The Iran Rescue: The Payoff of Painful Lessons

The well-deserved accolades have already been given, although there will be yet another round when the medal citations have been written, and the heroes summoned for their ceremonial presentations. There will be many such, all well-earned, because the rescue of the two downed  F-15 crew represents a remarkable achievement, both heroic on-the-ground performance and masterful leadership up and down the chain of command.

But before we move on from the present moment, let’s remember that we owe an immense debt of gratitude to several previous generations of special warfare leaders, without whose efforts, insight, and, above all, willingness to learn from mistakes, all combined to bequeath us this present moment of triumph. It hasn’t always been this way.

The obvious marker is the tragedy of Operation Eagle Claw, the disastrous 1980 attempt to rescue the U.S. embassy personnel taken hostage at the beginning of the Iranian revolution. Lack of planning for the required aviation assets compromised the mission, and a lethal accident on the ground at the Desert One airfield inside Iran doomed it to disastrous failure. Arguments still swirl about the root causes of the disaster, but lack of coordination and training between the different operational elements certainly played a role.

At the time of Operation Eagle Claw, Delta Force was in its infancy. Air Force Combat Search and Rescue, despite its outstanding performance in Vietnam, had been starved for funds throughout the 1970s. The Army’s 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment and the Navy’s SEAL Team Six were actually creations of the failure at Desert One, an acknowledgement that complex special operations missions could not simply be cobbled together from disparate assets.

Or one could look back a bit further, to the now almost forgotten Son Tay raid in 1970, where a carefully selected team of Army special forces personnel was helicoptered deep into North Vietnam on a mission to rescue American POWs. This was not a shoestring mission, nor hastily conceived. Training was meticulous, and coordination of ground and aviation assets was outstanding.

Decades after the event, working with Department of Energy nuclear facility protective forces, I had the great privilege of working alongside Colonel Elliot P. “Bud” Sydnor, the second in command/ground force commander for the Son Tay raid. A highlight of our annual Composite Adversary Team  (CAT) training was Bud’s discussion of how the raid unfolded. Our CAT program existed to test the defenses of our DOE facilities through force-on-force performance testing, and the CATs benefited not only from Bud’s lessons but, above all, the example he provided of character and commitment.

By every tactical standard, the Son Tay raid was a great success; even when improvisation was required when a helicopter landed in the wrong place, the well-trained teams adapted almost instantaneously. Bull Simons, the overall commander, Bud Sydnor, and SF legend Dick Meadows provided the leadership, but every trooper did his job. And yet, in the larger scheme of things, the mission was a failure. Shortly before the raid launched, the North Vietnamese had moved the POWs to a location closer to Hanoi, and, after the raid, to the prison that would come to be known as the Hanoi Hilton.

On the eve of the raid, suspicions had grown that the POWs had been moved, but the intelligence was uncertain, and the decision was made to proceed. The raiders’ outstanding performance, then, was lost in the aftermath of the intelligence failure. “Negative items,” as the raid reported, that is, no POWs found, became the bitter call sign of remembrance, as heroism went unrewarded except by the POWs themselves, who took heart from the fact that their country had at least tried to save them.

Operation Urgent Fury in 1982, the liberation of Grenada from Cuban communist-aligned elements, was also marked by special operations issues — issues that would become grist for further training and analysis. Nonetheless, real reservations continued to exist about the capabilities of our special operators, even of the utility of special operations itself.

General Norman Schwarzkopf, one of the key commanders of the Grenada operation, came away with a deep skepticism of special operations, so much so that, as the commander of 1991’s Operation Desert Storm, he initially refused the participation of special forces elements, opining that if they got into trouble behind the lines he’d be forced to waste precious assets to rescue them.

Schwarzkopf eventually relented, and special operations, not only our own teams but, famously, those of the British Special Air Service, would play a useful supporting role in the campaign. Subsequent operations in Iraq and over the long years of the Afghanistan War would further hone the capabilities of the special warfare community.

And now, in the span of only months, we’ve witnessed the culmination of decades of lessons learned. First, there was the capture of Nicolás Maduro, a gem of an operation, and now the rescue of the downed F-15 crew, recovered from the very teeth of a massive Iranian effort to make prizes of the downed airmen.

With all due credit to the supporting role played by renowned Israeli special operators, this was an American triumph. Even the supposed failures now being trumpeted by frustrated leftists actually bear testimony to the tactical success of the operation. Two C-130s stuck on the ground — echoes of the disaster where it all began, at Desert One, where a similar issue forced the mission to be aborted. Instead, the airfield was held, and fresh aircraft were quickly flown in to replace them — a contingency evidently planned for and successfully executed.

These decades-worth of lessons were all in evidence this past weekend. Precise and continuously updated intelligence. An effective CIA-orchestrated deception plan. Continuous air cover, despite evidence that the IRGC had been freshly supplied with Chinese anti-aircraft weapons. Ground teams whose superb combat skills thwarted a massive Iranian response. Command and control that simply worked, across hourly challenges, and a chain of command from on the ground all the way to the White House that operated with confidence and resolution.

It’s way too soon to assess the long-term significance of this rescue operation, but some strategic implications are immediately obvious. If it had failed, if the WSO, for example, had been captured and paraded through the streets of Teheran, the impact would have been incalculable. Instead of proceeding confidently to the next phase of the operation, our government would have been trapped in a geo-strategic hostage negotiation, almost inevitably a “lose-lose” proposition for our war effort.

The same people, both abroad and in this country, who’ve tried at every turn to view this undertaking as a disaster would have been rewarded. Instead, they’ve been reduced to carping about lost aircraft rather than rejoicing at the rescue of American servicemen. One of the saddest aspects of the current situation has been the evident desire of so many to see our efforts meet with failure, not so much out of principled criticism, but more from the fear of American success.

These haters would have been rewarded. Instead, they have been, at least for the moment, embarrassed into silence. Perhaps therein lies the largest message of all, namely that Americans need not be the prisoners of past failures, that we know how to learn, to grow, and to overcome all manner of challenges.

And this, in spades, is what our special operators just demonstrated.

READ MORE from James H. McGee:

NATO Commits Suicide — All We Can Do Is Bury It

Fresh Horror in Nigeria: The Return of Boko Haram

Californicating Virginia: Democrats’ Misleading Appeal to ‘Fairness’

James H. McGee retired in 2018 after nearly four decades as a nuclear security and counter-terrorism professional. Since retiring, he’s begun a second career as a thriller writer. His most recent novel, The Zebras from Minsk, was featured among National Review’s favorite books in 2025.  You can find The Zebras from Minsk (and its predecessor, Letter of Reprisal) on Amazon in Kindle and paperback editions.