Free KBL by John Weisman Page A

like the one at top-drawer training facilities like the old Blackwater complex in Moyock, North Carolina, are multilevel structures with moveable walls and adjustable stairwells. They can be rigged to resemble an intricate warren of narrow hallways connecting small rooms, like the ones you’d find in Beirut’s southern suburbs or droguista hideaways in Bogota, Colombia, or the multilevel Iraqi villas common to the Triangle of Death, where Sunni Jihadis still lived, or walled Taliban compounds like the ones in Helmand Province, or even a couple of floors of the Taj Mahal Hotel and Tower in Mumbai. All you needed was a floor plan and the shoot house crews would build it for you.
    Within twenty-four hours you could practice assaulting a Yemeni hovel or a Saudi prince’s palace; rehearse multiple simultaneous entries; blow doors with shaped charges or rake-and-break windows. You could work force-on-force using Simunitions—flesh-seeking, red- or blue-dye primer-powered rounds that stung like hell when you got hit—with one of the other assault elements playing the bad guys.
    And then there was the occasional dog-and-pony show, when some VIP—the speaker of the house, the secretary of state, Prince Charles and Camilla—would visit the compound, and they’d sit inside one of the shoot house rooms and an assault element would show off all its bells and whistles and stage a live-fire hostage rescue using mannequin terrorists and the VIPs as the hostages.
    The shoot house instructors loved to make life difficult. They would add nasty elements—invisible tripwires attached to flash-bang grenades, for example—to keep DEVGRU shooters alert. They’d start a scenario in total darkness and then turn the lights on, watching how the suddenly blinded shooters adjusted to their new situation. They would do their best to introduce Murphy’s Laws into every stage of every exercise, so that every single DEVGRU SEAL would be able to think on his feet and realize that rigidity ain’t no good and blindly following an op-plan just because it’s there can get you killed.
    Lieutenant Colonel Pete Blaber, one of Delta’s better squadron commanders in the 1990s, had put it this way: “If you fail to prepare, you prepare to fail.”
    DEVGRU’s shoot house instructors phrased it a little more starkly. A stenciled sign nailed above the entrance of Shoot House No. 1 at Dam Neck said it all:
DARWIN SUN TZU MUSASHI
ADAPT, OVERCOME, OR DIE!
    This morning’s exercise would be a variation of the standard capture/kill template that had been in existence since 1983. It had been refined since then, of course, and DEVGRU’s equipment was a lot more sophisticated and its weapons a lot more efficient and reliable. Sure, now mission briefs were done on PowerPoints instead of using chalk on a blackboard, and you had drone and satellite imagery instead of drawings. But the core of capture/kill hadn’t changed in decades. In fact, it hadn’t changed in more than half a century.
    Capture/kill, just like the heart of all special operations, relies on the theory of relative superiority, which was first formalized in 1995 in Bill McRaven’s seminal book Spec Ops . Briefly stated, relative superiority occurs when a small group of assaulters gains a pivotal tactical advantage over a larger adversary. They do this through the use of six basic principles listed by McRaven: speed, surprise, simplicity, security, repetition, and purpose.
    Think Entebbe, July 4, 1976, or Skorzeny’s September 1943 rescue of Benito Mussolini, missions conducted by small units that, because of speed, surprise, and violence of action, overcame much larger opposing forces and achieved their objectives successfully. What had worked for the Nazi captain Otto Skorzeny were the same dynamics that allowed Yonatan Netanyahu’s Israeli shooters to rescue a hundred hostages from their terrorist captors: the six basic principles of relative superiority.
    It was those basic principles that