Former Delta Force Commander Has Worst Idea Ever For Afghanistan

I am about to tell you a very, very bad idea

Ok everybody. I know things are looking grim over here, what with more US and coalition troops dying last month than in any previous month of the war, the security situation deteriorating for average Afghans, the wheels coming off the election process and attacks in the capital.

But somehow, I don’t think loosing murderous scum from the US prison system onto the plains and mountains of central Asia for covert suicide missions  is the answer that the international community is looking for. From Dalton Fury (no, not his real name) at Abu Muqawama:

Doesn’t our great nation, the sole super power in the world, have the capacity to field killers equal to the 9/11 hijackers?

Yeah! If the Talibs can field suicide squads, the good ‘ol US of A can field even more ruthless and desperate suicide squads! But where would we find such psychos?

What about those prisons? What if we offered men on death row the opportunity of a lifetime? What if we spent a year or so training them to execute a covert assassination suicide mission? A mission with no exfil phase.

The opportunity of a lifetime? Seriously? I think I’ve seen this movie before, the one with Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte. I think that mission started off with a bloody fistfight in an alley, but I’m sure things will be better when the convicts in question are homicidal maniacs instead of wise-cracking thieves.
But what happens after all of our convicts have patriotically given their lives in suicide missions? Dalton Fury knows!

What about recruiting convicted killers in the Middle East who see little value in life, and whose life is short as is, and offer them the Rocky Balboa opportunity of the global war on terror? Recruiting ex-patriot or disenfranchised, poor, and destitute Saudis, Yemenis, Pakistanis, Iraqis, Somalis, etc. to do the deed with an iron clad contract that their surviving families would get a guaranteed passage to the US, US citizenship, a seat in the Federal Witness Protection program and a fat bank account would likely net some great candidates.

Yes, I’m sure we’d “net some great candidates” from the bowels of a Syrian prison.

In all seriousness, I’ve met plenty of US Special Forces guys who work in small teams in dangerous environments and do the kind of precision warfare or covert ops that Fury is talking about. The number one thing that they all had in common (besides the swagger) was they were all smart.

Very, very smart.

Getting to a small, well protected target, undetected, in a foreign, hostile country, and then sneaking up to that target without anyone who has lived there for their entire lives noticing you, is not a job for murderers  dumb enough to get caught by local police. And I don’t care if they do get “a year or so” of training, US and British special ops guys get a helluva’ lot more than that to even be considered for assignments like these.

What puzzles me is that Dalton Fury knows all this. He’s a former Delta commander–hence the fake name–with two decades in the military. According to this 60 Minutes story, it was Fury who led the team that went into Tora Bora to kill Bin Laden. Does he really think that a team of hoods from US and international prisons could do the work that he and his men did?

Could this essay even be real?