On the night of May 2, 2011, a team of US Special Forces killed Osama bin Laden in “Operation Neptune Spear.” The mission’s organizer and executor, Admiral William McRaven, was promoted to commander of US Special Operations command shortly thereafter, and sat down at this summer’s Aspen Security Forum with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer for his first public interview. Quick to deflect praise, McRaven described his forces as architects of peace, drew back the veil on foreign force integration, and made the case for journalistic discretion in covering their classified work across the globe.

Wolf Blitzer: What is Special Operations?

William McRaven: We get a lot of notoriety for the raids, for the rescue operations, and frankly, we’re very proud of that. When the nation calls on us to do those sort of operations, they expect us to be successful every single time, and I expect the guys to be successful, and they expect to be successful.

But the fact of the matter is that’s a small portion of what we do. When you take a look at where we are around the globe today, we are in 79 countries, and only one of those is Afghanistan. The other 78 countries, we are trying to teach other nations how to deal with their own problems so they don’t grow violent extremists. We’re building wells in places. We’re doing civil affairs operations. We’re doing information operations to cut down on things like corruption.

So there’s a whole spectrum of things that Special Operations do that rarely get the press’s attention because they’re not sexy. It doesn’t sound terribly good or bad at that point in time, but when you put the totality of it together, you have nations out there that have not gone extremist because Special Operations forces have been working there for decades.

WB: When you look at a young man or a woman out there, a 17-, 18-, 19-, 20-year-old who wants to be a Navy SEAL, what do you look for?

WM: They’ve got to be able to think on their feet. The physical aspect of it is important, but we all know people who are very physically fit but can’t think on their feet. At the end of the day, I want somebody who can think, react, and operate under pressure and make the right decision, somebody who’s got some life experience and maturity. The average operator is about 34 years old, married with two kids, spent about six years in the conventional force, so he’s got some life experience. That’s not always true. The young SEALs and the young Rangers come in, and some of them are 18, 19 years old, but across the board, our population is a
little bit more experienced.

WB: Tell me the two or three greatest Special Operations missions that you studied and learned from.

WM: I was fortunate enough to go to the Naval Postgraduate School in Monterey, and I had an opportunity to do some good thinking and research on Special Operations. And I was originally trying to figure out what the principles of Special Operations were.

There have historically been principles of war, mass maneuver, size, those sorts of things, but I knew that a successful Special Operation was different because invariably, you’ve got a smaller force going against a well-defended force. But more times than not, that Special Operations force succeeded. So the question is why did it succeed?

I did eight different case studies. One that jumped out at me, interestingly enough, was the Army Special Forces raid on the POW compound in Son Tay, North Vietnam. And while the prisoners were not there and we were not successful in rescuing the prisoners, when you look at how those great Green Berets and airmen and helicopter pilots planned, rehearsed, and executed that operation, other than the fact that the intelligence was flawed and we were not able to get to the POWs, it was almost flawless in terms of the execution.  

And the one thing that taught me—because I had the opportunity to interview a lot of these soldiers—was that they rehearsed and rehearsed and rehearsed and then rehearsed again. And they looked at plan A, plan B, plan C, and plan D, because they knew at the end of the day that no good plan survives first contact with the enemy.
And so when things did go wrong to some degree on the target in Son Tay, they were flexible.

The other one was the Israeli raid on Entebbe [Uganda, in 1976]—a different model in that they didn’t have as much time but they had a very, very capable force, and were very ingenious in how they approached the problem set. They knew they had to get close to the target, they knew they had to use some sort of operational deception, which they did. As you recall, they had a Mercedes with an Idi Amin look-alike. That gave them just enough time to be able to get to the target and execute the mission. Unfortunately, Yonathan Netanyahu was killed in the operation, but having said that, it was an exceedingly successful operation.

But frankly, there are equally magnificent special operations going on today in Afghanistan and in the past years in Iraq that would probably rival any of those. They just didn’t get the kind of recognition they probably deserve.

WB: What should the US be doing about al-Queda in places like Yemen and Somalia?

WM: The US is partnering with the government of Yemen. The government of Yemen has been very supportive in this partnership, and we are working with Yemeni forces so they can take care of their own security problems. And as they made the transition from President [Ali Abdullah] Saleh to President [Abd Rabbuh Mansur] al-Hadi, that transition frankly probably went better than we would have expected. President Hadi has done a good job in stepping up to the plate, taking this
threat of al-Queda in Yemen seriously, and because of that, the US is again reaching out to him where it is appropriate to do so.

WB: You work closely with foreign militaries. How does that work out? Give us a little description.

WM: As I said, we’re in about 78 additional countries above and beyond Afghanistan today. The first thing we do is sit down the country team—the chief emissary, the ambassador, to make sure that our goals are consistent with the ambassador’s goals. There is some belief out there that we have separate agenda from the ambassador, and I will tell you that’s absolutely not the case. Before we ever go into a country, the US ambassador and the country team have to provide us clearance in order to get into the country. So any thought that somehow Special Operations guys slip into a country and do things that are outside the purview of the embassy is just patently wrong. Everything we do supports the embassy mission there, and that starts months before we are ever in a country.

So we’ll work with the embassy. We will partner with a unit that’s gone through the Leahy vetting [an amendment prohibiting the US military from assisting foreign military units that violate human rights]. And a lot of times, it’s basic infantry tactics dependent upon the unit to get them up to a certain level.

WB: And you train each other, you help each other, you learn from each other.

WM: Absolutely. There’s this belief that as we go in as Americans to a less developed country that somehow we’re doing all the teaching. That’s absolutely not the case. As we go into a country, we’re learning a lot about their culture, and we talk a great deal within Special Operations about understanding the human domain.

You have the maritime, the ground, and the air domains, and then there’s a human domain you have to operate in, and that’s the totality of the physical and the cultural environment. So as we go into a country in Africa or in the Middle East or the Pacific region, we’re learning about them. We’re learning what their culture is so next time we come back in, they understand who we are, and we understand who they are.

You build that trust—you can’t surge trust. You’ve got to start it early, and that’s one of the things Special Operations forces do very well— build a small footprint. We don’t take a lot of guys to do that and it’s pretty cost-effective.

WB: Now that gays are allowed to serve openly in the US military, I assume that among the 66,000 Special Operations troops that you command, there are gays and lesbians who serve there. How is that working out? Because we heard all sorts of horror stories, fears that this would be a disaster.

WM: Yeah, but at the end of the day, all we care about is whether you carry your rucksack and do your job. And whether you’re a female, whether you’re gay or lesbian, whether you’re a minority is immaterial to the guy in the military. We just want somebody that steps up and does their job.

WB: How do you feel about [national security leaks]?

WM: We’re never happy when leaks occur, obviously. We go to great lengths to protect our national security, and very great lengths to protect our sources and methods. We guard all of that very carefully, but unfortunately, not everyone guards that very carefully. Secretary Panetta and the President and the Hill are taking these leaks very seriously, as they should, and we need to do the best we can to clamp down on it. Because sooner or later, it is going to cost people their lives, or it’s going to cost us our national security. So it’s important, and frankly, I would tell you, it’s important for reporters that are here.

You’re going to hear things, you’re going to see things, that you think the public needs to know. And I will tell you, I’m not sure the public needs to know all that. A lot of times, you all are racing to a deadline to try and trump the next network, potentially at the expense of somebody’s life. I have had discussions with editors about the sensitive nature of some of the things they are about to print, and they’ve been very candid with me and said, “If so-and-so is going to beat us to the story, I’m going to print it.” And all you can do is make the best case you can. That’s not to say the American people don’t need to have a completely transparent government. I got it, and I’m the guy working to protect that transparency for all the right reasons. But I do think as reporters, you have an obligation as well, and I would encourage ever reporter in this room to accept their responsibility to protect this country.

From the Audience: How do you instill the kind of commitment and dedication in these young men and women that Special Forces display?

WM: I think a lot of them come in with that in their DNA. They come in and they join our organizations because they want to be special, they want to be challenged, they want to be put into difficult situations. And so you have great men and women that are coming into the service. When you’re young, you’re looking for an adventure. And then after a while, that adventure becomes of a profession, and then after a while, that profession becomes a calling, and you find in the senior military guys that it has become a calling to them. It’s a very, very powerful self-awareness that it’s not about you. It’s about a cause that’s greater than you, and that’s what brings them together.