's Modelo prison during Operation Just Cause in December 1989.
But it suffered a setback in October 1993 in the Somali capital of Mogadishu when a daylight operation to capture leaders of the Habr Gadir clan was thrown off course by the downing of an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.
In the ensuing battle, the JSOC task force killed hundreds of Somali militiamen, but 19 U.S. troops also died, the vast majority of them members of the task force.
The JSOC commander at the time, and the man who ran the U.S. side of the battle, was Army Maj. Gen. Bill Garrison. The commander of the Delta troops in the battle was William "Jerry" Boykin, a Delta Force officer on the hostage rescue mission who would go on to retire as a three-star general. Boykin called Garrison the leader who began turning JSOC into the formidable force it is today.
"Bill Garrison did a great deal to improve the headquarters by getting beyond a strict focus on just the operator in the Rangers or the SEALs or Delta or anything like that," Boykin said. "He established a strong ethos of 'Everybody's a team and you all contribute to the success or the failure of this organization, so even if you're not in the battlespace, necessarily, your contribution is equal.'"
"Look at JSOC from 1980 to 2003, and there was a series of progressions that was on a very similar path … and then look what happened starting in 2003 to today, how radically different it is," the SEAL officer said. "Look at the level of respect it gets in the interagency. Look at the level of respect it gets in the conventional forces."
Before McChrystal, who spent much of his career in the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, "we were really good at what we did [in JSOC], but we were pirates and totally disorganized," the retired SEAL officer said. "McChrystal took the Ranger discipline, applied it systematically to the organization and then completely changed the way the organization works within the government, within the Defense Department and then within the greater interagency."
McChrystal's vision and force of personality molded JSOC, its component units - and, crucially, its partners in the intelligence community - into a force that took its ability to conduct precision raids to an industrial scale.
This allowed creation of multiple task forces across Iraq, who conducted raids nightly to destroy Abu Musab Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq network, and finally killing Zarqawi himself in a June 2006 airstrike.
Under McChrystal, who led the command until 2008, JSOC became a global actor with small elements deployed to many countries outside the combat theaters. In 2006, it was elevated to a three-star command.
McChrystal "came up with a way to command and control his forces so that with a limited number, he could service efforts in truly a global game," said retired Army Capt. Wade Ishimoto, who was on the ground at Desert One as Delta's acting intelligence officer and is now an adjunct faculty member at the Joint Special Operations University at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla.
Special operations sources said Vice Adm. Bill McRaven, the SEAL who commands JSOC, has continued to improve the organization.
As the Iraq war winds down, the Afghan campaign has heated up, and JSOC's task forces appear to be returning to the operational tempo of Iraq in 2006 and 2007. It is the main force going up against the Haqqani network, which U.S. commanders consider the most dangerous Afghan insurgent group.
"McRaven's going to get the credit [for the bin Laden mission], and he deserves it because he's continued the legacy," said the recently retired SEAL officer. "But make no mistake, this house was built by Stan."
Ishimoto paid tribute to McRaven, but said that others beyond the past two JSOC leaders played key roles, including Boykin, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence under President George W. Bush, and McChrystal's intelligence chief at JSOC, now-Maj. Gen. Mike Flynn of the Army.
"We had a good cast of the right people in the right places at the right time to make this kind of progress," Ishimoto said.
But the stealth MH-60 Black Hawks that carried the SEALs to the compound were almost certainly flown by crews from the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), another unit created in the 1980s. The unit went by a series of different names in the 1980s before acquiring the 160th SOAR(A) moniker in 1990.
The SEALs who killed bin Laden, his son and two male couriers - as well as, accidentally, a woman in the compound - came from another unit formed to fill a capability gap identified after Operation Eagle Claw: Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, popularly known as SEAL Team 6.
"DEVGRU was created specifically as a result of [Eagle Claw]," Boykin said. "It was created to give this new joint command a maritime capability."
Multiple sources in the special operations community said the operators who conducted the bin Laden mission were drawn from DEVGRU's Red Squadron, chosen because it was ready at DEVGRU's Dam Neck, Va., headquarters and available for tasking.
"It was Red Squadron," said the recently retired SEAL officer. "They were not on alert and they weren't deployed."
Each squadron has about 50 operators, "of which they picked about half … for this thing," he added.
The selection of DEVGRU to conduct the bin Laden mission has irked some in Delta, who are miffed that their organization - traditionally considered the pre-eminent special mission unit for direct action operations on land - was overlooked.
"The infighting between the tribes is at an all-time high," said a field-grade Army special operations officer. "People [in Delta] are livid."
Some Delta personnel think that because SEALs command both JSOC and U.S. Special Operations Command - Adm. Eric Olson in the latter case - that was a critical factor behind DEVGRU's selection for the mission, the field-grade Army special operations officer said.
But other sources said a bigger factor was likely the fact that DEVGRU has worked nonstop in the Afghanistan theater since 2001, while Delta spent much of that time focused on Iraq.
Born from the ashes of Operation Eagle Claw, the disastrous 1980 attempt to rescue 53 American hostages from the U.S. Embassy in Iran, JSOC is part of three-decade effort to ensure that when the nation called again, the military's most elite units would be up to the task.
In the years that followed, the Defense Department stood up several organizations, filling capability gaps exposed by the failure at Desert One. JSOC was among the first, starting up in December 1980 as a two-star command designed to command and control Delta Force and other elite units in the conduct of counterterrorism missions. It later added operations to counter weapons of mass destruction to its mission profile, with regular exercises aimed at neutralizing the nuclear forces of a country such as Libya. It would ultimately become, arguably, the pre-eminent three-star command in the U.S. military.
The command had some early successes, notably the rescue of American Kurt Muse from Panama's Modelo prison during Operation Just Cause in December 1989.
But it suffered a setback in October 1993 in the Somali capital of Mogadishu when a daylight operation to capture leaders of the Habr Gadir clan was thrown off course by the downing of an MH-60 Black Hawk helicopter.
In the ensuing battle, the JSOC task force killed hundreds of Somali militiamen, but 19 U.S. troops also died, the vast majority of them members of the task force.
The JSOC commander at the time, and the man who ran the U.S. side of the battle, was Army Maj. Gen. Bill Garrison. The commander of the Delta troops in the battle was William "Jerry" Boykin, a Delta Force officer on the hostage rescue mission who would go on to retire as a three-star general. Boykin called Garrison the leader who began turning JSOC into the formidable force it is today.
"Bill Garrison did a great deal to improve the headquarters by getting beyond a strict focus on just the operator in the Rangers or the SEALs or Delta or anything like that," Boykin said. "He established a strong ethos of 'Everybody's a team and you all contribute to the success or the failure of this organization, so even if you're not in the battlespace, necessarily, your contribution is equal.'"
Turning Point
But JSOC's star truly began to rise when then-Maj. Gen. Stan McChrystal took command in 2003, said one recently retired SEAL officer."Look at JSOC from 1980 to 2003, and there was a series of progressions that was on a very similar path … and then look what happened starting in 2003 to today, how radically different it is," the SEAL officer said. "Look at the level of respect it gets in the interagency. Look at the level of respect it gets in the conventional forces."
Before McChrystal, who spent much of his career in the Army's 75th Ranger Regiment, "we were really good at what we did [in JSOC], but we were pirates and totally disorganized," the retired SEAL officer said. "McChrystal took the Ranger discipline, applied it systematically to the organization and then completely changed the way the organization works within the government, within the Defense Department and then within the greater interagency."
McChrystal's vision and force of personality molded JSOC, its component units - and, crucially, its partners in the intelligence community - into a force that took its ability to conduct precision raids to an industrial scale.
This allowed creation of multiple task forces across Iraq, who conducted raids nightly to destroy Abu Musab Zarqawi's al-Qaida in Iraq network, and finally killing Zarqawi himself in a June 2006 airstrike.
Under McChrystal, who led the command until 2008, JSOC became a global actor with small elements deployed to many countries outside the combat theaters. In 2006, it was elevated to a three-star command.
McChrystal "came up with a way to command and control his forces so that with a limited number, he could service efforts in truly a global game," said retired Army Capt. Wade Ishimoto, who was on the ground at Desert One as Delta's acting intelligence officer and is now an adjunct faculty member at the Joint Special Operations University at MacDill Air Force Base, Fla.
Special operations sources said Vice Adm. Bill McRaven, the SEAL who commands JSOC, has continued to improve the organization.
As the Iraq war winds down, the Afghan campaign has heated up, and JSOC's task forces appear to be returning to the operational tempo of Iraq in 2006 and 2007. It is the main force going up against the Haqqani network, which U.S. commanders consider the most dangerous Afghan insurgent group.
"McRaven's going to get the credit [for the bin Laden mission], and he deserves it because he's continued the legacy," said the recently retired SEAL officer. "But make no mistake, this house was built by Stan."
Ishimoto paid tribute to McRaven, but said that others beyond the past two JSOC leaders played key roles, including Boykin, who served as deputy undersecretary of defense for intelligence under President George W. Bush, and McChrystal's intelligence chief at JSOC, now-Maj. Gen. Mike Flynn of the Army.
"We had a good cast of the right people in the right places at the right time to make this kind of progress," Ishimoto said.
The Special Operators
The Obama administration has not identified the units that took part in the mission to kill bin Laden.But the stealth MH-60 Black Hawks that carried the SEALs to the compound were almost certainly flown by crews from the Army's 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), another unit created in the 1980s. The unit went by a series of different names in the 1980s before acquiring the 160th SOAR(A) moniker in 1990.
The SEALs who killed bin Laden, his son and two male couriers - as well as, accidentally, a woman in the compound - came from another unit formed to fill a capability gap identified after Operation Eagle Claw: Naval Special Warfare Development Group, or DEVGRU, popularly known as SEAL Team 6.
"DEVGRU was created specifically as a result of [Eagle Claw]," Boykin said. "It was created to give this new joint command a maritime capability."
Multiple sources in the special operations community said the operators who conducted the bin Laden mission were drawn from DEVGRU's Red Squadron, chosen because it was ready at DEVGRU's Dam Neck, Va., headquarters and available for tasking.
"It was Red Squadron," said the recently retired SEAL officer. "They were not on alert and they weren't deployed."
Each squadron has about 50 operators, "of which they picked about half … for this thing," he added.
The selection of DEVGRU to conduct the bin Laden mission has irked some in Delta, who are miffed that their organization - traditionally considered the pre-eminent special mission unit for direct action operations on land - was overlooked.
"The infighting between the tribes is at an all-time high," said a field-grade Army special operations officer. "People [in Delta] are livid."
Some Delta personnel think that because SEALs command both JSOC and U.S. Special Operations Command - Adm. Eric Olson in the latter case - that was a critical factor behind DEVGRU's selection for the mission, the field-grade Army special operations officer said.
But other sources said a bigger factor was likely the fact that DEVGRU has worked nonstop in the Afghanistan theater since 2001, while Delta spent much of that time focused on Iraq.
