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One Decade Later -- Debacle in Somalia
By Lieutenant Colonel Frank G. Hoffman,
U.S. Marine Corps Reserve (Retired)
Proceedings, January 2004
The shoot-down of a Blackhawk helicopter on a mission to eliminate two
lieutenants of warlord Mohamed Farah Aideed was only part of the U.S.
story in Somalia. For the 10th anniversary, principal players gathered
for a conference staged by the McCormick Tribune Foundation and the
U.S. Naval Institute.
The U.S. intervention in Somalia in the early 1990s remains a
distant memory to most Americans. The policy debacle in that
impoverished African state is now linked indelibly to Mark Bowden's
graphic tale, Black Hawk Down. But much more than the events of 3
October 1993 have relevance to ongoing combat operations in Afghanistan
and Iraq. For a thorough review of the Somalia intervention, the U.S.
Naval Institute and the McCormick Tribune Foundation brought military
and diplomatic participants to the Foundation's Cantigny conference
center near Chicago 7-9 May 2003.
Why Did the United Nations Intervene?
Ambassador Robert Gosende, who served first as the U.S.
embassy's information officer and later as ambassador (replacing
Ambassador Robert Oakley in Somalia), moderated the first panel, which
consisted of retired Navy Admiral Jonathan T. Howe and retired Army
Brigadier General John S. Brown.
General Brown, current Chief of Military History for the U.S.
Army, placed the Somalia experience in the context of a larger
historical process. "The reason we intervened in Somalia was because it
occurred at the time it did," he concluded, adding that, "timing is
everything." The end of the Cold War was one influence that had been
"both a brake and a prism." It imposed a brake against getting involved
in events not directly related to our confrontation with the Soviet
Union, and it framed how we looked at priorities. The deterioration in
the material well-being of the African people while the rest of the
world was making significant economic progress was another context. The
global information network heightened awareness of the situation by
carrying pictures of Somalia's tragedy worldwide. Had the United States
not intervened in Somalia, it would have somewhere else for about the
same purpose and would have had to acquire the experience that would
give it the sophistication to recognize both the capabilities and
limits of U.S. power in humanitarian circumstances.
Admiral Howe served in Somalia as the Special Representative
of the United Nations (UN) Secretary General from March 1993 until
March 1994; from December 1991 to January 1993 he served on the
National Security Council (NSC) staff as the Deputy Assistant to the
President for National Security Affairs and as Chairman for the
Deputies Committee. He was serving on the NSC staff when President
George H. W. Bush asked, "Can't we do something about this?" The
Deputies Committee had been meeting regularly on Somalia but without
urgency. Eventually, the President was presented a set of options just
before Thanksgiving and approved a proposal that became known as
Operation Restore Hope.
Admiral Howe explained how the U.S. commitment was circumscribed to
a very narrow mission: "We are going to put a Band-Aid on this thing,
basically. We are going to stabilize it." The mission was boxed in
merely to feed the starving people, create conditions for relief to
flow, and transfer the operation as soon as possible to the UN. Admiral
Howe admitted that the United States was "perhaps naïve." It believed,
he said, that "the U.S. would be a bridge to kind of a regular
peacekeeping group." The UN's shift to create a more lasting political
change in Somalia, what Admiral Howe called "put Humpty Dumpty back
together again from a failed state," was equally naïve. But fault could
not be laid completely on the UN. The United States kept the old
commitment— "get in there quick, get out of there, and give it to the
UN." When the new resolution was passed, it took a new commitment of
nations—particularly the United States, given the stakes it had in
Somalia—to back this with the kind of resources, forces, and
determination that would make it a success.
Despite his position with the UN, Admiral Howe was surprised
at the significant change in mission presented by the 26 March 1993 UN
Resolution 814: "To establish a secure environment for humanitarian
relief operations in Somalia" and "acknowledging the need for a prompt,
smooth and phased transition from the Unified Task Force (UNITAF) to
the expanded United Nations Operation in Somalia (UNOSOM II)."
Retired Army Lieutenant General Thomas Montgomery, commander
of U.S. forces and deputy UN force commander during the UNOSOM II
phase, noted that the interagency oversight mechanism, a crisis action
team (CAT), put in place for the initial limited UNITAF Operation
Restore Hope phase, was shut down during the switch to the UN in
Operation Continued Hope. He recalled the image of the UNITAF staff
returning to a well-deserved recognition ceremony on the White House
lawn, which made the cover of Time magazine. "The American people
thought Somalia was over," he noted, even if it was not true. The lack
of coordination and continuity exasperated seasoned diplomats such as
Gosende. "One fundamental rule we all thought people would be following
is, if there is a place in the world where American servicemen are
being shot at and killed, that is the first thing you ought to be
discussing every day. That was what was so very hard to grasp."
Retired Army Major General Waldo Freeman offered his
perspective from having served as deputy commander of U.S. Central
Command (CentCom) during Operation Restore Hope. CentCom was more
upbeat about the degree of success achieved in the summer's early
humanitarian airlifts. The shift to Operation Restore Hope caught it
entirely by surprise, and those involved resisted the mission. "CentCom
was very much against the intervention," he recalled. "Even after we
developed our plans, we went to the Joint Staff with the position that
we don't think this is a very good idea." Once the decision was made,
CentCom worked to narrow the mandate. General Freeman reasoned that
attempting to disarm the clans, or "do nation-building and that sort of
thing," was beyond what the command thought was appropriate. He
recalled a "big battle that was actually fought right up to the day the
President made his announcement over the exact wording of the mission
statement, a battle which CentCom won."
As General Montgomery pointed out, the issuance of UN Security
Council Resolution 814, with tacit U.S. support, clearly changed the
mission. "For us there was no such thing as mission creep," he pointed
out, "because it was very clear at the outset what we were supposed to
do." While the resolution was unrealistic and overly ambitious, General
Montgomery insisted the taskings in it were clear enough.
The Political Perspective
The panel tackling this aspect of the intervention featured
Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Patrick Sloyan, who delivered a
slashing critique of administration policy and execution. "I can't come
up with an insanity defense for any of the key players in Mogadishu 10
years ago," he said. "Bizarre, certainly. Incompetence, plenty of it. A
lack of diplomatic skill, for sure. Mix in old hatreds, tribal and
global. Add that major ingredient found in really distinctive
disasters—good intentions—and you have a bloodbath on the horn of
Africa."
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BOTH COURTESY OF THE UNITED NATIONS
UN
Envoy retired Navy Admiral Jonathan Howe (left) speaks to a Somali
official on the streets of Mogadishu. Admiral Howe and Army Lieutenant
General Thomas Montgomery (right) agreed in a conference at the
McCormick Tribune Foundation’s Cantigny estate 10 years later that the
mission change dictated by UN Resolution 814 had a profound effect on
operations in Somalia. |
Sloyan attacked both the policy makers around the U.S. president and
the civilian diplomatic personnel on site for the worsening situation
in Mogadishu. He found inexplicable the dual-track approach the United
States was pursuing by September 1993: it would launch an initiative
aimed at a political settlement in Somalia that included warlord
Mohamed Farah Aideed, but at the same time the hunt for Aideed would
continue. He roundly criticized then-Secretary of Defense Les Aspin for
his refusal to provide tanks.
Responding from a UN perspective, Admiral Howe explained, "We
had always held out the idea that there could be two tracks from the
start, right after the June incident, even before we had made the first
move." The UN strategy was not necessarily to destroy Aideed or his
people, but to isolate and weaken him, "to remove the ammunition and
take their ammunition supplies, which had been part of the inspection
that caused the reaction and the ambush of the Pakistanis." The
introduction of Delta and Task Force Ranger was to support the 6 June
UN Security Council Resolution 837, which called for bringing those
responsible for the slaughter of the Pakistanis to justice.
Ambassador Gosende reiterated the deliberate nature of the 5
June attack on the Pakistanis. This "was a pretty telling event. Here
we had 24 Pakistani peacekeepers killed in fundamentally three acts of
premeditated slaughter." Walter S. Clarke, a senior diplomat in the
U.S. embassy, stated emphatically: "The mission changed in Mogadishu.
But the decision to change the relationship with Aideed was Aideed's.
He was the one who put together the ambushes."
What Went Right, and What Went Wrong?
Clarke moderated this panel and pointed out the need to look at
each of the phases in Somalia, "because there are a lot of different
Somalias." Dr. Richard Stewart, chief of the Histories Division of the
Center of Military History at Fort McNair, focused on the early period
from August 1992 to May 1993. He found the airlift of humanitarian aid
during Operation Provide Relief from August to December 1992 was
successful. But this did not really change the conditions on the
ground, Stewart stressed. In fact, "it didn't really help that many
Somalis. It was a drop in the bucket."
The deeper problem of unscrupulous warlords grappling for
power could not be addressed by air power, "satisfying though the
thought of antiseptic aid from the air may be to some," added Stewart.
The subsequent U.S.-led Operation Restore Hope introduced substantial
military forces—about 38,000 soldiers from 23 nations—into southern
Somalia. This operation, in Stewart's view, could be declared a
success.
It was successful because it was conducted by "a powerful and
multitalented U.S. force acting legitimately under an international
mandate and was complemented by numerous coalition partners." Stewart
concluded that UNITAF was a success, but a limited one to match the
limited mission. He likened the task force's performance to a sheriff's
posse. "While the sheriff and his watchful deputies are in town, the
local criminals put up their guns and keep out of sight. By limiting
the mission in Somalia to establish temporary order, the U.S. got just
that." In hindsight, Stewart argued that postponing the broader problem
of political order overshadowed UNITAF's success and laid the
groundwork for future operational and strategic failures.
General Montgomery stressed the unique aspects of the
intervention, the first UN peace-enforcement mission since the Korean
War and the first to be transferred to the sole leadership of the UN.
He observed that the two major phases of the intervention operated
under different leadership, with distinctly different mandates.
Substantive disagreements erupted between the United States and the UN
over the latter's mandate. This caused a delay in the transition
between UNITAF and UNOSOM II, with U.S. forces already withdrawing. The
transition itself did not go well. UNOSOM II on 4 May had only 28% of
its staff in place when it took over from UNITAF. Its mandate had not
even been settled by this time.
Before he left Washington, General Montgomery received an
explicit charge from the Joint Chiefs of Staff that his mission was to
"make sure that the UN is a success, but don't let it become a U.S.
mission." But it could not possibly be a success.
Task Force Ranger, 3-4 October
Retired Army Brigadier General David Grange, a distinguished
special operations veteran and now Executive Vice President and Chief
Operating Officer of the McCormick Tribune Foundation, moderated a
panel that addressed what went wrong on 3-4 October 1993. Retired Army
Colonel Larry Casper commanded Falcon Brigade of the 10th Mountain
Division, which was the Quick Reaction Force (QRF) between September
1993 and March 1994 in Somalia. The author of a highly regarded book
that covers the actions of his command in Mogadishu, Colonel Casper
explained what happened along with his impressions of that chaotic day
a decade ago. Casper arrived in Somalia in late September, and was on
the ground only 10 days before the events of 3-4 October, having
assumed command only three days prior. He reported to General
Montgomery as commander of the QRF, which consisted of an infantry
battalion task force, an aviation battalion task force, and a support
battalion.
Both Colonel Casper and General Montgomery had been outside
the city visiting a German contingent when they started receiving radio
traffic: "We got the word ‘Blackhawk Down,' and my first reaction was,
‘Which Blackhawk is it?'" It was not one of Colonel Casper's birds, but
his command was soon involved deeply. The QRF already was activated
when Task Force Ranger began its mission, standing by with one of the
rifle companies on one-hour alert. An initial relief force under Army
Lieutenant Colonel Bill David, his command group, and Charlie Company
was dispatched to the scene and met stiff resistance.
Realizing piecemeal responses would result only in a bigger
disaster, General Montgomery withdrew the QRF. At this time, the
Pakistanis and Malaysians were asked to provide assistance. General
Montgomery explained these efforts and extolled their cooperation.
Colonel Casper recounted the reluctance of the allied contingents to
come to the aid of the beleaguered Rangers but explained this was
partly owing to their lack of night-vision equipment. "They had
nothing," he explained, "and they ended up doing it with white light."
When Colonel Casper began to supervise the relief column from a command
helicopter, the city of Mogadishu appeared to be a darkened mass until
he flew over the first crash site. "The perimeter's being inundated
with fire. It's going in and bunches were coming out," he recalled, "It
was absolutely an amazing sight to see from the sky, because I mean it
was nothing but tracers."
Former Ranger Michael E. Goodale reflected on the training and
cohesion of his unit. Before 3 October, "we had been on six other
missions," he noted. "So for the most part our task force really
believed that we were basically invincible." The complex mission went
off without a hitch until the first aircraft went down. "At that point,
our mission changed," he quipped, "and we did what our training told us
to do." In retrospect, Goodale admitted some decisions made that day
were not optimal. He attributed some of these to a sense of
complacency, because the previous missions had not met any serious
resistance. One of those soldier-level decisions was the choice not to
carry night-vision goggles on a short daylight mission. In retrospect,
Goodale admitted, it was "a bad choice."
General Montgomery pointed out that while he was the U.S.
Force Commander in Somalia, Task Force Ranger did not work for him.
Generally, he stated, no intelligence was shared between Task Force
Ranger and U.S. Forces Somalia, and rehearsals and coordination between
Task Force Ranger and the QRF were minimal. While admitting that the
Special Operations Forces (SOF) were elitist and did not like to
coordinate very much, he thought the coordination was acceptable and
his relationship with Major General William Garrison, the SOF
commander, was a strong one.
General Grange pointed out numerous units were on the ground:
Delta Force, Rangers, and a QRF infantry company. But it was not
apparent who was in charge of the target site on the ground. One of the
ground combatants, another Ranger by the name of John Belman, noted
that "there wasn't any one person in charge. Everything seemed to
self-organize fairly well, at least where I was. But there was no one
person making decisions as far as I can tell."
General Grange termed Special Operations Forces as "very aloof
. . . don't want to work for other people." He stressed that the issue
has to be forced to the front, or it would violate unity of command.
Army Chief of Military History General Brown echoed this concern,
adding that "it's going to continue to be dysfunctional until we
wrestle it to the ground."
The Aftermath
The panel moderated by Dr. Ahmed I. Samatar, a native Somali
and a professor at Macalester College, was charged with addressing how
the experience changed subsequent U.S. policy.
Retired Navy Vice Admiral Lee Gunn provided an operational
overview of Operation United Shield, which extracted the remaining UN
force from Mogadishu. He had served as the deputy commander of the
combined task force that conducted the operation, led by
then-Lieutenant General Anthony Zinni. This operation, related Admiral
Gunn, had all the potential to be the first amphibious withdrawal under
fire since the Korean War.
The first hurdle was the complexity of the planning effort,
since the coalition fleet comprised 21 ships, additional support
vessels, and ferries from several countries. France, Italy, Malaysia,
and Pakistan sent substantial contingents. The ferry boat contracted by
the UN to provide troop transport was a "a bucket of rust with a drunk
captain." Ultimately, a Navy repair team fixed the ship's most
immediate shortfalls, and then stayed on the vessel to ensure the 4,000
UN peacekeepers made the trip from Mogadishu to Mombasa. General
Zinni's leadership in pushing a gun-shy administration to participate
and his strong diplomatic effort with clan leaders ensured success.
Admiral Gunn concluded the operation was carried off well, but it would
have been much less complicated had it been done only by U.S. Marines
and sailors.
Adam Siegel, a naval analyst with extensive experience
studying complex contingencies in both the Middle East and Europe, was
critical of the haphazard approach the U.S. military has taken with
lessons learned from its small wars, calling it "lessons identified
versus lessons learned." Siegel accused the U.S. government of taking
away many of the wrong lessons.
Professor Samatar ended the session with his own cogent set of
lessons: First, the United States "is condemned to deal with these
global problems one way or another." He stressed the importance of
early warning, long before implosions take place. He also faulted U.S.
policy makers for not understanding how deep the self-destruction of
the Somali society was, and for not appreciating the sustained effort
needed to help the country fix itself. The combination of the dilution
of civic order and the tribalism of Somali culture became "a cocktail
of enormous firepower" that was never grasped fully. Mixing force and
diplomacy intelligently —"the essence of politics," he said—was a
serious shortcoming during the intervention.
Roundtable Discussion
- Strategy/Resources Mismatch. In a concluding session, General
Freeman, who had been involved extensively in CentCom's planning for
Operation Restore Hope, stressed "interests, ends, means, all three
have to be in balance" in any future intervention of this type. The
resources to execute the strategy were never balanced in Somalia.
While the UN Security Council was interested in helping
Somalia climb out of its abyss, it never gave commensurate resources to
UNOSOM II to accomplish the mission. "This was the huge frustration we
had out in the field," claimed one participant. "‘Give us the tools,'
we cried. And it wasn't that I wasn't asking for them constantly."
With regard to military input at the national level, General Montgomery added:
I think it is the responsibility of senior military people to
tell the policy level what it is they need in terms of military means
to do the job and not to try and pre-guess what will fly politically or
not. You need to say, "Here's what we need to do the job." And let them
say yes or no before you start deciding what might fly politically.
- Comprehensive Planning. A corollary of balancing ends and
means is the need for detailed campaign planning, including
collaborative discussions with all participants and explicit metrics
for success and exit concepts. For the United States, the exit concept
seemed to be minimizing forces required in Somalia until the entire
mission could be handed off to the UN. "We weren't out, but we
pretended like we were out," noted General Freeman.
General Montgomery observed the need to recognize that "there
is not one separate end state in an operation or a campaign. There are
a whole series of end states." While acknowledging senior military
people always should press for a clear definition of the end state, he
also noted that "we will never see one, because it's subject to
political negotiation"—and consensus, if it involves the UN or NATO.
The roundtable also observed that policy makers resist goals and
milestones for political reasons.
General Freeman explained the utility of what are called
"discourses" up and down the chain of command to facilitate
comprehensive and collaborative campaign planning. These are useful
when no clear definition of end state is in place and when the
combatant commander has to interact with "the political/military level
to answer hard questions, ask hard questions, and force, at least try
to force, the masters at that level to give you answers to the
questions about the end state." Success in Somalia required this kind
of discourse, Freeman admitted, "but I think we failed in that."
- Unity of Command. This is the by-product of clear authority
and effective planning. Widely understood mission statements, distinct
lines of authority and responsibility, and appropriate resources were
troublesome aspects of almost all the operations in Somalia. Military
veterans continued to point out the split in command channels and
confusing authorities between the UN forces, the U.S.-led QRF, and the
SOF forces in-country. Several conference participants saw the failure
to conduct adequate planning and rehearsals as contributing to the
confusion on 3 October.
Admiral Howe stressed any coalition has difficulties, but the
participants must "have a unity of values, hopefully, but at least
purpose," and that in Somalia there were too many countries with
separate agendas. "When we came to the turn in the road after the
assaults of 5 June," he stated, "you started to see the true colors of
the various nations that were there."
- Limitations of the UN. One of the grave difficulties posed was
the UN culture, which disdains collection of intelligence and proper
security of classified material. Participants felt the UN culture of
transparency must adapt, that much more must be done within the UN, and
that it was not sufficient for U.S. cells inside UN task forces to
develop "work-arounds" to make intelligence actionable.
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DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (RANDY MALLARD)
Marine
Lieutenant General Anthony Zinni listens to a briefing on Operation
United Shield that, under his command, withdrew UN peacekeepers from
Mogadishu. Many credit General Zinni’s strong leadership and diplomacy
skills with ensuring the success of this operation. |
This issue reinforced a conclusion drawn by numerous participants: the
UN was not then and is not now capable of conducting peace-enforcement
operations. While it is capable of planning and supervising traditional
Chapter VI peacekeeping missions, the UN falls short at more complex
situations. Some attendees, however, were willing to concede that in
the rush to push the mission over to the UN and pull back U.S.
resources, the UN "was doomed to failure, . . . we undercut our own
effort in the UN." Admiral Howe added, "Sometimes in the United States
we spend more time beating the United Nations up than we do figuring
out how we can influence it and make it a more capable organization."
- Force Multipliers. Numerous participants echoed the comments
of retired Army Colonel Charles Borchini, who had served as the
psychological operations (PsyOps) task force commander during Restore
Hope, on the importance of force multipliers such as PsyOps,
intelligence, and civil affairs. UNITAF had a PsyOps capability that
worked. The leaders in Mogadishu—Ambassadors Oakley and Gosende and
Generals Robert Johnston and Zinni—were familiar from past experience
with what PsyOps could do and gave appropriate latitude to their task
force. It shaped information positively to counteract Aideed's own
rudimentary but effective program. Borchini recalled General Charles E.
Wilhelm, who commanded the Marine division during Restore Hope, as
saying, "Your PsyOp loudspeaker teams were a combat reducer. They
reduced the incidents of combat, and saved the lives of my Marines and
the lives of the Somalis as well." Yet, when the U.S. mission
transitioned to UNOSOM II, the UNITAF PsyOp task force had nobody to
make the transition.
- Interagency Education. Comprehensive and collaborative
interagency planning and execution cannot be expected in the absence of
training and education. One proposal would adapt the National Defense
University into a National Strategy University and broaden its mission
as a center of excellence for senior government employees. One
commentator stated that "effective fusion of all instruments of
national power, at the operational level, cannot be expected in the
absence of any understanding of the culture and capabilities of all the
participants."
- Lessons Learned. A critical insight made by many military
participants was the need for a more systemic lessons-learned process.
The Army has the Center for Army Lessons Learned, and the joint
community has a rudimentary system. Several panelists cited the formal
After Action Review conducted by General Montgomery after Somalia,
which was suppressed for a decade because of political sensitivities.
The interagency process needs such a mechanism to preclude future
debacles. As Dr. Stewart noted in his earlier presentation:
No one likes to remember failure. It's very uncomfortable. But
failure should be remembered. It can and should be learned from. This
is the role of the historian, to turn down the microscope deeper and
deeper so that we can look into all the different aspects of the
operation, the mixture of successes and failures that make up any
military operation.
Many conferees believed the lessons generated in this discussion should
be exported to the national security community. General Montgomery
captured this best:
In the United States, the aftermath of the failures in
Somalia, as we all know, has haunted U.S. foreign policy to this day.
And if you're reading the press on Afghanistan and Iraq, the ghost of
Mogadishu on 3 October 1993 looms very large even today. It certainly
looms large in the minds of many of our soldiers in the field.
The fact that potential lessons from Somalia have not been shared
widely was an explicit concern for many who realized that complex
contingencies and failed states have great salience today. Having lived
through the dark and brutal night depicted in Black Hawk Down, the
veterans of Somalia wanted their experiences disseminated to avoid the
need for young Americans in the future to relearn them the hard way—on
the battlefield.
Retired Army Colonel Charles Borchini, a conference participant,
assisted materially in preparing this article. Both he and Colonel
Hoffman work at the Center for Emerging Threats and Opportunities at
Quantico, Virginia.
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