← The Rest Is Classified
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- [00:04]
David McClarsky
For exclusive interviews, bonus episodes, ad free listening, early access to series first look at live show tickets, a weekly newsletter and discounted books. Join the Declassified club@the restisclassified.com.
- [00:26]
Gordon Carrera
The US Soldiers trapped in Mogadishu are running for their lives. But how does the true story of Black Hawk down end? Well, welcome to the Rest Is Classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.
- [00:37]
David McClarsky
And I'm David McClarsky.
- [00:38]
Gordon Carrera
David last time we left off at the crash site where Super 61, one of the black Hawks had gone down, the group of Rangers and Delta had fought through the night, their ammunition running low, lots of wounded around them. They'd been waiting for their rescue convoy to come, which is complicated because it's a joint UN American rescue convoy with complicated command structures. It finally assembled, left at 2am, got to the crash site, and when we left last time, amazingly the convoy had gone, but had left some of those Rangers and Delta who had been there all night behind. And now they're faced with once again being stuck, almost abandoned, I guess, in Mogadishu. As the sun is coming up and as a new day is dawning with Somali fighters all around them, This episode is brought to you by HP in
- [01:37]
David McClarsky
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Gordon Carrera
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David McClarsky
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Gordon Carrera
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David McClarsky
To see how HP helps businesses work securely and productively, visit hp.com classified the rest is classified. Listeners also benefit from 10% off HP business technology with code TRIC10. There wasn't enough room on the vehicles and so some contingent was always going to have to run. But the plan had been for the runners to be able to use the vehicles as cover, and as we talked about last time, that cover is now gone, so maybe 60 men will need to run now. The soldiers running, they've been in continuous combat for around 16 hours. Many are severely dehydrated, many are wounded, and I think it's safe to say that many are experiencing something close to the limits of human endurance. They're also going to have to run in full combat gear. So this is maybe 60 pounds of the body armor, ammunition, weapons. That's hard even when you're in peak physical condition and obviously in the, in this situation, it's, it's even harder. Some of the Rangers describe this run, which has come to be known as the Bogadishu Mile, in almost hallucinatory terms, right? That combination of exhaustion and dehydration, adrenaline, depletion and terror creates almost altered mental states, right? So you read the accounts of this time becomes distorted, pain becomes distant. There's weird cases of just again, these, these really significant injuries that are almost not even noticed in real time. And the environment on this run gets reduced to these kind of immediate sensory inputs, right? So you can hear your own breathing or your feet hitting the pavement. The crack of bullets passing by. They follow the same route as the convoy and same as the convoy yesterday. These intersections are really deadly for the runners and for the vehicles, right, because they get this crossfire through the intersections. One Ranger is shot through the leg and falls. Other soldiers drag him back to his feet and support him between them, kind of carrying him while they continue to run. Another takes shrapnel from an RPG blast across his back and shoulders, just painful enough to make movement difficult, but he keeps on running. Another has a sort of a golf ball sized piece of flesh scooped out of his shoulder by around one guy. And you actually do see this at the film. One guy is deaf from the battle because he had had his head so close to a, a heavy machine gun that he loses hearing. One runner has literally, his pants have been shot off and he's running almost naked, actually naked from the waist down. So they're shooting at everything that appears at this point in the battle. And you see this if you watch the Netflix documentary, the Rangers who were part of this say that at this point they weren't making any distinction really between, you know, civilians or who's, you know, who's part of the militia. I mean, basically, you know, there's this mortal danger that comes, as we've discussed, from stopping. So no one wants to stop. You just have to keep moving. And the convoy fights on through Mogadishu streets. Some of the vehicles are at their breaking point because they're so overloaded with people. They're just. People are packed into these vehicles like sardines. The Somali attacks are intensifying. One of the armored personnel carriers engines overheats and it actually fails from overloading. I mean, there's, there's 30 people packed into a vehicle that's designed to hold 10. Another vehicle's suspension collapses under the weight. And it's just, it is an absolutely chaotic and mind boggling thing that after all of this up to this point, that they've experienced the end of this experience. What they hope will be the end is just this mad dash under fire through the streets of Mogadishu and eventually the runners will reach the kind of the full complement of the Pakistani the tanks and the armored personnel carriers and some of these Humvees. They reach that full complement of the vehicles. At the intersection of How Road and National street, there's another roadblock ahead. The vehicles plow through the roadblock and the rest of the vehicles roar through past them and the runners are coming along. And finally the convoy reaches the Pakistani Stadium in the early morning hours.
- [07:04]
Gordon Carrera
The distances aren't that large, are they, from the Pakistani Stadium to the crash site. It's pretty, it's actually a short distance and yet it's taken them hours to do that return journey. And overall it's been what, 16 hours since the mission first began, what was supposed to be a one hour mission.
- [07:21]
David McClarsky
And the crew that has arrived, this force that has arrived at the safety of the Pakistani stadium is in some state of shock, right? Bodies are being unloaded, they're having to triage the wounded, figure out, well, who needs immediate attention and who can wait. A lot of people with, with what you would think of as really horrendous injuries are made to wait because there are so many people who are even more awfully wounded than they are. There's people with bruised holes in their bodies, limbs mangled, parts of their bodies shot off. I mean, just on and on, right? But they're still not done yet because they need to go back to the American base. This part of the journey is not as bad as what had come before it. Vehicles turn north through Mogadishu. They go back to the Task Force Ranger compound at the airfield, which was the spot where the previous afternoon they're watching football games, hanging out on what had felt like it might be a quiet Sunday afternoon. That mission was supposed to take an hour, and it is now the morning of the next day. Now, General Garrison, head of Task Force Ranger, he's there with the vehicles come in, he walks out to meet them and he has already written a letter to President Clinton, taking personal responsibility for everything that has happened. He's going to send it before the day is out.
- [08:46]
Gordon Carrera
Does it fall on him? I Mean, in one sense, it does in the chain of command. He's running it, he decides on the mission, but I mean, he does the honorable thing by writing the letter. But whether it was predictable, it's hard to say, isn't it?
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David McClarsky
Well, I think you'd have to say it wasn't predictable given that they'd done six missions already that had gone quite well.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
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David McClarsky
On the other, on the other hand, you know, these, some of these decisions around not having armor, I actually think the AC130 gunship would not have been that helpful.
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Gordon Carrera
But that wasn't his fault.
- [09:15]
David McClarsky
It wasn't his fault. No, no, no, not his fault. But I think as you, as you look back and say, well, could it have gone differently? There's, there's a lot of different ways you could unpack the decision making around this battle and come up with a different, A different outcome. Now, back at the, at the base, the silence is the thing that a lot of survivors describe very vividly because after 15 or so hours in which there was almost constant gunfire, screaming, RPG detonations, thud of mortars, the crackle of radio traffic. Right. It's just this kind of soundtrack of war. The compound is relatively calm and quiet. There are engines cooling. They can actually hear the call to prayer coming from mosques in Mogadishu. Some people are crying. And as the morning progresses and they are accounting for what's happened, the first casualty count becomes clear, it's that 18Americans have died, 73 are wounded. That's 1/3 of Captain Steel's Ranger company had been killed or wounded. And at this point, those two Delta operators who had gone in to stave off the militia around Michael Durant's crash site, that second crash site, they're still out there unaccounted for, along with the crew on Super 64. So that's six men missing. Now, Delta operators will embed with a sympathetic local NGO to provide them with COVID so they can go out into the city in civilian clothes. They're actually gonna look for the bodies. At this point, they're assuming that, you know, at least some of them might be. Might be dead. Or they try, they're trying to figure out where they're being held, if any of them are alive. And there is only one of those missing persons that is still alive, and that's Michael Durant.
- [11:08]
Gordon Carrera
He, we'd left him, I guess he'd been, you know, holding out with his pistol by the very end and surrounded by Somali militia. And then he's captured. I mean, he was battered you know, we'd left him with his back pretty much broken from the crash, his leg shattered. He gets treated by a Somali doctor, which is interesting because as we'd said, they wanted to have someone alive that had been always one of the targets for aid. And then there's this fascinating bit where there's going to be a propaganda video which is being made of him. And the Netflix documentary Surviving Black Hawk down is fascinating because actually get the guy who brought in, don't they, to be the cameraman interviewing, you know, Michael Durant and who's, who's captured some of these things. And you see him being asked questions and being interrogated and he looks just terrible. I mean, he looks absolutely, you know, his eyes are kind of black and he's bruised. And they're clearly trying to get him to say we were killing lots of civilians. You know, that's, that's clearly what they are trying to get him to do in that propaganda video. And I think you can tell he knows that and he's trying to avoid saying, saying those kind of things and doing the absolute minimum. But that now becomes one of the key focus of American operations is trying to get him out. And he's going to get visited by Red Cross and even some journalists. But he's held by the ID forces.
- [12:31]
David McClarsky
IDEID has basically paid for him to use him as a bargaining chip with the US Just to continue the accounting. So two Malaysian soldiers are killed, seven wounded, two Pakistani soldiers are wounded, and then there are those Somali casualties of this battle. Estimates on this range widely Several hundred, maybe three to 500 killed up to at the higher end, estimates of maybe a thousand or more killed with many more wounded. The overwhelming majority of these are men who came to fight, of course, not all of them. This is really telling. The biggest hospitals in Mogadishu by morning are at capacity. Surgeons are operating around the clock. The hospital that is closest to the American base had been largely empty since the arrival of task force rancher because locals were too afraid to go there. But now all 500 beds in that hospital that morning are full. So massive number of Somali casualties in comparison to the Americans.
- [13:32]
Gordon Carrera
And what's interesting is it is now, I guess, in the US late Monday morning and already the images and the news of what has happened in Mogadishu are starting to filter into the United States. We talked earlier about how, you know, actually the White House didn't really understand what was going on as the battle was unfolding on the Sunday and into the early hours of Monday morning. But once you get into Monday, some of that footage shot by Somali cameraman is sent out very quickly and reaches American newsrooms. And this is really important, I think, for the legacy of the Battle of Mogadishu, because, I mean, the footage is pretty graphic. And looking back, when you look at the archive footage, I'm astonished that they showed it on American tv. I mean, they show it with a warning, and they say, you know, warning. This is graphic, but it's the bodies of American soldiers, of dead American soldiers being literally dragged through the streets, the mutilated bodies by crowds who are celebrating. I mean, that's what the images are. And suddenly everyone is realizing that something huge has unfolded and that there are soldiers who've died. And you've got Michael Durant, the capture pilot, who we spoke of, being interviewed by his. His captors, and these kind of footage of, you know, downed Blackhawk helicopters and of carnage. I mean, it is a massive impact that day on American public opinion, isn't it, as it makes the news?
- [15:02]
David McClarsky
It's hard to overstate the impact that I think, in particular the videos and images of the bodies being dragged through the streets had on American public opinion, because the political mood shifts overnight. There had been an ABC News poll done in May of 1993, so five months earlier that showed that the intervention at Somalia had a 65% approval rating. That's gone overnight. It evaporates. And President Clinton will suspend all combat operations in Somalia just a few days later. So effectively, he ends the manhunt for Aidid and his organization right after the battle. But we still have Americans in Somalia, Michael Durant, still a prisoner, not all of the bodies are accounted for. And we talked about how Delta teams have been going into the city in the days after the battle, trying to account for the dead. Now, there's another footnote to this, which doesn't often get included in the accounts of that battle itself, which is that there are militia mortar teams that fire on the airfield, on the Ranger base regularly. And up to this point, they had been woefully inaccurate. The Rangers and the Delta guys would, I mean, in some cases, just kind of mock how terribly inaccurate the mortar fire was. But on 6 October, one of those borders finds its mark and kills a Delta operator named Matt Ryerson. So he's killed in a mortar strike. And you get this sense in the days afterward of this confused picture where the. Clearly, there is no political fuel left to do much of anything in Somalia, and yet we still have Americans there, and we still have People unaccounted for.
- [16:45]
Gordon Carrera
And I mean, that's the thing. The film and the traditional story of Black Hawk down ends immediately after the battle, when they get back to the American base. And, you know, there's relief and a sense also of loss and obviously, you know, of tragedy. But actually, the aftermath of this is so important and so interesting, isn't it, because. Because first of all, there's the political aftermath for President Clinton, who, of course, is pretty new to office there. This is his first year in office. Following day, October 7, after Rieson, as you said, had been killed, President Clinton addresses the nation from the Oval Office. And he's got a kind of tricky thing, hasn't it, because it had originally been a humanitarian mission. It had been started by President George H.W. bush before him, and he'd continued it, and he's trying to justify it, saying, you know, we saved close to a million lives. But now having to acknowledge that something had gone wrong. It's interesting, isn't it? He blames it on a mistake of going after ID of almost personalizing the conflict and suggesting that the manhunt element of it turning it into that very kind of intense struggle between the US Force and ID was an error.
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David McClarsky
Privately, he's furious. He'd been getting briefs on Task Force Ranger missions, but this one had spun up so quickly that he actually hadn't had known about it. And I do think in this, you know, Clinton at this time is also, I would say, not the most popular guy in the American military. And this makes him look even more aloof, disengaged from military matters. There's a whiff of Bay of Pigs here in, I think, President Kennedy kind of thinking, well, I've been maybe not tricked, but I've been misled by my military advisors and my senior people. What's that about? I get the sense here from Clinton that he's feeling in sort of similar straits after the Battle of Mogadishu.
- [18:39]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, you're right. He had a difficult relationship with the military, of course, during Vietnam. He'd not served. He'd been, amongst other things, in Oxford and other places. So he's slightly struggling with that. As someone who'd been elected to focus on domestic issues, suddenly being pulled into foreign policy in this. In this area. I think it was definitely tricky for him. And the result is effectively, he's going to call it quits on the mission. He's going to say, we're done. We're done in Somalia. Even if the humanitarian mission had been
- [19:11]
David McClarsky
important and successful, all Americans, he announces, will leave Somalia by March 31, 1994. There will, in the short term, be substantial reinforcements. So there's an aircraft carrier and a contingent of Marines who are sent. But this is to enable the withdrawal. This is about force protection. This is not for combat. And really the nation building element of the UN mission and the kind of complement that Task Force Ranger had tried to apply on the security side, they're abandoned. American involvement in Somalia, which had begun with a tremendous amount of optimism in December of 1992, ends in absolute failure and retreat. And I think you could hear in the testimonials of many of the soldiers, this is the part that outrages so many of the American soldiers. It's not second guessing the way that the battle was conducted or the decisions leading up to the battle. It's this decision to just hightail it afterward that has so many of them wondering what was the sacrifice for, which
- [20:15]
Gordon Carrera
I'm afraid does have echoes of some of those who, in very different contexts and much longer wars, you know, would serve in places like Afghanistan, wouldn't they? And when, you know, they, they did 20 years of nation building and then you leave and the Taliban come back and people go, well, what was that for? What was that intervention for? So I think there's, there's echoes of it there.
- [20:35]
David McClarsky
I think Clinton also has another track going. There's a diplomatic track to this that we have not talked much about so far. But that becomes really important in the days after the battle because Clinton is looking for a way to withdraw, to leave and to solve some of the problems, the immediate problems that he has in the aftermath of the battle, which is that you have Americans who are unaccounted for and being held hostage by IDs militia. So what Clinton does is he goes and he taps a guy named Robert Oakley, who had been the US special envoy to Somalia in 1992 and early 1993 before task force Ranger had entered the picture. Oakley had run the original humanitarian intervention and had been pretty successful. And he'd worked with clan leaders, including ID. Clinton sends Oakley back to Mogadishu on the 9th of October. So just five days after the battle, and Oakley arrives with a mandate to end the crisis. He's there to secure Michael Durant's release and to enable this, this withdrawal in many ways. And we should maybe put a brief trigger warning here. If, if for some reason you have made it to this point in listening to the series with children, this might be a point where you ask them to leave the room or Turn it
- [22:02]
Gordon Carrera
down because it gets even worse than we've heard before. I mean, who'd have thought.
- [22:06]
David McClarsky
It does, it does get get worse because what happens, and this is, I mean, it's, this part is absolutely enraging to so many of the Americans, to all of the Americans who are, who are there, which is that the body is, or pieces of the bodies of Gary Gordon, Randy Shugart and the crew chiefs in that Blackhawk. These guys are most likely confirmed killed when pieces of their bodies are returned to the base in garbage bags. And that has, there's, there is some debate over whether that's the Somalis actually just trying to return them.
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Gordon Carrera
It just feels to the Americans disrespectful somehow for it to arrive in, in garbage bags.
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David McClarsky
The intent is, I think, up for debate, but the impact it had at the base is not, which is that it made everyone absolutely furious and, and, and enraged. So with this as the context, Oakley, the, you know, Clinton representative meets with representatives of ID, does, though within hours of landing, and he doesn't demand that idea surrender, but he basically, Oakley basically says there's not going to be any trade for Michael Durant. He threatens id's men and says if you don't hand over Durant, there's going to be absolute hell to pay. And you do not want us to turn loose on your city, on your neighborhoods. These forces who have been through what they've been through the last couple days. It's going to go very, very poorly for you. We're sending an aircraft carrier, we're sending more Marines. You're going to hand over Michael Durant. And ID basically recognizes that Durant's value to him is going to depreciate very quickly. So on October 14th, less than two weeks after the battle, Idid announces Durant's release. Id actually announces it on, on CNN. Durant is back at the Ranger base the next day. On the 15th of October. He's greeted by a force of now more than a thousand people. They form a, a corridor leading from the base driveway to the apron of the transport plane that's going to take Michael Durant to Germany for medical treatment. Because remember, he's, he's been treated by the Somali doctors, but he's in bad shape. Everybody has a paper cup that is filled with a tiny bit of bourbon. Now, remember, while he's in captivity, Durant could actually through the Red Cross had been able to write some letters and he had a handle of Jack Daniels in his belongings and he had written in one of the Letters threatening the other, threatening the other pilots and everyone at the base that if they drink it, if they drank it, there would be hell to pay. So everybody had a paper cup that was supposedly filled with the bourbon from his fifth of Jack Daniels. And Durant is transported to medical facility in Germany, goes back to the US he will eventually recover, returns back to flight status, which is absolutely amazing.
- [25:08]
Gordon Carrera
I know. I find that extraordinary. Yeah. Both physically and emotionally and psychologically, that he can do that, that he goes back to being able to fly. Yeah.
- [25:16]
David McClarsky
Retires years later, ends up writing a book, which I highly recommend to all listeners, called in the Company of Heroes.
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Gordon Carrera
Now, meanwhile, I mean, one thing we lost sight of perhaps amidst the battle was the reason for it was to go after some IDD lieutenants. But they get released, I mean, they get released as part of the deal, I guess, to get durant out. So 24 Somalis captured during the raid, all eventually freed. So it goes back to that idea that actually nothing was gained from it ultimately, I mean, which must be one of the reasons for the kind of anger in some parts, as well as the withdrawal ultimately from Somalia, but also the fact even that raid itself doesn't. It doesn't bring about any benefit.
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David McClarsky
And then In March of 1994, five months later, all US forces are out of Somalia. So maybe there. Let's take a break and when we come back, we will look at the legacy of this intense battle. How many discounts does USAA auto insurance offer? Too many to say here. Multi vehicle discount, safe driver discount, new vehicle discount, storage discount. How many discounts will you stack up? Tap the banner or visit usaa.com autodeck Discounts restrictions apply.
- [26:34]
Gordon Carrera
So welcome back. So American forces have left. The Somalis they captured during the raid were released. What did it all mean? Intense battle. But what was the significance of it? And I guess the first thing to say is it does have a huge lasting effects on America and American foreign policy. That one battle, you know, less than a day, but actually really does, I think, shape the American mindset through the coming years, particularly in the 90s. I mean, they talk about this thing called the Mogadishu effect, don't they? And it is particularly the. The aversion to casualties and military casualties in situations like that. The combination, I guess, of mission creep, of a lack of a clear objective over the overall mission and then the sustaining of casualties, but also the fact that it feeds back into American public opinion because as we'd said right at the start of the series, this is the kind of era in which cable news is just emerging, CNN is emerging. So the fact that when you have these casualties in a way much more immediately than, say, in the Vietnam War, the reality of what's happening is being fed back to the American public and creating this kind of aversion to it, isn't it?
- [27:56]
David McClarsky
I think it's hard to explain, or you shouldn't bother explaining the foreign policy decision making of, of really the rest of the 1990s without talking about Mogadishu, without talking about this battle, because you can almost draw a straight line, for example, from the outcome in Somalia to the genocide in Rwanda, which erupts just six months after the Black Hawk down incident. I mean, between 800,000 and a million Rwandans are murdered in roughly a hundred days in 1994, and the Clinton administration does nothing. And when you look back at declassified documents or even just the official memoirs written by the Clinton national security team, it's clear that Somalia was a factor in the decision making around staying out of Rwanda.
- [28:50]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. Because in hindsight, people said, well, actually, if a relatively small number of troops perhaps to secure Kigali airport in Rwanda and, you know, create safe havens could have had a massive impact. But the legacy of Mogadishu is there because the US Just doesn't want to risk going into another African war zone, inserting troops into.
- [29:10]
David McClarsky
You could also make the case that the kind of shadow of Somalia fell on opportunities to strike Osama bin Laden. That popped up in the late 1990s where you, you had examples in, in Sudan or in Afghanistan where a special operations raid that would have involved groups like Delta Force or the seals operating, you know, being inserted in helicopters to capture or kill Osama bin Laden, those proposals got dismissed. And, you know, I think the memory of this incident and in particular the massive political fallout from sustaining casualties and from having those casualties then paraded around on cnn, it's very. It sticks in the hearts and minds of, of senior, you know, national security officials in the Clinton administration and shapes their decision making on Rwanda and on counterterrorism.
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Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And what's interesting is, is, of course, you mentioned, you know, al Qaeda, Osama bin Laden on that. They also learn from this incident. And bin Laden himself tries to understand what's happened. And the conclusion that bin Laden takes from it is that if you can inflict just a few military casualties on the US you can force them to withdraw. In other words, American public opinion will not sustain military casualties. And he used this phrase that America is a paper tiger. You know, the idea is it looks really impressive, but all you need to do is kind of inflict those casualties and they'll back away. And that becomes, I mean, that actually becomes part of the strategic philosophy of Al Qaeda. I mean, that's a really significant impact. Impact of it, isn't it?
- [30:59]
David McClarsky
I think you could make the case that the East Africa bombings that Al Qaeda conducted in 1998, the destruction of a US destroyer off the coast of Yemen in 2000 and then maybe ultimately 911 itself are all influenced to some degree by what Bin Laden saw in Somalia. It's a very, again, it's not an exactly straight line, but without Black Hawk Down, I'm, I'm not sure that Osama Bin Laden has in his own deluded mind such a clear theory of victory for what he could accomplish with, you know, even just a few casualties. You know, I mean, the other piece of this, Gordon, is what's the legacy for Somalis and, and Somalia? I mean, the long term legacy is, is exceptionally bleak. I mean the, yeah, international withdrawal essentially leaves Somalia to more than two decades of just state failure, clan warfare, humanitarian crisis after crisis, the rise of violent extremism. I mean, Mohamed Farah Adid, you know, he doesn't, spoiler alert. He doesn't wind up stabilizing the country. He winds up dying in a battle with another clan in July of 1996. And over the course of the next few decades, I mean you have this, this complete absence of a functionality central government creates conditions for an extremist group very similar to Al Qaeda called Al Shabaab to, to emerge and kind of grow in power and confidence throughout the 2000s, ends up controlling large portions of southern Somalia, implements a very harsh interpretation of Sharia and areas it controls. It commits terrorist attacks in Somalia. Most a huge one was the, the attack on the 2010 World cup in Kampala killed 74 people. So you have, you know, an international community through the un, The US Military, a whole bunch of allied nations trying to fix the place who are trying to fix things. And you know, the. None of it, none of it comes to pass. I mean, you also have, you know, famously Somali piracy flourishing in that security vacuum.
- [33:06]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah. And taking down shipping, you know, particularly in the 2010s with, with, with huge impact. And I mean, still, I mean, you know, I was remembering that actually some of the first military strikes that Donald Trump did in his second term of office, so in early 2025 were against Somalia. And I think what he described as is in Somalia, and so it continues to be a A major security concern as a potential hub for whether it's piracy or, or terrorist violence ongoing as well as. Of course, you know, we shouldn't underplay the suffering of the Somali people who are going to, you know, suffer terribly in the years to come. But both from the civil war, but even also famine comes back again, doesn't it? And kills, you know, I think in 2011 it kills between 50,000 and 260,000 people, many of them children. So the consequences for the country are pretty enormous.
- [33:57]
David McClarsky
I also think that the U.S. military and intelligence apparatus look at this battle and it forces fundamental changes in how the military trains for and equips for and conducts these kind of special operations raids. Right. Because I think there are tactical deficiencies that are revealed by the battle on October 3rd and 4th and they get addressed pretty systematically in the decade that follows. And in many ways you could draw a line from Mogadishu to these kind of special operations raids in Iraq and Afghanistan and then also the raids against high value targets like Osama bin Laden and Nicholas Maduro. Yeah, Gordon, in the episodes we did on bin Laden, we talked about how the Joint Special Operations Command had set up a replica of the Abbottabad compound where Bin Laden was hiding and actually trained, did the pre mission rehearsals on that compound. This is a lesson that runs almost directly from the confusion of the market and the target building. Because months and years after the battle of Mogadishu, the American military, particularly the special operations units, developed the practice of constructing full scale replicas of target compounds to do this kind of pre mission rehearsal. The models. Right. So we have a Seal Team 6 rehearsing on a model of Abbottabad. We've got Delta Force training on a replica of the Maduro compound. That that practice comes out of this battle was like we should always, we should have a replica of what we're going to be operating in and we should train on that.
- [35:40]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah.
- [35:41]
David McClarsky
You know, interesting. I mean, just talking about the Osama bin Laden raid, I find it fascinating that Blackhawk down has almost become American foreign policy decision maker shorthand for some kind of horrendous, accidental, unforeseen disaster. That shadow was, I mean, present in the room. A cabinet official in the Obama administration said, well, we can't afford another Black Hawk down, you know, so it becomes this kind of shorthand for a disaster that could have incredible political consequences. Right. I also think that Mogadishu made Abbottabad possible. It made these kind of manhunting raids that characterized U.S. special operations during the War on Terror possible. We have, you know, better aircraft and training. We have a joint special operations command that has spent almost two decades developing doctrine for exactly this kind of like complex hostile environment raid like they did in Pakistan and like they did in Venezuela. When you look at the mission to go get bin Laden, one of the helicopters did crash.
- [36:51]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, yeah.
- [36:52]
David McClarsky
And the mission continued and Osama bin Laden was killed and the entire force was out of Pakistani airspace before the Pakistani military even understood what had happened. And so you can't, obviously those are two different situations, but you can make some loose comparison to say 2011 versus 1993. Big difference.
- [37:12]
Gordon Carrera
I guess your point is that it's big difference and they learned from Black Hawk down and adapted and, and deliberately have worked out ways to avoid it happening again. I suppose the other thing to say though is it was probably quite fine margins between something going wrong and you getting another Black Hawk down. Because you know, both of bin Laden red, you said something went wrong and they managed to recover from it. In bin Laden, Maduro kind of went, went like clockwork in one sense. But it doesn't take much for, for a helicopter to go down or to get hit or for something to happen for then to be into another disaster. But I guess, I guess they now build more redundancy into operations in case that, in case something goes wrong. That's the thing. Because the reality is things do go wrong.
- [37:54]
David McClarsky
I think the redundancy is one of the major learnings because when you talk to seals or Delta operators or Night Stalker pilots who are thinking about how you would do a raid today if you needed, let's say in theory, you're going to hit a target and you think you need 15 men, 15 operators, that's maybe one kilo. There would be a, there would be a contingency of exactly the same force on another helicopter that would be accompanying the guys who are actually going to go and hit the target. And if one of those helicopters goes down, everybody could go back in the other helicopter and in some cases you might even have three. So there's an incredible amount of redundancy that's built in. Also think, you know, talk about Maduro. Just happened just in January of this year. Operation Absolute Resolve. Look at the units that are involved. It's Delta Force, it's the Night Stalkers. The pilots, the same pilots. Intelligence preparation over months, full scale replica of the target compound that was built in Kentucky. Over 150 aircraft in coordinated roles. And you know, when one of the Chinooks is hit and struggles to stay airborne over the capital. I mean, it doesn't end up. It doesn't end up going down now, again, different situations. But I think when you look at the way that the Maduro raid is conducted and that you look at how the Battle of Mogadisha went down, I think you can. You can say that the military, the intelligence apparatus behind it, had adopted a lot of the lessons of 1993 and had adapted these special operations units, the equipment, the gear, the tactics to conduct these kind of raids. And we're very good at it.
- [39:38]
Gordon Carrera
Yeah, I think that's true. But I guess one of the lessons, though, for me is, you know, even with the best military in the world, even with all the planning, even with all the redundancy, even with all those things, unpredictable stuff happens. And if you're fighting on your opponent's terrain. Mogadishu was part, you know, was a character in this story for a reason, because it was. It was difficult terrain which the. The adversary knew and the US side didn't. That lesson, to me is still there, is that even if you've got all the intelligence, all the firepower, there's a level of unpredictability that's real when combat operations start, which can lead something to disaster. However much preparation you've got and however much you've got the technological advantage.
- [40:25]
David McClarsky
I was struck in watching both the film Black Hawk down and in watching the Netflix documentary in particular. At multiple points, I was wondering to myself, it's like, why are we in Somalia? I'm kind of, why are we there? And it's interesting, when you peel the history apart, each decision kind of makes sense. The UN mission actually did some real good to help ameliorate the conditions that brought about the famine. But then once you're there, you're faced with this awful decision of, well, to actually give this whole thing a fighting chance of being sustainable. We then have to deal with the fact that we have these rival clans and militias who are fueling the famine or who will step in and, you know, sort of recreate the conditions that. That created the famine in the first place if we don't leave. So now it's a security thing, and
- [41:21]
Gordon Carrera
then it becomes a manhunt, and then
- [41:22]
David McClarsky
it becomes a manhunt. And so you can kind of see how each of those decisions, they're being made by smart people who are, in general, I think, well meaning. And yet you end up at really a position by the time you get to October of 1993, where the gap between means and ends is a chasm
- [41:45]
Gordon Carrera
which is the mission creek problem on a much different scale and over a longer period. You could say that was one of the issues with Afghanistan. The original mission was, you know, remove the Taliban from power and get Al Qaeda and then you get an expansion into, well, is it nation building? Is it counter narcotics? Are we rebuilding political institutions? How far do you get into that? And if you don't have the clarity of objectives, you do risk mission creep or mission complexity, which can draw you into situations which you can't always control and can draw you into those kind of situations of insurgency and occupation, which are problematic. So I think that issue of clarity of objectives, admission creep, those are surely the kind of big strategic lessons which I'm not entirely sure everyone's learned since then.
- [42:34]
David McClarsky
I might argue that they're unlearnable. Is that a word? It can be because you can't anticipate or it's very challenging to anticipate the second and third order problems that will crop up after you've dealt with the first problem. But it, I think it is true that there's a. An echo of Somalia in the wars that we'll fight in Iraq and Afghanistan where we'll enter that conflict with maybe a muddled objective, but certainly a more limited one than we. What we ended up with, you know, 10, 20 years later, where, you know, as soon as you intervene to break a political structure, well, it's a lot easier to kind of break it. It's a lot easier in the Somalian context to, you know, just kind of hit militia guys and put them in prison than it is to resolve the underlying political and military conflict that's creating, which becomes nation building, the major problem in the first place. So you end up on this kind of slippery slope to nation building. I also think. One other piece that I think bears some discussion before we close this out is there's a tendency to frame this battle as a loss for the US And I think it's important to parse that out because in pure military terms, it's absolutely not. The Rangers in Delta Force, they had targets. They went and got those targets. They brought those targets back.
- [44:11]
Gordon Carrera
They paid a heavy price, though. They paid a heavy price.
- [44:16]
David McClarsky
It's a very lopsided battle.
- [44:18]
Gordon Carrera
Well, if you do it by casualty
- [44:19]
David McClarsky
figures, but I think that's a valid, that is one valid lens through which to look at this battle, which is 18Americans killed, maybe up to three to 500 Somali militia.
- [44:33]
Gordon Carrera
But if you. But that's kind of. That's body count metrics that. That that has echoes to me of Vietnam accounting going, we're winning because look at the body count. It feels to me like a defeat. I mean, because. Because. Because they're. They're out of Somalia within. Within, you know, months of this happening. And the kind of strategic effect.
- [44:55]
David McClarsky
I'm not arguing that point. I'm just saying that when you look at the battle, yeah, the US Won the battle.
- [45:02]
Gordon Carrera
You could. Well, you can win a battle and lose a war.
- [45:05]
David McClarsky
Exactly. And that's exactly what I'm saying, is that the. The battle, the tactical success was not translated into a strategic victory. And, yeah, it was a. It was a bloody tactical success.
- [45:19]
Gordon Carrera
But it goes back to. This is a longer discussion we could have, but it goes back to whether you see military battles purely in military terms or whether you see them in kind of political, strategic terms. It's a bit like saying the. I mean, because we're talking as, you know, the US And Israel are pounding Iran, and in terms of, you know, they're saying, we hit 5,000 targets, 10,000 targets. You can hit 5 or 10,000 targets and militarily have complete dominance on one level over a country like Iran. But if they close the Straits of Hormuz and have an impact on the global economy, then actually, you're fighting almost, you know, you're discussing different things about who's winning or who's losing. And I guess, you know, I agree, if you see in a very narrow tactical mission, the Americans go in, they take casualties, but they get out and they get their people out. But I just think that's a very. A narrow lens through which to see this battle. But I suppose it all goes to saying how consequential it is.
- [46:10]
David McClarsky
It is also worth saying that when you look at the individual stories of the people who fought, Gary Gordon and Randy Shugart, we should say, I mean, they both received the Medal of Honor posthumously. They're the first Medal of Honor recipients since the Vietnam War. At that time, I mean, many of the Americans are decorated with silver stars, Bronze stars, of course, Purple Hearts for the battle. And there is, and I think we'll see this as we talk about the film, you know, in our bonus episode, is that when you examine the battle through the lens of the individuals who fought it, it's an incredible story, I think, of heroism, bravery, sacrifice. And then when you layer on the kind of, as you're doing, I think rightly, this question of, well, did the battle produce a better political outcome, strategic victory, the answer is obviously no. And in that sense, this is why. So many of the people who fought them fought in the battle. So angry with the the Clinton administration's response afterward is we we ended up with 19 people killed, dozens and dozens wounded, and we achieved nothing for it. I mean, neither side really wins. And yet it's the reason we've been telling the story is that it's also, weirdly, an extremely important battle that affected the history of foreign policy decision making in the 1990s and the way that the US conducted the war on terror.
- [47:58]
Gordon Carrera
A remarkable story on lots of levels, I think, David so thank you for joining with us, all of you out there. And a reminder that if you're a Declassified Club member, you will be able to hear our bonus episodes on this, including us looking at kind of doing a bit of film review on the film Black Hawk down and looking at the reality versus the fiction. So do join up@therestdisclassified.com where you'll also be able to get details about our tickets for our live show coming up in September, the South Bank. We're doing a show in which I think fact and fiction may well feature again. So do sign up for those tickets for the live show in September. And we will see you next time.
- [48:42]
David McClarsky
We'll see you next time.