The Operator: Firing the Shots That Killed Osama Bin Laden and My Years as a Seal Team Warrior

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There are so many great anecdotes in this book. Of course the famous Paris bar incident in which everyone in McChrystal's crew gets shitfaced and bad mouths special envoy Holbrooke and VP Biden is fleshed out here in Hasting's book. However, there is one story that hits the main theme of the book. McChrystal visits a base that had recently lost a popular officer. All the soldiers wanted was someone who would listen to them about their concerns and failures of the mission. McChrystal didn't listen to them. Instead Hasting's describes how McChrystal had become the exact person he railed against when he was a cadet at West Point. He was the mouthpiece of a strategy that was not going to win a damn thing. Operators most commonly provide their insights in the form of metrics. These metrics are usually compatible with metrics aggregation servers such as Prometheus. (Interestingly enough, Red Hat publishes an Operator for Prometheus that is a Level IV Operator. That Operator is available on OperatorHub at https://operatorhub.io/operator/prometheus.) The Operators is a book that details the author's travels with General Stanley McChrystal and his team in April 2010. It includes extensive quotations from over 20 hours of audio recordings of McChrystal and his inner circle. Auto-Healing Operators can react to applications that are reporting unhealthy conditions and work to correct them (or, at least, prevent them from getting any worse). When an Operand is reporting an error, the Operator should take reactive steps to rectify the failure. In addition, Operators can use current metrics to proactively prevent an Operand from transitioning to a failure state. Our example web application Operator could offer the same set of features. This means that if a new version of the application were released, the Operator could handle upgrading the deployed instances of the application to the newer version. Or, if changes were made to the Operator itself, then it could manage its own upgrades (and later upgrade the application, regardless of version skew between Operator and Operand).

At Level V, the simple web application Operator would manage most of the aspects of the application for us. It has insights into the current number of requests, so it can scale up copies of the app on demand. If this scaling starts to cause errors (for example, too many concurrent database calls), it can identify the number of failing Pods and prevent further scaling. It would also attempt to modify parameters of the web app (such as request timeouts) to help rectify the situation and allow the auto-scaling to proceed. When the load peak subsided, the Operator would then automatically scale down the application to its baseline service levels.Jake came up to me. "We'll hunt you down and kill you if we don't like what you write," he said. "C. (a former British SAS assassin) will hunt you down and kill you." His narration is genuine and you can tell some parts of his story are harder to read than others, for example, when he recounts the deaths of friends. I would not want to hear this story told by anyone but the author himself. That kindness provoked something of an out-of-body experience. After he released his iron grip from my elbow and sent me reeling into the night, I glimpsed myself as if from a distance. It wasn’t an attractive sight. I realized that if I was acting like this now, it would only get worse. I’d end up as one of those guys who hang around Butte forever, whining about the good old days.

These three pillars are what have made the Operator Framework so successful. They transform the framework from just development patterns to an encompassing, iterative process that spans the entire lifecycle of an Operator. This helps support the contract between Operator developers and users to provide consistent industry standards for their software. When I graduated high school in Butte, Montana—the same school my grandfather and father had graduated from—and enrolled at Montana Tech, the local college, this girl was still a junior. It’s just one of those things; you’re not going to date a high school girl when you’re in college. So I stayed away, but I couldn’t keep my mind off her. She went on doing her high school thing, dating and going to dances, which she damn well should have been doing. But I wanted it both ways, me having my fun and her staying on hold. I simmered miserably for weeks, then finally snapped when I heard she’d spent the day with some high school boy. With a couple drinks in me I went to her house to find out what was going on, and promptly made a complete ass out of myself. Now, to the subtitle of the book: did O'Neill really fire the shots that killed Osama bin Laden? In some sense, it doesn't matter. Nobody disputes that SOMEONE on SEAL Team 6 (which, ridiculously, is beeped out in the audiobook every time O'Neill references SEAL Team 6 - as if people haven't heard of it) shot bin Laden on that raid in May 2011. But was it O'Neill? Some sources, including a book by, you guessed it, another Navy SEAL, Matt Bissonnette going by the pseudonym of Mark Owen, dispute that O'Neill killed bin Laden, although it seems certain that O'Neill at least fired a few shots into bin Laden's body and/or head posthumously, if not while he was alive. In fact, an article from The Intercept (do a google search) insists that it was a third SEAL, who O'Neill only refers to repeatedly as "the point man" was the one who shot and killed bin Laden. The fact that O'Neill never mentions this SEAL's name - even though he names almost everybody else - and uses the moniker "the point man" dozens of times, lends credence to the idea that it was NOT O'Neill but this unnamed SEAL, who, unlike many of his fellow SEALs, must not hunger for publicity, who actually killed bin Laden. When we were finally exhausted, my dad would say, “We can’t leave until one of us sinks twenty free throws in a row.” He would feed me—I’d get pissed if he made me move my feet even an inch off the line—and I’d shoot till I missed. Then he’d take over. The first time it took about twenty minutes for one of us to make twenty in a row. Then we went out for a steak dinner to celebrate. The next day my dad said, “We can leave when one of us gets twenty, but we need twenty-five for the steak.” Once we hit twenty-five, it went up to thirty, then thirty-five, forty. We got to where we had to make seventy free throws in a row for a dinner, and we almost always did it. I think my dad’s record was ninety in a row. Mine is still 105. We were making a lot of free throws. The puzzle of this book is whether Hastings, who seems to have some guts and a lot of experience on the ground, understands the military he so roundly criticizes, or cares to in the first place. There's a difference between traveling as a correspondent and traveling as a man with a rifle who may have to use it to commit state-sponsored killings, then live with the aftermath.All of these features are heavily dependent upon the use of metrics to automatically inform the Operator of the need to act upon itself or its Operand. Therefore, a Level V Operator is an inherent progression from Level IV, which is the level at which an Operator exposes advanced metrics. I just joined the Navy,” I said. “I’m going to SEAL school. You know they swim like a mile a day there.” Revisiting the first example in this chapter, the idea of a simple application with three Pods and a Persistent Volume was examined without Operator management. This application relied on optimistic uptime and future-proof design to run continuously. In real-world deployments, these ideas are unfortunately unreasonable. Designs evolve and change, and unforeseeable failures bring applications down. But how could an Operator help this app persist in an unpredictable world? What does come through to the close reader of this book are a few things the self-censoring US media likely glossed over out of sheer wishful thinking--or perhaps coercion. During a drunken cavort at a bar in Paris, General Mike Flynn confesses to Hastings that he thinks they'll never get Osama Bin Laden, who at the time was the stated target of US involvement in the region. Hastings notes this point -- twice -- with awe. Very interesting. Together, these three pillars establish the basis of the Operator Framework and form the design patterns and community standards that distinguish Operators as a concept. Along with the Capability Model, this standardized framework has led to an explosion in the adoption of Operators in Kubernetes.