Holy cow, did the vice president really say this?
Vice President Joseph Biden on Monday night upped the ante around the already quite-dramatic assassination of Osama bin Laden.Okay, having been an operations planner from battalion to Army corps to the Pentagon, I can tell you that 48 percent probability of success is sometimes pretty doggone good.
From the pool report of Biden's comments during a fundraising event in New Jersey come these quotes.
You can go back 500 years. You cannot find a more audacious plan. Never knowing for certain. We never had more than a 48 percent probability that he was there.
But really - for all the risks, skill and courage of the SEALs and Army aviators who carried out the bin Laden raid, was it actually the most audacious military raid in 500 years? Since the United States and colonial America have had armed forces for about 300 years of that time, Biden must have been thinking of operations done by any nation in the world (assuming, of course, that he was thinking at all, which is always a matter of speculation).
But let's not dicker over long-ago history, nor even 500 years. Let's stay in our own military history and go back only seven decades.
Vice President Biden, meet then-Lt. Col. Jimmy Doolittle, commanding the first American airmen to bomb Japan in World War II:
In brief, US Army Air Corps medium bombers launched from a Navy aircraft carrier to bomb Japan in April 1942, only four months after Pearl Harbor and before the US had won a single battle against Japan. The carrier USS Hornet with a small escort force was was to sail to only about 400 miles from Tokyo at a time when Japan's Navy absolutely dominated the western Pacific ocean. The Hornet task force could not defend itself at all because all navy aircraft had been removed to make room for the bombers. The entire operation depended on secrecy and escaping detection both sailing in and returning.
When the task force was more than 800 miles from Tokyo, multiple surface contacts with Japanese vessels, including one short engagement, compelled Doolittle to order the planes to take off immediately. The Doolittle Raiders' official web site offers comprehensive accounts of what followed.
It would be hard to identify another action in the entire war that rivaled the audacity of the Doolittle raid. Its effects on the course of the war were profound. So shocked was the Japanese government that it ordered the return of naval forces from the Indian ocean. Trying to determine where the Army bombers had come from, and apparently never considering that they could have launched from an aircraft carrier, the Japanese navy decided that they had to have come from Midway Island. It then devoted four carriers to eliminating the presumed threat there. The resulting Battle of Midway sent all four carriers to the ocean's bottom and resulted in Japan's permanent loss of initiative. Before Midway, Japan never lost. After Midway, it never won.
Yet the most profound risk of the Doolittle Raid was not losing the bombers or their crews, but the risk of losing Hornet and the accompanying combatant ships. The US Navy was on a shoestring in those days; Hornet was one of only four carriers the US Navy had in the Pacific. A month after the raid the Navy was down to three, having lost USS Lexington at the Battle of the Coral Sea. Had Hornet been lost during the Doolittle raid, Coral Sea, which turned aside Japanese efforts against Australia, would have meant severe difficulty for the Navy. The Battle of Midway in June 1942 would almost certainly not have been a victory for the US Navy if had been compelled to fight with only two carriers. In the battle, Hornet represented one-third of the Navy's airpower and its Torpedo Squadron 8, though destroyed except for Ensign George Gay, and scoring no hits against Japanese ships, was crucial in the minutes-afterward success of Navy dive bombers, which sank three Japanese carriers in mere minutes.
Though these events had yet to unfold when Hornet sailed toward Tokyo in April 1942, every officer involved understood the exceptionally high stakes for the country, and so did President Roosevelt, on whose shoulders rested the final decision to go. I have to say again: without diminishing the skill and personal risks to the bin Laden raiders, the strategic risks and actual danger to country of failure in Abottabad, Pakistan, was nil. For the Doolittle raid they were immense and potentially decisive had failure resulted.
Blackfive has more.
Postscript: There are only five still-living Doolittle Raiders.
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