Today is the thirtieth anniversary of the Battle of Mogadishu. At this moment thirty years ago, nearly one hundred Rangers and Delta Force operators were pinned down in the city, caring for the wounded and fighting off thousands of heavily armed Somali militiamen. Helicopter crews from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—the Night Stalkers—provided aerial fire support. One of the most intense battles of modern times had been going for seven hours; it would continue through the night for another eight hours. In the end, eighteen Americans died and more than seventy were wounded.
This epic battle was immortalized in the classic book Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden and dramatized in the movie of the same name. What most Americans know about the battle comes from his excellent reporting.
What Bowden made clear is sometimes overlo ooked: these warriors accomplished their mission. The veterans of that battle should hold their heads high with pride. And the Gold Star families of those eighteen fallen warriors in Mogadishu should know that their husbands, sons, and fathers were indeed heroes, no less than the men who jumped into Normandy or stormed Iwo Jima.
Unfortunately, their leaders in Washington failed these heroes. No modern battle better reflects some enduring truths that we ought to keep in mind today.
We should only commit our forces when our vital national-security interests are at stake—when the mission is so critical that it justifies American casualties if necessary.
Once committed, we should provide our troops with every last thing they need to fight and win, without tying one hand behind their backs.
And we should be mindful of what dangerous lessons we teach our enemies when we handcuff our troops or squander their battlefield victories.
Let’s go back to how those Rangers, Delta operators, and Night Stalkers wound up fighting for their lives in the streets of Mogadishu. In 1992, an estimated 350,000 Somalis had starved to death in a famine of biblical proportion. The American media highlighted the atrocious suffering in Somalia. But the famine primarily resulted not from natural disaster, but from rival warlords fighting a brutal civil war. The warlords stole food-aid shipments to profiteer, feed their clans, and starve their enemies. Hunger was just another weapon.
After the election and with the approval of President-elect Clinton, President Bush decided to intervene. He acted against the counsel of many of his senior advisors. CIA Director (and later Secretary of Defense) Bob Gates later summed up their opposition by observing that no vital American interest was at stake. Moreover, the humanitarian disaster was caused by the warlords, so intervening to ensure the safe delivery of food aid merely addressed the symptoms, not the causes, of the famine. Gates lamented “the first U.S. military intervention driven by CNN.”
In his diary, President Bush cited the shocking loss of life from the famine and the perception that America didn’t do enough to help black and Muslim nations as justification for intervention—not exactly core national interests.
Whatever one thinks of his decision, though, President Bush wisely used overwhelming force to pursue strictly defined and limited objectives. He deployed more than 25,000 troops to Mogadishu, but only to secure the port and distribute food aid to needy Somalis. He refused the UN’s proposal to expand the mission to disarming the Somali warlords.
Faced with such overwhelming power, the warlords backed down and allowed the aid to flow freely into Mogadishu. Then-Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Colin Powell later reflected that “within weeks, we were so successful that we had upset the economics of the marketplace. So much free food came pouring into Somalia that it became tough to make a living by farming.”
When Bill Clinton took office in January 1993, he inherited a successful, narrow mission that was drawing down. Unfortunately, he snatched defeat from the jaws of victory.
He flipped President Bush’s approach of overwhelming force with limited and defined objectives on its head. By March, President Clinton turned over primary responsibility to the UN, reduced the American presence to barely more than 4,000 troops, and expanded the mission to encompass the grandiose objective of nation building. UN Ambassador Madeline Albright proclaimed that “we will embark on an unprecedented mission aimed at nothing less than the restoration of an entire country.”
Gates later called the plan “a pipe dream” and “hopelessly unrealistic.” Powell scoffed that “since the catastrophe had been provoked by feuding fourteenth-century-style warlords, the solution was a dose of twentieth-century-style democracy.”
What happened next was all too predictable. The warlords no longer feared the shrunken American force and renewed their fighting against each other and the UN peacekeepers. By June, the militia of the most powerful warlord, Mohamad Farah Aidid, massacred two dozen Pakistani peacekeepers. Two months later, Aidid’s men killed four Americans and wounded another four in separate bombings.
Faced with American casualties, the inexperienced president felt compelled to respond, but he only authorized half measures. He deployed 450 Rangers, Delta Force operators, and Night Stalkers to capture Aidid and destroy his command structure. Though these soldiers are among our nation’s very best, the mission creep was extraordinary. President Clinton simply asked too much of too small a force. Mogadishu was a dense city of more than one million residents, including thousands of Aidid’s clansmen and fanatical supporters, some of whom probably received training from al Qaeda operatives on how to shoot down our helicopters. Yet the elite forces immediately set themselves to the task of rolling up Aidid’s network.
Their mission on October 3 was straightforward enough for these seasoned warriors. Intelligence reports placed key Aidid lieutenants in downtown Mogadishu. Rangers would fast-rope from Black Hawks to the street at the corners of the target house to establish a security perimeter.
Delta operators would hit the house and detain the targets. Meanwhile, a convoy of Rangers would stage nearby, ready to transport our troops and their prisoners back to the nearby American base. Helicopters would provide covering fire throughout the operation. All told, the mission was supposed to last only an hour.
But this operation occurred deep in the territory of Aidid’s clan, and the fighting was intense from the moment the helicopters hit the target house. Aidid’s militiamen and angry mobs rushed to the scene and the streets erupted in gun fire and explosions. The Rangers and Delta operators fought back ferociously, securing the house and beginning to set in the defensive perimeter.
Then, disaster struck. First, one Black Hawk was shot down, killing the pilots. A downed helicopter was a contingency for which the task force had planned, but it still greatly complicated the mission. Now, rather than returning to base with the prisoners, the Rangers and Delta operators first had to fight their way to the crash site, secure it, and recover the dead.
And then another disaster struck. Militiamen shot down a second Black Hawk, a contingency for which the task force lacked sufficient search-and-rescue assets. Two Delta snipers, Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart, had been providing covering fire from another helicopter. Observing a mob rushing toward the downed helicopter, they repeatedly requested permission to be inserted to protect the crash site. Once on the ground and with nothing more than small arms, they heroically fought back the mob until they ran low on ammunition and were overwhelmed. The injured pilot, Mike Durant, narrowly escaped death and was instead taken prisoner.
For their willingness to give their lives for his in the face of impossible odds, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randy Shughart posthumously received the Medal of Honor—the only Medals of Honor awarded between Vietnam and Afghanistan, to give you a sense of the intensity of the battle.
Meanwhile, the Rangers and Delta operators had moved by foot to secure the first crash site and recover the remains of their fallen comrades. One pilot was trapped under tons of wreckage, complicating the recovery mission. But there was never any question that they would stay until they succeeded. Their creed permitted nothing else: leave no man behind.
In any event, they had no way out, because the supporting convoy was decimated in the maze of downtown Mogadishu, a rat’s nest of alleys, flaming roadblocks, and enemy fire. Rendered combat ineffective, the convoy had to return to base, leaving the dismounted Rangers and Delta operators isolated at the crash site.
Bloodied and staggered, they hunkered down and prepared for the long night ahead. With Night Stalkers heroically suppressing the Somalis from the sky, the Rangers and Delta operators defended their position, tended their casualties, and continued the efforts to recover the remains of their fallen comrades. Their commanders cobbled together a new and more heavily armored convoy from the nearby 10th Mountain Division and Pakistani and Malay UN peacekeepers. This convoy reached their position early in the morning of October 4 as they still struggled to recover the pilot’s body.
Even the endgame was frightful for these warriors. Once they finally recovered the fallen and prepared to escape, nervous and poorly prepared foreign drivers sped away before all the American troops could load up, forcing several to run what became known as “the Mogadishu mile” to a different rendezvous point. Miraculously given all they had been through, they nonetheless made it out alive.
It’s hard to overstate the ferocity of the battle. Jeff Struecker was a young Ranger who received the Silver Star for his actions. Struecker had seen combat before Mogadishu and many times after. Years later, he said of that night, “nothing came close to Mogadishu. I mean not even close.” I once heard the same from General Scott Miller, a legend of the special-operations world and our last four-star commander in Afghanistan. He was a young Delta captain on the ground. He observed that, “I’ve seen a lot of firefights these last twenty years, but nothing close to Mogadishu.” I’ve never spoken to a veteran of Mogadishu who said anything different.
Against all odds and in spite of all the horror, these warriors, I want to stress again, accomplished their mission and returned bloodied but victorious. They captured their targets and brought them out. Tragedy indeed struck with eighteen troops killed in action and more than seventy wounded. But our troops inflicted far, far more casualties; even conservative estimates put enemy deaths over five hundred and casualties over one thousand. As one Delta operator put it to Bowden, “they’d just fought one of the most one-sided battles in American history.”
But the shocking videos of the bodies of American soldiers being desecrated and an American pilot in captivity overshadowed everything else. Most Americans had no idea we even had troops in Somalia, much less that they were engaging in such ferocious battle.
President Clinton had failed to articulate what vital national interests justified his decision to massively expand the limited mission that he inherited from President Bush. He neither deployed enough troops nor gave them enough firepower and engagement authorities to complete that expanded mission.
Now, faced with political controversy, he cut and ran. His decision left many of our troops in Mogadishu confused and enraged. Many asked, if the mission was worth eighteen American lives, why would they abandon it now? And if it wasn’t, what were they doing there in the first place? And what about vengeance for the dead and wounded?
President Clinton didn’t trouble himself to answer these questions. He shut down Task Force Ranger. He announced that the American forces within the broader UN peacekeeping mission would come home by March. He released the prisoners that Task Force Ranger had captured, including the two targets from the raid on October 3. President Clinton later wrote that “I knew how President Kennedy felt after the Bay of Pigs.” I suppose so. He knew what it felt like to bring humiliation and shame to a great and proud nation.
And grave danger. Because among the unanswered questions was another one: What kind of lesson would it teach our enemies if America packed up and left at the first moment of bloodshed?
For it wasn’t just Americans and Somalis watching; the rest of the world was also watching. Among those watching was the obscure leader of a nascent terrorist network called al Qaeda. Osama bin Laden concluded that America was “a paper tiger and after a few blows ran in defeat.” In fact, bin Laden regularly cited President Clinton’s frantic withdrawal from Somalia in his many fatwas, statements, and interviews about America.
That dangerous lesson is also an important reminder for us today. We can control where we commit our forces, which we shouldn’t do absent a compelling national interest. We certainly shouldn’t commit them to quixotic, Wilsonian nation-building projects. But once American power and prestige is committed, the whole world is watching, especially our enemies. And from Somalia to Kabul to Ukraine, they will learn dangerous lessons when our leaders are timid, irresolute, and weak.
But one lesson our enemies will always take away from the Battle of Mogadishu is never challenge the American soldier on the field of battle. Against all odds and despite political constraints, our troops fought with unparalleled bravery and skill. They brought back their dead and wounded. They accomplished their mission. They made their country proud.
On behalf of a grateful nation, I want to thank the men who served and sacrificed so much thirty years ago. God bless them, God bless their families, and may God continue to bless America with warriors just like them.
