How viable are inland Special Forces raids?

I.E., send in a crack team by air under cover of darkness to kill someone and/or blow up something. I specify “inland” because that means the force doesn’t have the luxury of getting to within a few kilometers of the target by sub.

I gather that even with the best possible people, equipment and intel, it’s about the riskiest possible military mission. We barely risked it to assassinate Bin Laden, even though we were expecting at most to face bodyguards in an urban setting. Is it considered viable against actual military resistance?

You can get a guy into almost anywhere by HALO drop, if need be, but one guy against “armed resistance” is a tough call.
More likely in that sort of situation, a remote method such as a cruise missile would be employed.

Entebbe: Resounding success. Against Uganda. :rolleyes:
Son Tay prison raid: Might have worked if the targets hadn’t moved away without leaving a forwarding address. :smack:
Eagle Claw: FUBAR. Nuff sed.

Risky as hell, all right. In actual hostile country, hugely risky. Even if you succeed, you have to get extracted… and if the hostiles get riled up, have fun un-assing the castle.

OTOH, if one of these really succeed, as long as the target isn’t already guaranteed a headline, we’d probably never hear about it.

I think part of the reason we have various special operations forces is for the specific reason of carrying out this sort of raid.

Of course it’s risky, but the general concept is to not run head-on into enemy forces; the perfect raid might be to sneak in, plant the charges/grab the hostage/insert the listening device, and sneak right back out with nobody ever knowing until long afterward.

At any rate, even if you’re expecting resistance, the idea is to hit unexpectedly, fast and violently, so that there’s a lot of confusion about what’s going on, and hopefully you can be in and out before anything untoward happens.

That’s how Entebbe, Cabanatuan, Son Tay and Abbotabad worked, and how Operation Eagle Claw and Mogadishu were planned to work. Obviously things don’t go as planned sometimes.

I don’t know. In the US at least, tier one special forces units have only existed since the late 70s at the latest. The British had them before that, but they are, historically speaking, a fairly recent development.

I’m sure they do missions that we never heard about like this though. I have no idea how hard it is.

Hereis a story about an Israeli attempt to travel deep into Iraq in 1992, and assassinate Saddam Hussein at a relative’s funeral. It was called off because of deaths during the training exercise.

I’m pretty sure the special forces did all sorts of aerial insertions into hostile areas during the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Most of them went fine, sometimes they went to shit (like “Lone Survivor”).

There was the Gran Sasso raid where Mussolini was rescued by Otto Skorzeny and other members of the Waffen-SS.

With Helo, HALO, and HAHO insertions, inland SF raids are quite viable, depending on the objective and how it’s defended.

How far can someone travel with a HAHO or HALO deploy from the site where they disembarked from the plane? Can you deploy in one place, then land somewhere 50+ miles away?

Here’s a glossary for those unfamiliar with a few of these terms.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAHO: High altitude military parachuting
HAHO: (high altitude - high (parachute) opening)

HALO: (high altitude - low (parachute) opening)

That leaves HELO, which refers either to helicopter or Highly Elliptical Lunar Orbit.

[QUOTE=Ranger Jeff]
With Helo, HALO, and HAHO insertions, inland SF raids are quite viable, depending on the objective and how it’s defended.
[/QUOTE]

[QUOTE=Measure for Measure]
Here’s a glossary for those unfamiliar with a few of these terms.

From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HAHO: High altitude military parachuting
HAHO: (high altitude - high (parachute) opening)

HALO: (high altitude - low (parachute) opening)

That leaves HELO, which refers either to helicopter or Highly Elliptical Lunar Orbit.
[/QUOTE]

First, by “Helo”, I was referring to a helicopter. I might have gone with “Chopper” or “Helicopter”, but I liked the alliteration and the rhyming. :smiley:

Wesley, briefly, with HAHO, yes. Not with HALO.

Long version. Either way, you’re going to use the same equipment. You’ve got a suit (used to be sheepskin lined leathers, now it’s probably some synthetic electrically warmed suit) that’ll keep the jumper warm at 30,000 feet where he exits the aircraft. There’s an oxygen bottle and mask with eye protection. And he’s got a 85 lb or so equipment bag attached with some quick release doohickies to the front of his harness. It probably goes from the bottom of his chest to mid shin. There’s a 15’ strap more securely holding the bag to the harness. For the last hour of the flight in, before they jump, they start breathing pure O2 from the system installed in the aircraft to flush the nitrogen out of their system to avoid getting the bends.

For a HALO jump, you’ll start out with the same horizontal velocity of the aircraft you’re jumping from. Air resistance will slow that down and your vertical velocity will increase until you reach terminal velocity. If you want to fall faster, you can “ride the tube”, where you manage, instead of a flat, belly down descent, to get into a head down position. Where/when you open your chute is tricky. You want enough time/height (above ground, not sea level, so watch that altimeter carefully and pay attention to the mission briefing) for your chute to fully inflate and to lower that equipment bag the 15’. So, maybe at 300 or 250 feet you’ll pop the chute. You won’t travel all that far from where you exit the plane. Probably not much more than 3 miles?

HAHO is a different story. Instead of pulling the D-ring to open the chute, more likely it’s a tether jump, so the chute will inflate hopefully just after you clear the tail of the aircraft. And you’ll lose a lot of your horizontal velocity. The chutes used for a HAHO are inflatable and steerable wings. I can’t be buggered to look up the exact specs, but let’s say there’s a 5:1 glide ratio (it’s probably more). That would mean that in still air, you’ll move forward 5 feet for every foot you descend. So, jumping from 30,000 feet (call it 5 miles), you could travel 25 miles from where you jump. And if you’re dropped off upwind of your destination and there’s a good tail wind, you’ll travel farther. Chutes for HAHOs have lights rigged on the top on either side; one green and one red, like marker/position lights on a plane. Remember, you’d probably be doing this at night anyway. The team, squad, platoon, whatever will descend in a trail formation, with the first guy doing the navigating and everyone else following him. I don’t know when they’d lower the equipment bags.

HALO or HAHO, The bags hit the ground first giving the jumper a couple seconds warning to pull both handles to get as much lift as possible to slow himself before he hits the ground. With these chutes, it’s possible to do a stand up landing without breaking anything, but if they’re smart, the tried and true Parachute Landing Fall (PLF) is probably safer.

That is, if the word “Safe” can really be applied to making a parachute jump into a combat situation. :dubious: