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American Morning

In Event Al Qaeda Leadership Located in a Cave Complex, Just What Would it Take to Launch a Cave Assault?

Aired December 17, 2001 - 10:30   ET

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.

THIS IS A RUSH TRANSCRIPT. THIS COPY MAY NOT BE IN ITS FINAL FORM AND MAY BE UPDATED.
PAULA ZAHN, CNN ANCHOR: As we've been reporting all morning long here, U.S. warplanes continue to pound that Tora Bora region as the hunt continues. In the event that Al Qaeda leadership is located in a cave complex, just what would it take then to launch a cave assault?

Here's Miles, again, watching that aspect of the story -- Miles.

MILES O'BRIEN, CNN CORRESPONDENT: Hello again, Bill.

Yes, direct action mission is what they call it, snatch-and-grab operations.

Joining us to talk a little bit about this is General Wesley Clark, former NATO supreme commander, our military analyst now.

General Clark, I've some animation now. I'm going to run through it quickly. If you'll watch it with me, and then we'll talk about the pitfalls to watch out for in these sorts of operations. The first things. as is case in all of these operations, is identifying targets, using whatever means are possible -- aircraft, satellites, human intelligence on the ground, identifying a target, and then coming in, and at the very least, closing off some of the entrances so that not all the points of exit are available to the enemy in this case.

Now once that occurs, and the entrances are blocked, as depicted here, leaving one entrance in the center for a ground team to come in, here's what happens. Let's take a look at some other animations that we have, showing these -- basically we're using this intelligence to identify the objective. That's fairly obvious. There are several teams involved, an assault team, a support team, as well as security perimeter, and the basic gist of it is the first step is to get into this operation, begin fire on the objective, and using that support team to do that. While these teams have debilitated them both with fire and say, tear gas, the assault team comes in and goes after the objective. In this case, it would be, perhaps, Osama bin Laden, perhaps some of his chief lieutenants, with flanking cover fire to either side to protect them as they go in. Obviously friendly fire a concern in these close-in type of situations.

Once that is going on and as that concludes, the security team and the POW team comes in to grab the suspect, if you will. They use photographs, DNA matches, fingerprints, that sort of thing, to identify, make sure they have the right bad guys. Going through that, General Clark, that makes it look relatively straightforward. It's not that way, is it?

GEN. WESLEY CLARK, (RET.) CNN MILITARY ANALYST: No, it really isn't, because the key part of this -- the organization that you've laid out is a good doctrinely sound organization. It's the way we organize for something like this. But the question is, what is the objective? In this case, the objective would seem to be in the model you set forth, the interior of the cave, and so all of the support fires and so forth will be directed to get the assault team up to mouth of the cave, and then they've got to work into the cave.

And the question here is, first, do they really have the intelligence about what's inside the cave? If they do, well, it's sort of like clearing a building, and you send a team forward and you clear a room, room by room. You secure the corridors and you move through the building using a number of teams. They may use flash-bang devices or actual grenades to clear various rooms. But if you don't know what's inside that building, then it becomes much more difficult, and in the case of a cave, of course, you don't know the extent of it, so you don't know really how many rooms there are, how many levels there are. And it's -- you've don't have windows to let light into the room, so everything is in the darkness. This is an advantage and a disadvantage. So it's a very difficult and dangerous operation.

One would ask, again, I mean, how do we know we want to clear that cave? Why not just blow it, seal it up? And if we knew we had Osama bin Laden and he was trapped outside, I think the temptation could be to do that, just finish off those caves without going in there and risking our own soldiers' lives.

O'BRIEN: So putting U.S. soldier in this harm's way. And to date, we haven't seen anything anywhere close to this level of magnitude of danger for U.S. troops in this conflict.

CLARK: That's exactly right.

O'BRIEN: The folks in Tampa and in Washington would think long and hard about it, I suspect.

CLARK: I think they would, Miles. This is a very tough mission.

O'BRIEN: All right, General Wesley Clark, our military analyst, former NATO supreme commander.

Thanks very much for helping us understand snatch and grab. Sounds simple, Bill, but it's not.

HEMMER: That's indeed right, Miles. Once we get the microphone on, thanks again. Apologize about that.

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