America's War for the Greater Middle East: A Military History (27 page)

Then on September 25, an SNA fighter used a rocket-propelled grenade (RPG) to down a UH-60, killing three crewmen. An RPG is an antitank weapon of limited range and accuracy. Its effective employment in an antiaircraft role marked a deeply disturbing development.

Undeterred, Garrison ordered a fateful seventh raid, this time during daylight hours on October 3. But the Americans had telegraphed their punch. This time, Aidid was waiting.
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The operation, expected to take thirty minutes from start to finish, began well but ended badly many hours later. During the ensuing period, the SNA shot down two UH-60s belonging to Task Force Ranger and damaged three others. Intense fire complicated efforts to recover killed and wounded crewmen, while pinning down both the rangers who had helicoptered in and those arriving in unarmored trucks.

Chaos reigned. Surrounded, outnumbered, and possibly even outgunned by adversaries they disparaged as “Sammies” or “Skinnies,” the elite U.S. troops formed a rudimentary defensive perimeter, returned fire, and hung on. Strafing runs by TF 160 attack helicopters, their crews wearing night vision devices, prevented the Americans from being completely overrun. Even so, there was no disguising the fact that the tables had turned. In the blink of an eye, the hunters had become the hunted.

Summoned to the rescue, General Montgomery cobbled together an extraction force consisting of QRF infantry mounted in Malaysian armored personnel carriers and escorted by a handful of lumbering Pakistani tanks. Getting things organized and moving proved excruciatingly time-consuming. In the meantime, Task Force Ranger, under unrelenting attack, had sustained heavy casualties. By the time the action broke off early the next morning, eighteen American soldiers were dead and another eighty wounded. Somalis had dragged from the wreckage of his aircraft an injured American aviator, Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant, whom they now proudly displayed. Estimates of Somali losses ranged widely but certainly numbered in the high hundreds.
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The reaction back home followed a predictable script: Shock and anger vied with demands for accountability. A bloodied and dazed-looking Durant made the cover of
Time,
which rather belatedly posed the question, “What in the World Are We Doing?”
Newsweek
aptly described Mogadishu as a “military disaster to rank with Desert One or the bombing of the marine barracks in Beirut.”
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In Washington, it reported, “a frantic search for scapegoats” was underway. Former Ambassador Smith Hempstone took to the pages of
The Wall Street Journal
to weigh in with a hearty I-told-you-so.
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The “Don’t Forsake Somalia” editorial board of
The New York Times
now reversed course: It was “Time to Get Out.”
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Senator John McCain, a Republican from Arizona, already a prominent voice on military affairs, was furious. U.S. troops were being “killed in a conflict with no clear connection to U.S. national security interests,” he complained. “It is time for American forces to come home.” McCain cited Ronald Reagan’s response to the Beirut bombing as a model. “Reagan’s admission of failure prevented the further waste of American lives. The decision to withdraw U.S. forces from Lebanon, frankly, took much more courage than the current administration’s decision to escalate our involvement in Somalia.”
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Yet the impulse to call it quits gained only limited traction. As had been the case after the Beirut bombing, not to mention the
Stark
incident and the shootdown of Iran Air 655, the ensuing inquiry steered clear of issues touching on basic policy. The very pertinent question posed by
Time
went unanswered. Instead, congressional investigators and members of the press became preoccupied with what might have been done to expedite the rescue of Task Force Ranger once the operation of October 3 went awry. The preferred answer: more firepower—Abrams tanks and AC-130 gunships.
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Critics pounced on President Clinton, his avoidance of Vietnam service making him an easy target on such matters, for his administration’s failure to fill each and every request that commanders in the field had made.
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That four-stars like Powell and Hoar had opposed those requests did not deter them. Nor did General Garrison’s subsequent admission that “if we had put one more ounce of lead on South Mogadishu on the night of 3 and 4 October, I believe it would have sunk.”
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His instinct for self-preservation kicking into high gear, Clinton did what presidents do to make such troubles go away. He promptly dispatched substantial reinforcements to Mogadishu—to include Abrams tanks and AC-130s—while simultaneously calling off the hunt for Aidid (thereby facilitating Michael Durant’s release). To those like Senator McCain who favored a cut-and-run response, he offered a compromise, setting a date-certain of March 31, 1994, for a complete withdrawal. This the Congress accepted. In the interim, rather than courting further trouble, the troops would stay put but keep a low profile, thereby making a show of departing on U.S. terms—much as Reagan had done a decade earlier in Beirut.

Perhaps most important, to placate his critics, Clinton fired his defense secretary, Les Aspin. Compared to all the principals involved, civilian and military alike, Aspin had contributed only tangentially to all that had gone wrong in Mogadishu.
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But he was eminently expendable. Tagging Aspin as responsible, rather than any of the senior military officers involved, came without any political cost.

With this, the controversy subsided. Almost immediately, the process of transforming the Mogadishu firefight from a small-scale fiasco into an epic worthy of Homer commenced. Thanks to a bestselling book and then a hit movie, the episode that ought to have been known as “the Somalia Campaign, 1992–1994” became simply “Black Hawk Down.” Narrowing the aperture enshrined the melee of October 3–4, 1993, as a demonstration of soldierly grit and gallantry while robbing it of context. The Mogadishu firefight became an event that stands alone—like the defense of the Alamo or Custer’s Last Stand.

An odd phenomenon ensued: As with the Tet Offensive of 1968 (and as would recur with the Third Gulf War of 2003–2011), mythologists reimagined a self-evident failure as an unrecognized or under-appreciated victory. You just had to see things in the proper light. In General Garrison’s estimation, “The Mission was a success.” So he wrote soon after the raid in a personal letter to his commander in chief.
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The journalist Mark Bowden, in his definitive account of the battle, reached a similar conclusion: In “a complex, difficult, and dangerous assignment, and despite terrible setbacks and losses, and against overwhelming odds, the mission was accomplished.”
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By implication, the Mogadishu firefight was something in which Americans could take justifiable pride.

Bowden’s claim invites the retort of the North Vietnamese colonel responding to an American officer’s insistence at the end of the Vietnam War that, “you know, you never defeated us in battle.” Was the American oblivious to the war’s outcome? “That may be true,” came the reply, “but it is also irrelevant.”
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At the end of the day, the estimable courage demonstrated by the U.S. troops who fought in Mogadishu—two of whom, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart, were posthumously awarded the Medal of Honor—proved similarly irrelevant to the issue at hand. Aidid had prevailed.

In effect, political and military leaders, not to mention the public at large, found it convenient to expunge from the record all that occurred during the months before that event. Americans had once cited the Battle of New Orleans (an impressive feat of arms) as an excuse to forget the War of 1812 (an ill-advised and badly managed venture). Something similar occurred here, with the travails endured by Task Force Ranger eclipsing Operation Continued Hope and draining it of significance. In the end, Americans overlooked even the most obvious lesson, namely, don’t pick a fight with well-armed, highly motivated irregulars in a large city that they own.

Once again, willful forgetting produced nontrivial consequences. In fact, the Somalia campaign that culminated with the Mogadishu firefight had profound relevance for America’s ongoing (even if still unacknowledged) War for the Greater Middle East. That was certainly Osama bin Laden’s view. For the Al Qaeda leader, who subsequently claimed that his operatives had helped train Aidid’s forces, Somalia exposed the “weakness, frailty, and cowardice of the U.S. troops.” For Washington, the campaign’s outcome warned against further involvement of U.S. forces in cockamamie UN humanitarian schemes. For bin Laden, in contrast, it offered proof that “the American soldier was just a paper tiger.” In his view, a U.S. military defeat at the hands of Islam offered cause for celebration. It showed that the United States could be had.
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We may opt for a more nuanced view, noting that the American defeat stemmed at least in part from a refusal to provide the wherewithal needed to get the job done. Although additional resources were readily available—the American military establishment in 1993 was generally underemployed—authorities at the White House, in the Pentagon, and at CENTCOM headquarters withheld them, choosing to wage war against Aidid on a shoestring. This serious failure of political will and military judgment was destined to recur in campaigns still to come elsewhere in the Greater Middle East. This was especially true after 9/11, when the United States committed itself to objectives far loftier than taking down the SNA. Time and again, those opting to use force to impose America’s will (or, some might say, to uplift and liberate) initiated hostilities without adequately calculating the human, material, fiscal, and political capital required.

Yet more than anything else, the Somalia campaign revealed severe deficiencies in American generalship that went far beyond such obvious lapses as acting without adequate intelligence, allowing tortuous command relationships, and disregarding basic operational security.

For senior commanders, accurately gauging the political environment in which they operate is at least as important as understanding enemy capabilities and intentions. No less than war itself, the exercise of wartime command is an inherently political act. Acute political sensitivity forms an unwritten part of the job description.

Commanders embarking upon a war do so with a finite number of credits—money, lives, time, support on the home front—upon which to draw. Their challenge is to get the job done without depleting those accounts. While Montgomery and Garrison made any number of tactical misjudgments, they erred above all in misidentifying their greatest vulnerability, which was not the threat posed by Aidid but the prospect of a sudden collapse of political support.

By way of comparison, consider Ulysses S. Grant, the exception that proves the rule. When Grant took command of all the Union armies in March 1864, President Lincoln allowed him unlimited drawing rights on the U.S. Treasury, on the fruits of American industry, and most importantly on the military-age manpower of the Union. Lincoln’s reelection in November (thanks in large part to the soldier vote) conferred on Grant this further advantage: time. Grant intuitively grasped the opportunity that availed itself. Over the course of a full year, acting with great deliberation, he crushed not only the Rebel armies but also the Confederacy itself in a series of campaigns that exacted staggering costs on both sides. Yet even today, few question whether the result was “worth it.” For its part, history celebrates Grant as a great captain.

No other commander in American history—not even those charged with the conduct of World War II—has enjoyed such a free hand. Indeed, the situation facing Montgomery and Garrison was the inverse of Grant’s. Whereas Lincoln allowed his general-in-chief to spend freely, the Americans charged with directing the Somalia campaign needed to achieve success within a constrained (if never explicitly specified) budget. Yet in a situation calling for parsimony, Montgomery and Garrison recklessly squandered their limited credits, only to discover that they had spent more than their masters back home—the president, the Congress, and the American people—were willing to cover. Senior U.S. military leaders had never pressed for an answer to the question of how much bringing order to Somalia was actually “worth.” The firefight of October 3–4 revealed the answer: not much.

Apparently assuming that generalship was about what you did to the enemy, Montgomery and Garrison (along with their superiors back in Tampa) either ignored or proved unable to decipher the political dimension of the war they were charged with waging. As we shall see, they were by no means the last senior military officers to display this particular failing. Throughout the War for the Greater Middle East, it formed an abiding weakness of American generalship, as, in time, another rule-proving exception made evident. His name was David Petraeus.