1: It was March of 2011. SEAL Team Six Commander Master Chief Dave Cooper and another Team Six leader were summoned to CIA headquarters in McLean, Virginia.
“We think we’ve found Osama bin Laden,” Admiral William McRaven, commander of Joint Special Operations Command, told them bluntly.
Admiral McRaven then outlined the plan: “Team Six operators would fly into Pakistan in stealth helicopters, fast-rope onto the the compound’s roof, and kill the Al Qaeda leader,” Daniel Coyle writes in The Culture Code: The Secrets of Highly Successful Groups.
Dave Cooper listened intently, but his mind kept coming back to the stealth helicopters.
“He knew they were attractive to McRaven,” Daniel writes, “because they were invisible to radar and would thus allow the team to travel undetected through Pakistani airspace.
But Dave also knew the stealth helicopters had not been tested in combat, and “special ops history was littered with disasters caused by using untested tools in combat,” Daniel notes.
So he spoke up.
“With all due respect, sir,” Dave said, “I would not use those helicopters on this mission. I would plan something else in parallel. If we can’t go with something else, then I go with the helicopters.”
“We’re not changing the plan now,” Admiral McRaven said.
Dave made his point again: “Sir, I’d be remiss if I didn’t tell you what I thought.”
Now William raised his voice. “We’re not changing the plan now,” he said.
“In that moment, I was pretty sure I was getting fired,” Dave told Daniel. “But I wasn’t going to keep my mouth shut.”
He raised the point again. Once again, he was shut down. Discussion over.
Dave walked out of that room with a challenge: “How do I follow an order that carries what I consider to be an unacceptably high risk?” Daniel writes.
“Should I follow the order or defy it?”
2: Dave chose a third option.
“He accepted the use of the stealth helicopters and also started preparing in case they failed,” Daniel writes.
“In the ensuing weeks, the SEALs built replicas of Bin Laden’s compound in North Carolina, Nevada, and Afghanistan. In each place, Dave ran downed helicopter scenarios over and over. He simulated crashes outside the compound, inside the compound, on the roof, in the yard, hundreds of yards away.
“Each was essentially the same: Partway through the operation, Dave would surprise the team with the order ‘You’re going down, now.’ “
At which point, the pilots would land the helicopter immediately, and the SEALs would attack the mock compound from that place.
“There were never any right or wrong answers; they had to self-organize and deal with problem,” Dave recalls. “Then we’d do the AAR (After Action Review), talk about it, and figure out what had happened and what we could do better next time.”
After-action reviews are gatherings that occur immediately after each mission or training session.
“Team members put down their weapons, grab a snack and water, and start talking,” Daniel writes. “The team members name and analyze problems and face uncomfortable questions head-on: Where did we fail? What did each of us do, and why did we do it? What will we do differently next time?”
To be successful, AARs require team members to be vulnerable. They can be “raw, painful, and filled with pulses of emotion and uncertainty,” Daniel notes.
The question at the heart of AARs is always: What’s really going on here?
“They’re not real fun,” says Christopher Baldwin, a former operator with SEAL Team Six. “They can get tense at times. I’ve never seen people fistfight, but it can get close. Still, it’s probably the most crucial thing we do together, aside from the missions themselves, because that’s where we figure out what really happened and how to get better.”
The downed helicopter drills and AARs that followed were difficult.
“We ran so many that it became a joke among the guys,” Dave remembers. “They were saying, ‘Hey, Coop, can we please run another downed-helicopter scenario?'”
Then, on May 1, the order came down to proceed with the mission. Two stealth helicopters took off from the U.S. air base in Jalalabad.
At the base’s command center, Dave, Admiral McRaven, and others gathered around the screen to watch the drone video feed. In Washington, D.C., President Barack Obama and his national security team sat in a room in the White House watching the same feed.
At first, everything went according to plan. The teams made it through Pakistani airspace undetected. They flew toward Bin Laden’s compound.
“But as the first helicopter attempted to land,” Daniel writes, “things went wrong. One helicopter skidded around in the air as if it were on ice, veering and spinning toward the ground.
“The other helicopter, which was supposed to land on the roof of the main compound, saw the problems and veered off to land outside.”*
Then things got really nasty.
During the crash-landing, the first helicopter’s tail section lodged into the wall and tipped onto its side, its nose buried in the dirt.
“In the command post, the generals stared wordlessly at the screen,” Daniel writes. “For three or four seconds, the room was filled with an unbearable silence.”
Then, on their screens, they saw the Team Six operators “pouring out of the downed helicopter, just as they had in the drills, going to work.”
“They didn’t miss a beat,” Dave recalls. “Once they got on the ground, there was zero doubt.”
Thirty-eight minutes later, it was over. Mission accomplished.
3: “From afar, the Bin Laden raid looked like a demonstration of team strength, power, and control,” Daniel writes. “But that strength was built of a willingness to spot and confront the truth and to come together to ask a simple question over and over: What’s really going on here?”
SEAL Team Six was successful that day “because they understood that being vulnerable together is the only way a team can become invulnerable,” Daniel observes.
“When we talk about courage, we think it’s going against an enemy with a machine gun,” Dave says. “The real courage is seeing the truth and speaking the truth to each other. People never want to be the person who says, ‘Wait a second, what’s really going on here?’ But inside the squadron, that is the culture, and that’s why we’re successful.”
More tomorrow!
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Reflection: Does my team conduct regular After Action Reviews after important projects?
Action: Experiment with this idea.
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