“Kill or capture” raids by U.S. Special Forces long ago became a staple of the Global War on Terror. In the early hours of Saturday, Oct. 26, American commandos executed one of the most significant kill-or-capture raids in the history of that long war, cutting the head off the Islamic State, the most notorious Islamic extremist organization in the world today.
The operation took place in northwestern Syria, inside a compound in the village of Barisha, about four miles from the Turkish border. Intelligence officers had confirmed that Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi and several of his children were within the compound hours before the attack commenced.
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The commandos flew to the compound in Ch-47 Chinook transport helicopters, protected by Apache gunships as well as jet fighter-bombers. The assault force took fire as it approached the target, but resistance was quickly eliminated by air strikes.
The commandos surrounded the compound and called for the inhabitants to surrender. According to Marine General Kenneth McKenzie, a number of noncombatants did so. They were unharmed and released.
Five ISIS fighters refused to surrender. The Americans then blew holes in the compound walls and conducted an assault that resulted in the deaths of all five. The only American casualty was a wounded military dog.
Before long, several commandos chased al-Baghdadi and three children he was using as human shields into a tunnel. Rather than surrender, he detonated his suicide vest, killing himself and all three children.
U.S. intelligence officials initially learned of the ISIS leader’s location from information gleaned in the interrogation of one of al-Baghdadi’s wives and a courier this past summer. Ironically, the same Kurdish forces President Donald Trump recently abandoned to Turkish predations played a key role in tracking the ISIS chieftain’s movements over the last few months. As one U.S. official told Time, “I don’t think we could have done this without the help we got from the Syrian and Iraqi Kurds, which continued after we began the pullout.”
The operation was reminiscent of the May 2011 raid that resulted in the killing of al Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden, but there was one key difference. It was carried out by 1st Special Forces Detachment Delta, America’s first Tier One counter-terrorism organization, dominated by Army personnel, not the Navy’s SEAL Team 6.
Far, far less is known about Delta than about the SEALs, who in recent years have managed to become both the darling of the American public and something of a public relations nightmare for the Pentagon thanks to a string of stories about individual SEALs who’ve failed drug tests, revealed classified information, or engaged in abusive behavior toward spouses.
Many people close to the SEAL Team 6 community worry that the unit’s recent fame and glory have damaged its cohesion and functionality. Today, it seems that Delta Force best fits the bill as the American military’s elite force of “quiet professionals.”
Just what do we know about Delta Force?
The short answer is, not as much as we’d like. The Pentagon provides almost no public information about the unit. We don’t even know its size for sure.
Here’s what we do know.
The driving force behind the unit’s formation was Col. “Charging Charlie” Beckwith, a tough Georgian who turned down a chance to play football for the Green Bay Packers to join the U.S. Army. Beckwith joined the Special Forces and served in the Korean War, but it was during the war in Vietnam that he became a legend, leading long-range reconnaissance missions against the Vietcong and North Vietnamese. Beckwith was awarded a Distinguished Service Cross, the nation’s second highest medal for valor, as well as a Silver Star for his performance in combat.
When Beckwith returned from Vietnam, he led the charge for the formation of an elite commando unit within the already elite Army Special Forces, aka the Green Berets. He wanted a small, highly experienced organization trained according to principles developed by the unit then regarded as the premier commando force in the world: the British Special Air Service. Beckwith had served with the SAS as an exchange officer in the early ’60s. He wanted the new unit to be manned by soldiers with extensive combat experience. “Men,” he wrote in his memoir, “who enjoyed being alone, who could think and operate by themselves, men who were strongminded and resolute.”
Beckwith fought tenaciously against an Army bureaucracy reluctant to establish yet another kind of special force. Then, in the early ’70s, a series of terrorist attacks, notably the seizure of the Israeli Olympic team in Munich by Palestinian terrorists, led the Army brass to accept Beckwith’s concept. Detachment Delta was officially approved in November 1977, but it took two years for the new organization to be certified as combat-ready.
Delta’s first major mission was Operation Eagle Claw, the failed attempt to rescue the American hostages in Iran in October 1979. The Pentagon’s investigation into the fiasco determined that failure was largely due to bad weather and miscommunication between Delta operators—the term the unit’s members prefer rather than soldiers—and the Marine and Air Force personnel who were responsible for air transport.
In the wake of Eagle Claw, the Army established the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment to work hand in glove with Delta. Since the disaster in the Iranian desert, Delta force, called “the unit” by its members, has performed superbly in scores of classified operations. It counts the successful rescue of American medical students in Grenada in 1983 and the capture of Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega in 1989 among its most prominent successes.
Delta operators fought with great élan and bravery alongside the 75th Ranger Regiment in the Battle of Mogadishu in Somalia, made famous by the book and subsequent film Blackhawk Down.
The Unit’s performance in the Global War on Terror has earned it high marks in the eyes of serious students of special operations. In the invasion of Iraq in spring 2003, a combined force of 10 tanks and about 100 Delta operators wreaked havoc against conventional Iraqi army units from behind enemy lines. Using highly classified deception techniques, this small force presented itself to the Iraqis as an entire American armored division. Several brigades and other large Iraqi formations fled in panic when confronted by the special American task force.
The commander of that unit, Pete Blaber, summarizes his unit’s performance in his memoir, The Mission, the Men, and Me:
This was the first time in history that a tank unit was attached to a special operations force to conduct special operations missions behind enemy lines. We had destroyed hundreds of Saddam’s machines of war—tanks, artillery, rocket launchers, and jets, most of them abandoned by their crews seconds before we drilled them with a technological orgy of laser- and precision-guided munitions. Our ruse had worked way beyond even our most optimistic expectations. We had accomplished our overall mission of causing Saddam and his top generals to believe the main attack was coming from the west of Baghdad, instead of where the invasion force was actually attacking from—the south.
Delta operators played a crucial role in the capture of Saddam Hussein in December 2003.
When Delta was first established in the late ’70s, its official complement of men stood at about 170 troops. By the time “the Unit” was called on to spearhead the attack against the Taliban in Afghanistan in 2001, one of the leading authorities on the organization, journalist Sean Naylor, believes it had grown to force of about 1,000—700 support personnel and 300 combat operators.
According to two former Pentagon officials interviewed by The New York Times, the 1st Special Operational Detachment Delta was initially selected to carry out the kill-or-capture raid against Osama bin Laden. Fears that the presence of Delta operators in Afghanistan might tip off al Qaeda that a raid was imminent prompted the Special Operations Command to turn the mission over to the SEALs. Nonetheless, Delta was awarded a coveted Presidential Unit Citation for its performance early in the War in Afghanistan.
Since 2009, Special Operations Command has assigned primary responsibility for counter-terror and classified operations in Iraq and Syria to Delta Force, while the SEALs’ area of responsibility includes the Horn of Africa and Yemen. Delta Force is widely known to have worked extensively with Kurdish troops in the war against ISIS.
Just how does Delta compare to the SEALs, the only other Tier One special operations forces unit in the Department of Defense? SEALs, of course, specialize in maritime operations, and all SEALs are Navy personnel. Most of Delta is composed of Army soldiers, but members of other services are welcome to try to make the grade as well. In 2006, General Wayne Downing told Congress that 70 percent of Delta operators were former members of the Army’s 75th Ranger Regiment.
General levels of skill in marksmanship, conditioning, and small-unit operations within the two units are widely considered equivalent.
The ethos of Delta Force, as I’ve come to understand it in 30 years of writing about the U.S. military, would predispose its members to say very little about their success in neutralizing Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi. Wade Isimoto, a former Army officer who took part in Operation Eagle Claw, recently told The New York Times that Delta’s culture is one of “humility vs bravado, of great professionalism rather than seeking publicity, and not revealing their methods.”
It seems quite likely that Delta operators, current or former, would not look very favorably on those SEALs who sought to cash in on their success in the Osama bin Laden raid, or on the overly graphic gloating President Trump engaged in the morning after al-Baghdadi’s demise. That’s just not the Delta way of doing business.
