I was reading a piece in the NYT Sunday about Seal Team Six and other elite military units. It mentioned that when the Seals parachuted to the Indian Ocean to save the captain of the Maersk Alabama, they also dropped a few specialized small boats to use in the mission.
I’m sure there are plenty of other unique, badass, expensive equipment that elite teams take on a mission but can’t carry around with them for the duration and then take it home. So is that equipment ever recovered?
With downed aircraft and some vehicles, I know that they will sometimes target it from the air to destroy it and make the debris useless to the enemy. But what about smaller items?
I doubt they do it any differently than the rest of the military. Everything has to be accounted for. Now, the special operations command supply budget is probably a lot higher. During wartime, there probably is no actual limit - that is how it worked in regular army units. Anything you lost, you filled out a form to account for it, and supply would fill out a form requesting a replacement. During a deployment, there was no limit to how much gear your unit could order because combat losses are unpredictable.
Anyways, according to one of the Seal biographies I read, they are pretty generous with supplies. As per the acronym “sea air land”, the soldiers need a separate kit for each operational environment they might encounter. So, each seal has a large cage room for themselves back at base, with a separate weapon and gear set for each environment. Seals and other special operations troops get to ask for the weapons they want - they don’t have to carry whatever command deems proper. Their units have dedicated armorers that customize the guns as requested.
So, with regards to your question, I expect it works about like it does in the regular military. They deploy with some equipment. Whatever they can’t recover, they are supposed to destroy - but if there isn’t time, they abandon it. Everything does have to be accounted for - anything you lost in combat, you fill out a form explaining this. I’m sure tons of stuff gets left. Obviously, command would frown upon operational weapons being left behind - some equipment is “sensitive”, and you are supposed to make every effort to recover it so the enemy cannot have it. This includes weapons, night vision goggles, and gas masks.
I just read that ISIS has a lot of Humvees now that were left in Iraq. 2300 of them
ISIS Captured $1B In American Humvees In Iraq, Uses Them In Suicide Bombing
Presumably, you are expected to make a reasonable effort to recover your gear, and if you can’t, destroy it if you can reasonably do so. Since command authorities are, hopefully, also reasonable people, they will understand if you come back to base and report that you abandoned that M60 machine gun that fell overboard during an explosion and sunk in mile-deep water, because it was in such deep water, you had only an hour to get to the rendezvous point, and blowing it up wasn’t reasonable since you only had 5 bombs left from the last mission, needed at absolute bare minimum three for the next mission assuming everything worked out perfectly (which you pretty well knew it wouldn’t), and your underwater radar had been critically damaged by shrapnel.
Underwater radar? Is that in the TO&E between the 5 gallon bucket of prop wash and the chemlight battereis? 
They are “special” forces for sure if they requisitioned and used The Pig when there are so many better choices of machine guns available to them.
Well, according to the book Black Hawk Down (the book, not the movie) at least one member of Delta force felt the M14 was a better battle rifle than something that fires 5.56. He felt the heavier bullet would take people down with less shots and more reliably. So there he was in the streets of Mogadishu, firing his M14. Not sure if he made it, and one problem this creates is that since he was shooting 7.62, he couldn’t share ammo with his buddies.
Although…come to think of it…he might be able to fire the rounds the enemy forces were using…
Anyways, different operators try different things. As long as it shoots big enough bullets with relatively low deviation, there are enough rounds in the magazine or belt, and it doesn’t jam too often, an expert can probably do pretty well with it.
Clarification - they weren’t left over in Iraq in a scrapheap or something. They given to the Iraqi security forces, who were then routed and ISIL took all their stuff.
Didn’t the US leave a shitload of fully operational heavy weapons (tank, artillery, trucks) in Vietnam upon departure?
Did we really think the “South Vietnamese” (a group which never existed in nature) were going to use the stuff to fight the rest of the Vietnamese?
Another plot point from the book and apropos of this thread is that team members were tasked with recovering the deployment ropes during the operation.
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Since command authorities are, hopefully, also reasonable people, they will understand if you come back to base and report that you abandoned that M60 machine gun that fell overboard during an explosion and sunk in mile-deep water
[/QUOTE]
This equipment is not lost, it is simply in long term (very) cold storage.