Anyone who came to the Senate Armed Services Committee to hear Vice Adm. William McRaven deliver the inside account of how his forces killed Osama bin Laden left disappointed. But under a cloud of vagueness, McRaven shed some light on how his shadowy forces wage the stealthy, lethal side of the war on terrorism. To hear him tell it, they’re not always the violent affair you’d imagine.

Soon to be the next leader of the U.S. Special Operations Command, McRaven is leaving his post atop the terrorist hunters of the Joint Special Operations Command (JSOC) on what you might call a high note. Sen. John McCain said McRaven’s plan to kill bin Laden assured him an “enduring place in American military history.” McRaven (pictured above, center) preferred to focus on his team’s contribution to the Afghanistan war, where they’re most famous for the controversial “night raids” on the houses of suspected terrorists.

Night raids have drawn the ire of President Hamid Karzai for their intrusiveness and the civilian casualties they’ve caused. (One of them prompted McRaven to deliver two sheep to an Afghan family as recompense.) But according to McRaven, they’re far from the shoot-’em-ups that the media portrays.

McRaven’s team has conducted over 1700 night raids in the past year alone, he disclosed. Of those, McRaven said, the vast majority — “approximately 84 to 86 percent” — “never fire a shot.”

“Every operation,” McRaven told the Senate panel in written questions for the record, is accompanied by Afghan troops, who “are always in the lead during entry of compounds and call outs.” Teams of women accompany the raids to “reassure women and children” in Afghan compounds that “everyone is going to be safe.”

Stopping the raids, as Karzai wants, would “certainly be detrimental to the special operations aspect to the fight in Afghanistan,” McRaven said.

Of course, McRaven has every interest in portraying the raids as benign affairs, since they’re the most controversial special operations mission in Afghanistan. His JSOC predecessor, Stanley McChrystal, restricted them during his tenure as Afghanistan commander for fear of alienating civilians.

McRaven, who literally wrote the book on special operations, didn’t say much about the shadow wars against terrorists that he’ll soon oversee. He gave little insight into how he’d target al-Qaida affiliates in Yemen, Somalia and Pakistan, beyond saying he needs “manned and unmanned” intelligence, surveillance and reconnaissance tools to succeed. He didn’t anticipate the Pakistanis taking action against the safe havens in their tribal areas — but begged off the enticements of various senators to pledge a replay of the bin Laden raid, which kept the Pakistanis in the dark.

Still, McRaven said that he kept an eye on ammonium nitrate supplies entering Afghanistan from Pakistan for use in lethal bombs. McRaven’s teams “target the networks” importing the material, not the explosives themselves. But he vaguely noted “some technology out there that allows us to detect [homemade explosive materials] before the critical components are there to put it in an explosive.” One such secretive effort, known as Project Ursus, puts chemical detection sensors under an aircraft to hunt for the ammonium nitrate stocks.

There were no questions about the off-the-books detention facilities that JSOC reportedly maintains in Afghanistan. But McRaven said that if a terrorist is caught outside of Afghanistan or Pakistan, he’d be held for a short time on “a naval vessel” while the higher-ups determine if he can be prosecuted or sent to a foreign country.

Releasing such an individual is “an unenviable option,” McRaven said, and supported keeping a long-term detention facility to avoid it — as he testified that sending detainees to Guantanamo Bay isn’t in the cards anymore. To think: Had the bin Laden raid gone differently, the al-Qaida commander might have been held on an aircraft carrier deck, instead of having his corpse pushed off one.

Photo: Spencer Ackerman