Lessons from the Osama bin Laden raid

President Obama showed that a meticulous process means everything

The situation room during the raid on bin Laden’s compound (White House photo by Pete Souza)

By Barbara A. Perry

Just before midnight on May 1, 2011, President Barack Obama announced that Navy SEALs had killed al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden (OBL) in a daring nighttime raid on his compound in Pakistan. After a decade, the United States had finally eliminated the mastermind behind 2001’s devastating 9/11 terrorist attacks that used civilian planes as missiles and murdered more than three thousand innocent souls in New York, Pennsylvania, and Virginia.

As the 15th anniversary of the successful bin Laden raid approaches, the Miller Center’s newly released Barack Obama Oral History Project offers insights about presidential performance gleaned from that 2011 decision.

Process is everything

From military operatives on the battlefield to the White House Situation Room, experience, knowledge, planning, and leadership are keys to success. As Admiral William McRaven recalled, “When I came in as the JSOC [Joint Special Operations Command] commander [in 2008], . . . we had a hell of a great process [for finding and eliminating terrorists]. . . . We had this process down pretty much pat by the time 2010 rolls in, and I get notified about bin Laden.”

The CIA had been trying to locate bin Laden for more than a decade. John Brennan, homeland security adviser in Obama’s first term and a former career CIA analyst, explained, “I had seen the footage of the Pacer [the nickname for the tall, bearded man who walked behind the compound’s high walls and never left it.]. . . . The CIA folks and I had lived this for a long, long time. We saw it developing. We had intellectually challenged, reviewed, interrogated the information. We had a lot of time on target, basically, and so when the president asked me if I thought it was him [OBL], without hesitation I said, ‘Yeah. I am very confident that that’s him.’”

Once the CIA was certain enough that they had traced bin Laden to his secret hideout in Pakistan, President Obama began meeting with Admiral Mike Mullen, chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and senior intelligence analysts. They shared with the commander in chief a model of the compound. Mullen noted that Obama approached the discussions of finding and eliminating bin Laden by asking “a thousand questions” because there was still “no smoking gun” to prove conclusively that he resided in the compound.

Therefore, Obama had to provide leadership by assuming the risk of mistakenly identifying bin Laden’s location. Mullen gave “Obama an awful lot of credit for a courageous decision. I really do believe it was a ‘bet the presidency’ decision. If that had gone badly,” Mullen believed, Obama would have lost his 2012 election bid.

Obama’s process for determining whether to move forward with an attack plan relied on questioning each of his senior advisers, whom he gathered around the Situation Room table. Secretary of Defense (and previous CIA Director) Bob Gates was skeptical about the intelligence on bin Laden’s coordinates and remembered the president saying, “‘It’s a 50/50 crapshoot any way you look at it.’”

Obama’s options

Once decided on bin Laden’s elimination, Obama had to determine how to do so. One option was a Navy SEAL raid on the compound, complicated by its location deep inside Pakistan and very near its national military academy. Gates remembered sitting in the same Situation Room with President Jimmy Carter and planning the ill-fated 1980 raid to rescue American hostages in Iran. Gates warned Obama, who had no military experience, that such daring attempts rarely go well. The defense secretary had a bias toward caution, he told the president. Less dangerous missions for the military included dropping bombs on the compound or sending an armed drone. Each had drawbacks.

Presidential leadership at its best

Mullen asserted that “having dissenting views [like Gates’s] is one of the greatest strengths of any decision-maker.” From the beginning, the admiral supported an in-person raid. “If we didn’t physically get [OBL]—literally if we didn’t have his body, have his DNA—then the enemy could have said forever it was a fake, that you didn’t get the right guy.” Mullen “had tremendous confidence in the team to go in and succeed.”

Gates reported that he shifted toward the raid option after his undersecretaries “made a very compelling case for why we ought to go forward with the raid.” He then “called [National Security Adviser Tom] Donilon and said, ‘You can tell the president I support the raid, so he can say it’s unanimous,’” although Vice President Joe Biden opposed the raid.

After Obama gathered all the opinions of his senior advisers on April 29, he left the Situation Room to weigh his options. Mullen noted that the president “typically would not make a visible decision in the room.” The next day he called Donilon to say, “It’s a go.” Yet the commander in chief couldn’t control the weather. May 2 became the only meteorological choice between two days of unfavorable conditions.

“Geronimo!”

Obama had made the fateful decision via a careful and orderly process that he managed. Now it was up to the Navy SEALs to carry out the mission. As Mullen recalled, “At that point in time, my main goal in life was to not get in the way of McRaven by the White House reaching in with a 10,000-mile screwdriver to somehow change the operation.”

All went according to the plan that had been rehearsed in the western United States—with one exception. There was no way to replicate the exact temperature in bin Laden’s compound, which affected the descent of one of the assault helicopters. Was Gates’s fear of another disaster coming to pass? No, the experienced Army pilot executed a landing that kept the copter upright, despite damage to the tail rotor from hitting the compound’s wall. Mullen noted that the pilot “literally saved the mission” by his masterful maneuver. The admiral also credited Obama with insisting that a third copter be ready as a backup for evacuating the assault team.

Soon the code words for killing bin Laden crackled across the communications channel: “Geronimo EKIA [Enemy Killed in Action]!” A Navy SEAL had killed the terrorist on the home’s third floor. In addition to removing the body and gathering as much intelligence from the house as they could, the commandos had to destroy the damaged copter and escape as quickly as possible before the Pakistani military was alerted to the raid.

The power of prayer?

Mullen noticed that during the raid he and Biden, a fellow Catholic, were fingering their “rosary rings,” a smaller version of the prayer beads used to repeat the “Hail Mary.” With their prayers answered, the admiral saw Biden return the ring to his wallet, but Mullen only half-teasingly told him, “Mr. Vice President, I’ve got 47 troops illegally in a foreign country. They just killed our number one enemy in the world, and I’ve got a 90-minute transit. They’ve got to refuel. I need to get them back into Afghanistan. I then have to transfer them to an [Bell Boeing V-22] Osprey, fly them through contested Pakistani airspace, get them out to the carrier, and get him [bin Laden] buried [at sea] in accordance with Islamic religious customs. Would you please put that rosary ring back on?”

After the president announced the momentous news to the nation in a brief East Room speech, Mullen described the relief among the team: “Biden walks up to me, pulls out his rosary ring, and shows it to me on his finger. I show him mine. Obama sees that. He walks over, and Obama literally reaches in his pocket and he pulls out a crucifix. That story is not known. And then [CIA Director] Leon [Panetta], who’s Catholic, he circles in, pulls out his rosary out of his pocket. He’d been moving the rosary beads during the whole thing as well. That was a pretty neat part of all of that. Buried him [bin Laden] safe.”

Obama impressed his troops with gratitude

McRaven suggested that the president go soon after the raid to Ft. Campbell in Kentucky “and talk to the great soldiers that are the helicopter pilots that flew the SEALs in, because they’re not going to get the kind of pat on the back that the SEALs will.” He thought Obama would make brief remarks on stage in a hanger filled with 600 soldiers, greet the senior leaders of the 101^st Airborne installation, and make a quick departure.

To McRaven’s surprise, the president stepped down from the stage and started shaking hands at the rope line. “I said to him, ‘Mr. President, you’re going to be here for another hour or so. If you want to step aside, it’ll be OK.’ And he looks at me and he goes, ‘Bill, I want to thank ’em.’ This is part of my job. It’s part of my opportunity to thank these soldiers. I don’t care if we’re here for another two hours,’ and I think we were there for another two hours. He shook hands with every single soldier.”

McRaven described young troops as “generally more conservative . . . . But I will tell you, once you got in front of the president, and you had a chance to shake hands, and you had a chance to see him, the soldiers were mesmerized by him. . . . To me, that was a great indication of (1) the soldiers’ appreciation and (2) his appreciation for them.”

Postmortems

Unfortunately, the elimination of bin Laden, while degrading al-Qaeda, did not result in an American victory over the Taliban in Afghanistan. Another decade would pass before Washington’s chaotic exit from that war-torn country. Yet the successful raid probably helped the president win reelection in 2012.

What are the lessons from Obama’s use of presidential power to decapitate the organization responsible for the deadliest attack ever on the U.S. homeland? The president’s meticulous process included working with knowledgeable and experienced civilian leaders he had appointed at CIA, Defense, and State, as well as to his White House staff, and relying on expert military veterans to plan and practice the raid. He posed informed questions that advanced the discussions, required detailed answers from intelligence advisers and combat-ready officers, welcomed dissent to challenge presumptions and preliminary conclusions, and fostered no pettiness or backstabbing. He trusted the military but insisted on backup plans to meet unpredictable contingencies.

As McRaven concluded about the raid, “I think our government works a heck of a lot better than people think it does. What was extraordinary about this was our ability to keep a secret, for one thing. It was the overall professionalism. . . . I give the president great credit for this because it was just the way he ran these meetings.”

Finally, as the Miller Center learned from its Obama oral histories, the power of prayer and reliance on religious symbols may not be measurable variables in presidential decision-making. But if there are no atheists in foxholes, the same held true for the Obama White House.

Barbara A. Perry is the J. Wilson Newman Professor of Governance and co-chair of the Miller Center’s Presidential Oral History Program. Her forthcoming book is Reconcilable Differences: The Unlikely Political Alliance of John F. Kennedy and Eleanor Roosevelt.