The culmination of counterterrorism operations — the “finish” of a target via their capture or killing — often involves dramatic actions such as the Delta Force raid which led to Islamic State leader Abu Bakr al Baghdadi’s death. But to finish a target, that target must first be found, then fixed in a location. The hard work of the finders and fixers allows the finishers to act.
As former Delta Force officer Jim Reese noted to me, the finish of any manhunter operation involves “surprise, speed, and violence of action.” But the prior two stages require painstaking efforts, often over many months or years, and often leading to dead ends before the result finally arrives.
The finders’ job is to identify the targets, their inner and outer circles, and then prioritize intelligence resources on anyone who can help narrow those circles back to a target. This is painstaking work, often involving a great deal of reliance on signal, human, and other intelligence collection platforms. Much of the intelligence collection will ultimately turn out to be irrelevant or outdated as applied to the target. Analysts can look for patterns of behavior such as motorcades, lookouts, and certain cellphone activity.
The intelligence community has a limited resource pool and many other missions. But when the finders eventually feel confident enough that they’ve got a hard find or location — big disagreements can exist as to what adequate confidence entails — they must then move to fix that target.
Depending on the target’s value, this fixing involves varying degrees of resource-intensive surveillance. It might entail satellite, aerial, and human monitoring of the target’s residence and movements. The fixing almost always involves electronic tagging and surveillance of any cellphones or other connected devices in the vicinity of the target. The idea here is that anyone around the target can unwittingly corroborate the target’s presence or provide tactical intelligence to assist in capturing the target/other operations. These added target-fixes allow for a continued monitoring of the target if they move location (which most hunted terrorists do).
Then comes the assault. Great responsibility weighs on the operational manager, and, as with the riskiest operations, such as the Baghdadi raid, senior political officials at the top of the national command authority. They must judge a probability assessment as to the target’s fix and the likelihood of a successful finish. But if it goes wrong, they must pay the price.
Luck, then, is always a crucial ingredient on top of preparation. Jimmy Carter was unlucky with the attempt to rescue American hostages in Tehran. Barack Obama and President Trump were lucky with Bin Laden and Baghdadi.
