Thirty-eight US/Afghan soldiers were killed in a recent Chinook downing.
It seems like an incredible risk to put 22 SEALs, most of whom were part of an elite group, inside one big target like that. Is it normal for the military to have so many people stuffed inside a relatively unarmed, slow-moving helicopter in a combat zone? I can’t imagine the lost costs of training for them all, not to mention the tolls on their families.
A Chinook seats 44 in addition to the two pilots, so it was fairly full. The number of SEALs or others in the aircraft is no doubt dictated by the mission. They were going after an insurgent safehouse if I recall from the story, so not knowing what they might encounter, yes, you might want to have quite a few SEALs, though I have no idea what is “normal”
As to using a Chinook versus several smaller and/or well armed helos instead, I’m sure the idea is to get them there all together, quickly, as one unit. If you needed to do a fast insertion and you had several small helos waiting to go in and land one at a time in a small area, that could take a while, and would cause you to lose the element of surprise, which in some circumstances could be just as deadly. I think the truth is that what happened in horribly unfortunate, but also quite rare, and the benefits of traveling as a group far outweigh the risk of a lucky Taliban guy shooting you down.
How else are you going to move troops around quickly and efficiently? Especially considering we have complete air superiority and there have been few aircraft-related fatalities thus far–just a quick wag after glancing at the wiki stats (which may or may not be accurate), I’m figuring the coalition averages about one aircraft crash per month that involved either death/injury and/or hostile fire. Considering how many sorties they fly each day, I can see how it’s an acceptable risk. Not trying to downplay the tragedy, but am trying to put it in perspective. I’d be shocked if our troop movement procedures changed as a result of this.
Is it normal to fully load a Chinook? I can’t definitively answer that, but IME, it’d be odd to not fully load it so long as operating conditions allowed it and you needed that load moved. Not sure why you’d treat SEALs any differently than anything else. I haven’t been to theater in a while, and I’m not up on how SEALs move around, so I could be off.
The training of Special Operations forces isn’t really a very big expense, they are just people, not F-22s.
Just people?
My helicopter is full of SEALs!
Sorry.
according to dick marcinko, his budget for training SEAL team 6 members to shoot was bigger than the entire marine corps for the same given period.
That doesn’t sound believable at all.
he mentioned it twice in his first book “rogue warrior.” can’t believe it myself.
Thats a rather machiavellian sentiment but probably true. Estimate of cost to train a Navy seal $500,000
One F-22 Raptor = 361 Million. So you can have approx 660 Navy Seals for 1 F-22 Raptor.
One modern Chinook is $24 million, so if you were to look at the attack in terms of purely costs to the forces to obtain those assets, the Chinook is a bigger loss than the 22 Seals ($11 million to train)… Note I not by any means suggesting thats a reasonable thing to do!
OTOH, you can build as many helicopters as you can afford, and within a relatively short time, while the pool of potential SEALS is very small, and their training takes years - not to mention their accumulated experience. You can’t buy experience.
In other words, it’ll be much easier to replace the vehicle than the men, if the latter’s even possible. In military terms, that makes them far more valuable.
The pool of potential SEALS is not very small. There are 300 million people in America. Recruiting ~2,400 SEALS is not an issue. While the training does take years, training is taking place all the time and new SEALS are coming into the service continuously. It would be a problem if you suddenly started out with 0 and needed 2,400 next week, a problem for a small country like Israel but not for America. As far as buying experience, well it’s difficult to buy it in peacetime and there was a lack of opportunity for them to apply their skills I suppose, but again this is not a problem for America right now.
In any case it wasn’t my intent to downplay the seriousness of the event or denigrate the loss of human life, merely to observe that in monetary terms, a couple of guys and rifles is a rounding error after you are done paying for the jet fighters and nuclear submarines.
helicopters always carry a risk and that’s not even considering combat conditions and the copter’s inherent vulnerabilities.
That seems like an overestimation. Out of the 300 million, how many are male? Of the males, how many are of service age? Of them, how many are physically fit enough to even begin training? Of them, how many are eligible to serve? Etc.
I guess your point sounds acceptable in the general sense, but your numbers are rough. You make it sound like it’s trivial to pump them out; is it actually?
The others are right in that I wasn’t talking about pure monetary cost, but ease of replacement.
if the SEALs suddenly took a heavy loss at the front, there’s no reason why other specwarriors from other services can’t step in. but i would think it is not that easy to replace 7 experienced SEALs. and their training is expensive. so is thweir deployment. if we are to believe marcinko, the team leader/coordinator would ask for an unlimited budget to get a job done.
specwar is supposed to be cheaper than conventional war. so it’s not right to compare raptors and attack subs with SEAL personnel and logistics. for one thing, subs or even UAVs couldn’t have taken out OBL.
There is a suggestion that the attack on the Chinook was a planned ambush.
I haven’t been able to get to George Friedman of Stratfor.com article. The suggestion is that the Taliban force actually laying in wait for the Chinook and managed to fire enough RPGs to get a hit.
It doesn’t really change that much unless one of our Afghan allies leaked the information to the Taliban that let them set up the ambush.
Alessan’s right- trained soldiers and crews are always more valuable than the equipment that they operate. After all, a tank, airplane or rifle is ultimately only as good as the men using them.
And, in the case of SEALs or other special operations forces, we’re talking about months of training, and (I suspect) years of experience in Iraq and Afghanistan that can’t be quantified in monetary terms. In these guys’ case, their experience was probably more valuable than their training, but how do you quantify either one?
Look at it this way- if you’re General Mattis, what would you rather have? 31 trained and experienced SEALs, or one more Chinook, that you could get transferred from some reserve in the States, or elsewhere in Iraq, Afghanistan or Europe?
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I guess your point sounds acceptable in the general sense, but your numbers are rough. You make it sound like it’s trivial to pump them out; is it actually?
Again, it’s somewhat a matter of scale. Once you have a sustainable scale it’s no issue. Replacements are being trained all the time.
They are more valuable to Israel because Israel doesn’t have the population or the industrial base to make up losses very quickly, so it’s much cheaper to have them stick around now than when the Arabs have pushed Israel into the sea. Some types of personnel, like pilots, are expensive to train because you have to get a bunch of planes first(!), then have the trainees fly them around for years before they are ready for action. A large part of the cost is the cost of the training plane. Fighter pilots are not Lady Gaga, they are not expensive because flying planes is a rare ability or because America lacks qualified candidates.
This incident reminded me of this:
The Chinook is a big helicopter but the Halo is a huge helicopter!
[quote=“Throatwarbler_Mangrove, post:18, topic:591872”]
They’re more valuable than materiel to us, because well-trained and motivated people are what win battles, not equipment.
Even in the World War II German Army, tank crews were more valuable than individual tanks, and this in 1944 and 1945, when they couldn’t crank out tanks, but could probably train crews.
Value in this context isn’t measured in dollars and cents, but rather in the military utility, and almost any general you can name will always choose another trained crew over another vehicle, unless trained crews are at an extreme surplus.