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Strange and convenient coincidences of this kind happen more than you might think. Pakistani civilians in Abottobad reported that several Navy SEALS were killed during the Bin Laden raid when their Blackhawk crashed, and that they saw bodies and body parts being loaded onto another helicopter for evacuation. A few weeks later, a helicopter was shot down in Afghanistan, killing about half of the exact same SEAL team that were on the Bin Laden raid.
Carrier groups fighting the Houthis in the Red Sea suffer all manner of random bad luck. Bad luck that strangely always seems to coincide with Houthi claims that they have struck American carriers. The USS Eisenhower had to be towed out of the Red Sea due to unspecified mechanical issues a day after the Houthis claim to have struck it. A few months later several members of its air wing died in a helicopter training crash. The USS Truman suffered extensive damage due to a freak collision with a civilian merchant ship just days after its Red Sea deployment. It also lost a fighter a few days after that because... because it just fell off the ship ok??
An American Marine general was mysteriously found dead in his quarters at 29 Palms Marine Base in California. Coincidentally he had just returned from unspecified duties in Ukraine. Coincidentally there had just been a particularly large round of Russian ballistic missile strikes against Ukraine, many of which OSINT analysts theorized were targeting NATO military advisors in Kyiv.
Members of elite special forces units tend to die in helicopter crashes during training exercises off the East and West coasts. Usually these training mishaps happen a few days or weeks after major Ukrainian offensives. A particularly nasty one claimed the lives of several Delta Force soldiers about a month after October 7, 2023. It was confirmed that Delta Force was assisting the IDF during raids to rescue hostages held in Gaza, but this crash is of course completely coincidental and did not happen anywhere near the Middle East.
I am not saying that this is impossible, but why cover up losses of the Bin Laden raid, even from a helicopter crash? Between the White House, the chain of command and the intelligence agencies, there were probably about a hundred people in the loop. I have a hard time imagining Obama saying "I will not have this day of triumph be overshadowed by some fucking technical failure. Make the bodies go away, I don't care how." This would be a textbook case of the coverup being worse than the crime. Just announce that some people died in the raid and classify the details for a decade.
Likewise, if I imagine a general being killed by Russian ballistic missiles, in most cases the body will not be in a state where you can put him in his quarters and pretend it was a natural death. So your theory would need an epicycle like "he died from a heart attack when a missile hit nearby", which would be a lot less plausible.
Or take the ships. Hundreds of sailors will very much be aware if the ship was hit by a rocket. A missile hit likely looks very distinct from an engine failure on satellite photos. Then you need to find a civilian ship to stage the collision. The mundane explanation is at least plausible: Navy vessels generally run without transponders, so sometimes they collide with ships, and due to the Suez canal there are a ton of merchant vessels in the red sea.
For special forces killed during some off-the-book op, I can almost see it. But even then, the straight and narrow would seem preferable. X was killed in action in that month during a classified operation, more details in half a century. Covering this up as a training accident would be complicated. If they were killed in infantry combat, you will need to make sure that the bodies burn in the crash. You will also need to find a plausible helicopter pilot whose body you can add to the pile. Presumably you don't want to murder them for it? You will waste a ton of taxpayer money on blowing up the helicopter, and you need the cooperation of the deceased soldiers comrades who should preferably confirm your story of them being hale before departing from their base for their training exercise. These soldiers will probably not be very sympathetic to you desecrating servicemen corpses to cover some minor international embarrassment.
Not to get all conspiracy theory but it needn't be a decision Obama made, or was even aware of. Besides, Obama etc. were quite happy to set up the whole photoshoot in the Situation Room like this was some Aaron Sorkin scripted movie about The West Wing: Independence Day.
The bin Laden raid was every bit as much about propaganda as anything else, and "some of our elite force were killed by these miserable stumblebums" is not the image the originators want portrayed. "We dropped on them like the wrathful hammer of Thor, obliterated them, and came away without even a scratch" is the message of power, influence, superiority, and 'we can get you wherever you are and not even break a sweat' to be publicised. See the nonsense about what happened bin Laden's body or who exactly shot him:
Dropping the charges is another symbolic piece of theatre, whatever the legal requirements; there are all kinds of objectives to be fulfilled in an incident like this beyond the merely literal.
"Yes, they killed our leader but we took vengeance by killing some of them" is not the comfort you want your enemies to take away, you want to make sure that there isn't anything that can be used to build up the mythos:
Even worse would be "Yeah, they killed themselves by a screw-up". But yes, the parsimonious explanation is that "if you're a soldier, your chances of dying are higher, especially if you're flying around on different high-level dangerous missions".
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