This month marks the 26th anniversary of the notorious Battle of Mogadishu, and if all you know about the infamous 18-hour urban firefight in Somalia is from the 2001 movie Black Hawk Down, then there are likely a few gaps in your knowledge about how the traumatic events shaped U.S. military thinking over the past two and a half decades.
On Oct. 3, 1993, elite U.S. Army Rangers and Delta Force commandos fast-roped from helicopters to a three-story white building in the Somali capital, with the mission to snatch key lieutenants to Mohammed Farah Aidid, a local warlord.
Aidid was believed responsible for an attack that killed two dozen Pakistani troops serving in the United Nations mission to feed the starving people of Somalia, as well as two subsequent attacks that killed four U.S. troops and wounded six others.
Operation Restore Hope began as a U.S. humanitarian mission under President George H.W. Bush but, in a textbook case of mission creep, had morphed into a nation-building project under President Bill Clinton.
If you read Mark Bowden’s book Black Hawk Down, which served as the basis for the film of the same name, you know the snatch mission didn’t go as planned.
Two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down in a fusillade of rocket-propelled grenades. Eighteen American soldiers died, and 77 were wounded in what was the deadliest sustained firefight since the Vietnam War.
While the Black Hawk Down battle is now mostly remembered as an embarrassing debacle, it was not, in the tactical sense, a defeat.
While the United States sustained significant casualties, the mission was accomplished.
The members of Aidid’s clan were captured, and the U.S. troops inflicted far more substantial losses on the Somali fighters, with an estimated 300 killed and 700 wounded, according to Bowden’s research.
In another war, in another time, that would count as a victory.
But the American public, having been told that the U.S. was on a humanitarian mission feeding the famished, was shocked by the ugly spectacle of the bodies of two U.S. soldiers dragged through the streets of Mogadishu.
And the Pentagon’s public instance that the U.S. was not on a manhunt for Aidid was revealed to be a fiction.
Clinton sent more troops, vowing not to cut and run, while immediately making plans to end the mission in six months.
A young Osama bin Laden took away the lesson that if the U.S. military suffered enough casualties, it would go away.
The real lesson, as we have learned in subsequent wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, is the American public will accept casualties if they believe wars are in the vital interest of the country.
Over time, several myths and misconceptions have grown up around the epic battle, some fueled by the film’s necessarily compressed depiction of events. One is that the lack of U.S. tanks and overhead firepower in the form of an AC-130 gunship led to the unnecessary deaths of the U.S. troops.
Subsequent after-action investigations, along with congressional hearings, revealed more fundamental flaws in the planning and execution of the mission.
For one, the use of helicopters in broad daylight in an urban environment was a dangerous gamble, primarily since the tactic had been used six times before, giving the Somalis time to learn the game plan and set up their ambush.
There were also two separate commands operating in Somalia: a U.N. commander, U.S. Army Maj. Gen. Tom Montgomery, and a covert special operations mission called “Task Force Ranger,” commanded by Maj. Gen. William Garrison.
As the movie accurately depicts, those commands weren’t talking to each other, and when the U.S. troops became trapped, Montgomery was caught by surprise. Eventually, Pakistani tanks made their way to the site, but the U.S. force has already sustained the most serious of its causalities in the initial fighting.
Of the 18 Americans killed, it was determined that only one, Army Cpl. James Smith, would likely have been saved if he could have been evacuated immediately to a combat hospital.
Perhaps the least known aspect of the infamous mission was who thought it was a good idea to secretly send Delta Force commandos after Aidid while publicly denying it. Clinton generally gets the blame, but there was a more pivotal player in what proved to be a massive policy blunder.
Les Aspin, the defense secretary at the time, and Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, had been adamant that sending in Delta Force was a fool’s errand.
“Finding Aidid in the warrens of Mogadishu was a thousand-to-one shot,” wrote Powell in his 1995 memoir, My American Journey.
But Powell was being pressured by retired U.S. Navy Adm. Jonathan Howe, who was appointed to oversee the U.N. mission, and who strenuously argued that capturing or killing Aidid was the key to bringing peace to Somalia. Against his better judgment, Powell recommended they dispatch the elite counterterrorism force.
Clinton, who was under constant criticism for his lack of military experience, could hardly overrule Powell, who was seen as the hero of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. In his book, Powell spends less than a page on his role in the blunder.
“I reluctantly yielded to the repeated requests from the field and recommended to Aspin that we dispatch the Rangers and Delta Force,” he writes. “It was a recommendation I would later regret.”
A few years later, I ran into Powell, who was then out of uniform, in the halls of the Pentagon. I grabbed his book from my office shelf and asked if he would sign it.
“To Jamie, with admiration,” he began to write before commenting on how dog-eared and marked up the book was.
“Yes,” I said, “I went through it pretty carefully when I wrote that story about how you weren’t such a great general after all.”
I was only half-joking.
He smiled and completed his inscription with, “notwithstanding your pissing me off.”
For a reporter, whose job it is to seek out facts and provide context, there could be no greater compliment.
Jamie McIntyre is the Washington Examiner’s senior writer on defense and national security. His morning newsletter, “Jamie McIntyre’s Daily on Defense,” is free and available by email subscription at dailyondefense.com.
