Operation Honey Badger

Operation Honey Badger which was to be the second attempt to rescue the hostages from Iran in 1981. It was called off when the hostages were released and it was no longer necessary. 

Within two weeks after the failure of the Iranian hostage crisis rescue mission (Operation Eagle Claw), planning for a second mission began in the Pentagon. The first mission failed due to equipment and coordination problems, culminating in the crash, killing eight servicemen, of a RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopter into a parked C-130 in the Iranian desert.

A new organization, the Joint Test Directorate (JTD), was established to assist and support the Office of Secretary of Defense Directorate (OSD) joint planning staff. Under the program name Honey Badger, the JTD conducted a series of large-scale joint-force exercises and projects to develop and validate a variety of capabilities that would be available to OSD when mission requirements were identified. JTD trained a large and diverse force of United States Army and United States Air Force special operations, Ranger, and aviation units, but the critical factor remained extracting the rescue force and freed hostages from Tehran. The Credible Sport project, a joint undertaking of the USAF, U.S. Navy, and Lockheed-Georgia, was created within Honey Badger to develop a reliable extraction capability. Credible Sport was tasked to create a large "Super STOL" fixed-wing aircraft to extract the rescue team and hostages and overcome the "weak link" in the previous plan, the heavy lift helicopter.

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