What Navy SEAL Team Six Said After Their First Joint Operation With the SAS in Iraq
The operational briefing was the same kind of briefing that SEAL Team Six had received hundreds of times before it. The objective was a structure in a district of the western Baghdad operational area where an AQI network cell had been identified. The intelligence picture was assessed as solid, confirmed occupancy, pattern of life established, threat assessment completed, approach routes analyzed.
The joint arrangement for the operation divided the objective package between two units. SEAL Team Six would take the primary target building, a four-story structure at the eastern end of the compound, while the SAS would simultaneously handle three secondary structures in the surrounding block. SEAL Team Six’s planning officer noted the arrangement in his orders with the standard professional attention and moved on to the threat assessment.
The SAS were allies with an established reputation. The expectation going into the operation was professional competence and effective coordination. It was not an expectation that needed revision. The revision came anyway. Before we dive in, drop a comment and let us know where you are watching from.
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The coordination requirement was straightforward. All four elements would make entry within a 60-second window to prevent any occupant from one building alerting occupants of another. The SAS’s three secondary structures were assessed as containing lower priority targets with fewer armed personnel.
The intelligence picture put the primary threat concentration in the SEAL Team Six objective. The arrangement reflected a standard doctrinal waiting of force against assessed threat. SEAL Team Six would handle the hard target. The SAS would handle the secondary network. At 0200, all four elements made entry simultaneously. SEAL Team Six entered the primary building with the efficiency that their training produces and proceeded through the clear without complication.
The building was secured in 7 minutes, which was within their planning timeline. Personnel were detained, materials were being collected, and the team was beginning the exploitation process when the joint radio net carried the first transmission from the SAS. It was brief, flat, and specific.
All three secondary structures were secure, personnel detained, exploitation underway. The element leader of SEAL Team Six checked the time. The SAS had handled three buildings in the time his team had handled one. The mathematics of this observation was not immediately comfortable. The radio traffic from the SAS elements across the three buildings monitored on the joint net throughout the operations execution phase had been almost nothing.
Three separate clearance operations running simultaneously staffed by a single SAS team that had split itself across multiple objectives, and the sum of their radio output during the execution phase was fewer transmissions than a single SEAL Team Six operator typically generated during a single building operation.
This observation was noted by the SEAL element leader during the operation and discussed afterward in the post-operation debrief with a directness that was characteristic of SEAL Team Six’s internal professional culture. If you observe something that challenges your assumptions, you say so clearly and investigate what it means.
What the radio traffic had shown and what the timeline had confirmed required investigation. The SEAL element leader was a man who had been operating at the highest levels of special operations for long enough to have developed stable professional references. He had worked alongside Rangers, Green Berets, Delta, Allied Special Operations Forces from multiple countries.
His professional vocabulary for evaluating elite performance was well-developed and carefully calibrated. The observation he recorded in the post-operation debrief was stated with the precision that calibration produces. The SAS had achieved, with a single team distributed across three structures, a result that his own assessment framework had not rated as achievable within the planning timeline.
The gap between his assessment and the outcome was specific and measurable. He was not going to not address it. The post-operation debrief in the joint operations room was the formal record of what both units had done and what they had observed. The informal debrief happened later between the element leaders of both units in the manner that professional soldiers use when formality is not required and directness is.
The SAS element leader answered the questions he was asked. He did not explain the three-building result as if it required explanation because from his perspective it was a standard execution of a standard task. The SEAL element leader did not receive this response as dismissiveness. He received it as the honest answer of someone who had internalized the relevant capabilities so thoroughly that they no longer registered as noteworthy.
This observation was, in some ways, the most informative thing he took from the conversation. The intelligence picture that drove the joint operation had been assembled over the preceding three weeks through the task force’s standard collection architecture, overhead imagery, signals intercepts, source reporting from contacts inside the AQI network that the task force had been developing for several months.
The picture was solid at the network level. The relationship between the primary target and the cell structure that surrounded him was well understood. The compound’s function in the broader network had been established, and the threat assessment had been developed from specific collection rather than from generic assessments of comparable targets.
What the picture was less specific about was the secondary structures. The intelligence assessed them as AQI associated, identified their occupants as network members, but had not developed the same depth of coverage on the secondary sites as it had on the primary. This was standard. Collection resources are finite and get directed toward the highest priority targets, but it meant that the SAS, who were tasked against the secondary buildings, were operating from a shallower intel ligence picture than SEAL Team Six.
The SEAL Team Six planning officer, who allocated tasks across the joint objective, had made this assessment and had weighted the force accordingly, assigning his own unit to the more intelligence-rich primary target and the SAS to the secondary buildings. This was operationally logical and professionally appropriate.
What the planning officer had not fully accounted for was the relationship between intelligence depth and execution speed. That a team with shallow intelligence on its targets, but deep operational capability, can sometimes achieve faster and more complete execution than a team with deep intelligence, but standard operational capability, because the team’s capability compensates for information gaps through the speed and decisiveness of the execution itself.
The SEAL Team Six planning officer learned this on the first joint operation and noted it in his post-operation documentation with professional specificity. The approach to the primary target building by SEAL Team Six was standard in the positive sense, well-planned, well-executed, producing the outcome the planning had projected within the timeline the planning had established.
The assessment of the building’s occupants, the approach route, the breach point, and the clearing sequence had been built on 3 weeks of collection and was substantially accurate. The primary target was where he was expected to be. The additional personnel in the building were within the assessed range. The material exploitation produced what the intelligence picture had predicted it would produce.
7 minutes from first entry to building secure was a good time and the element leader knew it. The professional discomfort came from the radio net. The three simultaneous transmissions from the SAS, all three buildings, all within 12 seconds of each other, all reporting secure, arrived on the joint net while the SEAL Team Six element was still in the middle of its exploitation phase.
The element leader recorded this in his mental log and said nothing during the operation because the operation was ongoing and the operation required focus. The processing happened afterward during the debrief and it was honest. The SAS had handled a three-building simultaneous operation in less time than his unit had needed for one building that had been the subject of 3 weeks of dedicated intelligence collection.
The gap between the two outcomes was specific and measurable and it was not fully explained by the difference in threat environment between the primary and secondary buildings. The secondary buildings had been assessed as easier. They hadn’t been assessed as that much easier.
The SEAL element leader’s formal debrief statement on the SAS performance was precise and stripped of editorial comment as debrief statements should be. He described the three building result, the elapsed time, and the radio discipline. He noted that the performance exceeded the pre-operation assessment of what a team of that size could achieve within the operational timeline.
He did not attribute the result to any factor he had not directly observed. He recommended continued joint operations as a standing request for the remainder of the rotation. The debriefing officer noted the recommendation. It was approved before the recommendation had been formally submitted because the task force commander had made the same assessment from the overall operational picture within an hour of the operation’s conclusion.
The days following the first joint operation were marked by a quality of mutual professional attention that both sides recognized and neither needed to name. SEAL operators observed SAS operators. SAS operators observed SEAL operators. The observations were respectful and specific in the way that two groups of professionals who have found themselves in the same space and are each trying to understand what the other knows produce observation carefully, without ego, with genuine interest in the specific mechanics of how the work gets done.
The SEAL operators who were most direct about their professional curiosity, who asked questions without worrying whether the questions revealed gaps in their own knowledge, got the most from the period. The ones who approached the observation as a comparison exercise got less because comparison requires a fixed reference point, and the most valuable professional insight comes from recognizing that the reference point needs to move.
The SAS element leader’s account of the same first operation, provided in a separate debrief with the British liaison staff, was characteristically brief. He described the three building operation in the same terms he would have used to describe any other operation at that difficulty level. It went as planned. The secondary structures were cleared within the timing requirement.
The intelligence objectives were achieved. He noted, without emphasis, that the coordination with SEAL Team Six had been professional and that the joint radio net had functioned correctly. He did not note what the SEAL element leader had noted about the time differential because from his perspective, there was no differential that required noting.
The operation had been planned, executed, and completed. The timeline had been met. These were the appropriate metrics. The SEAL element leader’s specific interest in the three-building time result was when it was communicated to the SAS element leader through the informal channel of the post-operation conversation, something he received with the polite puzzlement of someone being complimented on a capability he has long since stopped thinking of as remarkable.
He noted this in the debrief documentation and let the observation stand without further comment. The record was the record. The reputational weight that SEAL Team Six carried into the joint operation was substantial and specific. The unit’s operational history, accumulated over decades of direct action missions across multiple conflict environments, had produced a record that was genuinely impressive by any objective standard.
The selection process that produced Team Six operators was among the most demanding in American special operations, and the continuation training that followed selection maintained physical and technical standards that were at the upper end of what the human body and human cognition can reliably sustain. The operators who arrived at the forward operating base for the joint operation were not ordinary special operations forces.
They were among the most capable military personnel in the American system. Their assessment of the SAS would not be the assessment of people who could be easily impressed by technical proficiency because technical proficiency was something they themselves possessed at a level that made it a baseline rather than a distinguishing quality. The pre-operation briefing structure revealed the first substantive difference between how the two forces organized their mission preparation.
SEAL Team Six briefings at that time followed a structure that had evolved through the unit’s operational history. A format that moved from the intelligence picture to the mission objective, to the tactical scheme of maneuver, to the contingency planning in a sequence that was logical and comprehensive and that provided every participant with a thorough understanding of every element of the plan.
The SAS briefing structure was less formally organized in its presentation but more interactive in its process. SAS briefings at this stage of operation were not presentations of a completed plan. They were working sessions in which the plan was developed in the briefing room with contributions from team members who were expected to have identified problems and alternatives before they walked into the room.
The distinction is between a briefing that communicates a plan and a briefing that completes one and the SAS model was the second type. Team Six operators sitting in on an SAS pre-operation briefing for the first time found it disorganized by their standards. SAS operators sitting in on a Team Six briefing found it comprehensive but unresponsive to the kind of ground level input they were trained to provide.
The weapons handling assessment that Team Six operators made of the SAS during the joint operation was among the most analytically careful dimensions of the inter-unit evaluation that the first joint operation produced. Team six had spent years developing and refining close-quarters battle techniques through a development process that was highly structured and extensively documented.
And the unit’s standards in close-quarters environments were extremely high. The SAS’s close-quarters battle techniques were equally high in standard, but different in some of their technical specifics. Different enough that Team six operators could identify the differences and form views about which approach was better for specific tactical scenarios.
The evaluation was professional, rather than competitive. Both forces were interested in the same question: Which techniques produced the best outcomes in the environments they were operating in? And what could each force learn from the other’s approach to answering that question? The exchange of technical knowledge that followed the first joint operation was one of its most valuable long-term products.
The communications architecture for the joint operation had been designed by the American planning staff using American communication systems and American frequency management protocols with provision for British communications equipment to be integrated through interface devices that allowed both forces to monitor a common operational network.
The interface devices functioned, but the interface between two systems that had been designed independently and integrated in the field through adapters, rather than through native compatibility, created small timing and fidelity issues that were manageable under normal operational conditions and degraded under conditions of heavy electronic interference.
The joint operation experienced a period of heavy electronic interference during the most complex phase of the clearance sequence. The degradation in communications during that period required both forces to fall back on pre-planned contingency protocols, and the quality of each force’s contingency protocols, the specificity with which they had been designed for exactly this scenario, determined how well each force managed the degraded communications environment.
Both forces managed it. They managed it with slightly different levels of disruption to the operational tempo, and the reasons for those differences were instructive for the post-operation review. The physical movement techniques that the two forces used in the approach to the target building were broadly similar in their tactical logic, but different in their execution in ways that reflected different training traditions.
Both forces moved in a formation that balanced the need for mutual support with the need for speed, and both forces adjusted their formation when the terrain required it without losing the mutual support architecture. The differences were in the specific adjustments made at transitions from open ground to built-up terrain, from low-threat sectors, from the approach to the breach, and in the communication protocols used to coordinate those adjustments.
Team six transitions were coordinated through explicit hand and arm signals from the element leader with confirmation signals from each team member acknowledging the instruction. SAS transitions were coordinated through a combination of brief radio transmissions and movement that the team members initiated based on their own assessment of the tactical situation and their understanding of where the team leader wanted to go.
The SAS model assumed a higher level of individual tactical judgment in each team member. The Team six model assumed a more explicit command structure. Both models worked. They worked on different premises about what each team member was expected to contribute to the coordination problem. Chapter two.
The formal debrief documentation produced by SEAL Team Six following the joint operation was thorough and specific. The section on SAS performance addressed three distinct observations: the simultaneous multi-site capacity, the communication discipline during execution, and the elapsed time from first entry to all structures secure.
Each observation was supported by the available record, radio logs, operation timeline entries, exploitation reports. The documentation did not make claims beyond what the record supported. It did not attribute the performance to mystical capability or institutional mythology. It described precisely what had been observed and left the analysis to be drawn by the reader.
The simultaneous multi-site execution was the first and most operationally significant observation. The SAS team, of a size that SEAL Team Six’s planning assessment had treated as sufficient for one building, had run three buildings at the same time without detectable degradation of performance at any of the three sites.
The SEAL Team Six planning officer who reviewed the debrief documentation noted that this capability required not just physical capacity at each site, but a quality of coordination across the three simultaneous operations that was maintained without the communications overhead that standard doctrine assumes is necessary for that level of coordination.
The SAS team had been in three different buildings at the same time facing three independent situations and had managed the relationship between those three situations without significant verbal coordination. The planning officer’s annotation in the margin of the debrief document asked a question he didn’t yet have an answer to.
How do you coordinate three simultaneous operations without the communications that coordination requires? The communication observation was the second major section of the debrief documentation. The SEAL operators monitoring the joint radio net during the SAS execution had the logs from those monitoring sessions, and the logs were specific.
The total SAS radio traffic across three buildings during the execution phase occupied less than 90 seconds of airtime. For comparison, the SEAL Team Six primary building operation, a single building, had generated approximately 4 minutes of radio traffic during the same phase. The difference was not between a well-run operation and a poorly run one.
SEAL Team Six’s communication during the primary building operation was efficient and professional. The difference was between two communication philosophies, one of which required more verbal confirmation, and the other of which appeared to operate on a shared understanding so deep that the verbal confirmation was largely redundant.
The elapsed time observation produced the most extended discussion in the post-operation debriefs because it was the most measurable discrepancy between the pre-operation assessment and the post-operation outcome. The secondary structures had been assessed as manageable targets that would require a proportional time allocation.
The SAS had cleared all three within the execution window of the primary target, which by the planning assessment was the more demanding demanding objective. This was not explicable by threat differential alone. The secondary structures had been less well armed than the primary, which made them easier, but the degree of ease required to produce the observed time result exceeded what the threat differential fully accounted for.
The SEAL Team Six planning officer concluded in his debrief notes that the time result was a product of an approach to building entry and clearance that was simply faster in its mechanics than the approach he had been using as his planning reference. This was a professional observation, not a critique. It was noted and examined. The informal conversations between SEAL Team Six operators and SAS operators over the days following the first joint operation were the medium through which the most specific and useful information was exchanged. SEAL operators asked about
the three building approach, how the team divided itself, how the coordination between elements was maintained during simultaneous execution, how command decisions were made when the team leader was in a different building from the elements he was commanding. The SAS operators answered these questions directly and without evasion because they were being asked by professionals who had demonstrated they understood what the questions were about and because the information they were sharing was not sensitive. It was their
method and it had value to anyone willing to apply it with the same level of training behind it. What the SEAL operators absorbed from these conversations was not a set of transferable techniques in the narrow sense, the specific drills, the specific communication protocols, the specific entry mechanics. What they absorbed was a different understanding of what the unit is in the context of a clearance operation.
The SAS approach treated the team as a single organism with distributed capacity rather than as a collection of individual operators coordinated by a commander. Each member carried a complete picture of the operation including the portions he was not personally executing and could make decisions about his own actions in the context of that complete picture without needing to receive explicit instruction from the team leader.
This meant the team could be distributed across multiple structures because the coordination requirement for each member was to act in accordance with the complete picture he carried rather than to receive direction about what to do at each decision point. The difference between these two models of team function produced the difference in outcome that the debrief documentation had noted.
SEAL Team Six carried this understanding home. The element leaders post deployment interview, conducted as part of the standard after action process, addressed the joint operation directly when asked about significant professional experiences from the rotation. He described the first night’s operation in specific terms and then said something that was quoted in the subsequent SOCOM training publication that drew on his interview, that in 15 years of operating at the highest levels of special operations, working alongside
and against the full range of the world’s elite military units, the joint operation with the SAS had produced a single professional insight that was genuinely new to him. He had always understood team performance as the product of individual capability plus effective coordination. The SAS operation had shown him that there was a third variable, the shared picture, the distributed command understanding, the team functioning as a single entity rather than as coordinated individuals, and that this third variable, properly developed, changed
what was possible in a way that the first two variables alone did not. He said he had spent the remainder of the rotation thinking about how to build it. He said he came home with a framework and no certainty about how long building it would take. He said it would take however long it took and it would be worth it.
The specific mechanics that the SAS explained in response to SEAL operator questions were not classified or particularly guarded. They were the working methods of a unit that had developed its approach through many years of operational experience, refined through failure as much as through success and that treated its methods as tools rather than as proprietary intellectual property.
The SAS approach to simultaneous multi-site operations had been developed in the context of specific operational demands. The need to hit multiple targets quickly to prevent network members from alerting each other. The limitation on available force that made sequential operations impractical when the intelligence window was tight.
The solutions to those demands were not theoretical constructs. They were practical responses to real problems tested through the application of real operations in real conditions and modified when they didn’t work well enough. The SEAL operators who asked about the three building approach were getting an account of problem solving rather than of doctrine.
The communication question was the one that produced the longest and most substantive conversations. SEAL Team 6’s communication model was efficient and specifically designed. Short transmissions, clear formats, minimum airtime. The SAS communication model was further reduced in a specific direction. It assumed a shared picture that was detailed enough that many of the confirmations the SEAL model transmitted were within the SAS framework already known without transmission.
The question this raised for the SEAL operators was how the shared picture was maintained during an operation that was moving fast and changing. The SAS answer was that the shared picture wasn’t maintained during the operation by communication. It was built before the operation through preparation and sustained by each member’s individual understanding of the developing situation based on what their own position and senses were telling them.
The communication was minimal because the shared picture was already there. Building it before the operation was the work. Transmitting it during was largely redundant. The training implication of this explanation was not lost on the SEAL operators who received it. If the shared picture was built before the operation, rather than maintained during it, then the primary investment was in pre-operational understanding, in each member’s ability to read a complex situation, and model how it would develop, independent of explicit direction, and in the team’s
collective calibration of those models against each other until the models were consistent enough to function as a shared reality. This required a specific kind of training investment. Not drills, not protocols, not communication procedures, but the deeper work of building individual situational intelligence, and then aligning it across the team through shared experience.
It was, the SEAL operators understood, the work that elite units claim to do, and that very few actually do at the level required to produce the outcome they had observed. The SAS had clearly done it at that level. The question of how to replicate it occupied the SEAL operators’ professional attention for a long time after the deployment ended.
The post-deployment assessment that SEAL Team Six produced, drawing on the joint operations from the Iraq rotation, addressed the shared picture concept directly and with unusual analytical depth. The assessment identified it as the primary differentiating variable between the SAS’s operational approach and the SEAL Team Six model, and recommended a formal training program designed to develop shared situational modeling as a team capability, rather than treating it as an emergent property of experience.
The recommendation was reviewed by training staff and eventually incorporated into a modified pre-deployment preparation curriculum. The curriculum required time to develop and implement, and the first version of it was imperfect in ways that subsequent versions corrected. The element leader who had made the recommendation noted, in a follow-up interview 3 years after the Iraq deployment, that the curriculum had produced meaningful improvement in the shared picture quality that his teams brought to joint operations.
He said it hadn’t fully replicated what he had seen the SAS do on that first Baghdad night. He said he didn’t think it ever fully would because some of what the SAS had was the product of years of operational history together that couldn’t be compressed into a training program, but the direction was right and the progress was real.
He said that was what mattered. You can’t fully copy something built over decades. You can build toward it. He was building toward it. 3 years after the Iraq deployment, the element leader of SEAL Team Six who had requested continued joint operations with the SAS was asked in a training forum what single professional experience from his career he would most recommend to other special operations leaders.
He described the first joint operation in Baghdad and what it had produced in him, not the specific tactical observations, but the broader professional recalibration. He said that elite units develop professional self-confidence that is necessary for their function and genuinely earned by their performance, but that this self-confidence can create a closed loop. You perform well.
You develop confidence in your performance. You refine the approach that produced the performance and the loop becomes self-reinforcing. What the SAS had done on that first night was break the loop. They had shown him a reference point outside the loop that forced a genuine assessment of what was inside it.
He said this was the most valuable thing one elite unit can do for another, not demonstrate superiority, not compete, but offer a genuinely different perspective on what the work requires and what excellence in doing it actually looks like. He said the SAS had done this without trying to, simply by executing their mission the way they had been executing missions for 30 years.
The value was in the observation, the rest was up to him. The post-operation debrief between the two forces was the most analytically productive period of the joint operation for both units. The mutual evaluation that each force had been conducting throughout the operation, observing the others decision-making, technique, and management of unexpected developments was most useful when it was shared directly.
And the debrief format that both forces had agreed on in advance created a structure for that sharing that was substantive rather than diplomatic. The format did not ask either force to be complimentary about the other. It asked each force to identify what the other had done differently from how they would have done it, and to assess whether the difference represented a better approach, a different approach of roughly equal quality, or an approach that they would not adopt.
The answers produced a genuine comparative analysis of two forces that were at the peak of their respective operational traditions. The specific observations that Team Six made about the SAS were clustered around a consistent theme. The SAS’s tolerance for operational ambiguity at the individual operator level was higher than what Team Six had experienced in joint operations with other American special operations units, and the tolerance appeared to be a structural feature of how the SAS operated rather than a characteristic of specific
individuals. Team Six operators who had worked with units that maintained tighter control of individual operator behavior during operations were habituated to a model in which ambiguity was a problem to be reduced before the operation and managed at the command level during it. The SAS model appeared to treat ambiguity as a normal feature of the operational environment that individual operators were expected to navigate on their own initiative within the framework that the operational plan had established.
The Team Six assessment of whether this was a better or worse model than their own was nuanced. It was assessed as a better model for the specific kinds of operations where the SAS deployed it and potentially a worse model for the kinds of operations that required precise coordination between a larger number of elements simultaneously.
The SAS’s observations about Team Six were focused on different qualities. The technical standard of Team Six’s individual operators in close quarters environments was assessed as exceptionally high at the upper end of what the SAS operators had observed in coalition partner forces. The planning discipline and the post-operation documentation culture of Team Six were assessed as more formally rigorous than the SAS’s own equivalents in a way that produced operational lessons in a form that was more easily institutionalized across a large
organization. The SAS’s assessment was that Team Six’s operational culture was more systematized than the SAS’s own, that it relied more heavily on procedures that were developed at the institutional level and less heavily on the individual judgment of operators in the field. The SAS’s assessment of whether this was better or worse than their own model was consistent with the Team Six assessment of the SAS.
It was a different model better suited to some operational contexts and less suited to others, and the two forces’ ability to operate effectively together depended on each recognizing the other’s model rather than expecting the other to adopt its own.
