Our Special Forces’ Capacity to Evolve Despite Failure
The lesson 30 years on from the Battle of Mogadishu is that, with the right response, defeat can be a better tutor than victory.
Thirty years ago today, the U.S. military was involved in a brief but brutal battle in Somalia. In a series of firefights over two bloody days, 18 members of America’s most elite Special Forces and hundreds of Somali militiamen were killed. This was the Battle of Mogadishu, which the journalist Mark Bowden (now an Atlantic contributing writer) famously reported for The Philadelphia Inquirer and later adapted as the book and the film Black Hawk Down.
Although the American units involved fought courageously, and inflicted heavy losses on their adversaries, the Battle of Mogadishu exposed significant weaknesses in U.S. Special Operations Forces’ capability. The televised images of dead Americans being dragged down dusty streets were scarring not only for the Clinton administration, and the American public viewing them on the evening news, but also for the units themselves.
As painful as defeats are, lost battles can end up being the greatest teachers for military organizations. The battle marked an important waypoint in the evolution of our Special Operations Forces, and to this day carries important lessons for them.
In the battle’s aftermath, for example, the Army’s primary special-missions unit—which, like many such units, grants a lot of authority to its noncommissioned officers—concluded that, on balance, it did not have as strong an officer corps as it needed. (Its ground-force commander during the battle did distinguish himself, however, and would later be America’s last NATO commander in Afghanistan.)
The 75th Ranger Regiment, the unit in which I would later serve, was a relative newcomer to such assignments and was largely unfamiliar with urban warfare. So the training I received looked very different—incorporating lessons learned in Somalia—from what my predecessors a decade prior would have had.
In my service with the Rangers, I got to know several of the men who’d fought in the Battle of Mogadishu. Some went on to fight in Iraq or Afghanistan; I did tours in both countries alongside some of them. I’ve been texting with a few of them lately, letting them know that I will be thinking of them today.
Organizations learn in different ways, but large organizations—especially large corporations and military groups—are usually the most resistant to learning. Even in the face of impending doom, such major entities generally find it easiest to keep doing what feels familiar. One of the things that has marked the evolution of U.S. Special Operations Forces, though, is a remarkable willingness to learn and adapt. They need that same willingness today.
Despite the fact that rangers predate the nation’s founding, since such raiding forces fought in the French and Indian War, the United States was a relatively late adopter in the postwar period when it came to elite special-operations forces. This is in contrast with several U.S. allies, such as France, Germany, the U.K., and Israel, all of which developed elite national counterterrorism forces in response to armed extremist movements in the 1960s and ’70s.
Although Navy SEALs, Army Green Berets, and Ranger companies all fought in Vietnam, they did so largely under the command of conventional military forces. The task force that fought in Somalia was a relatively new phenomenon: a “national mission force” with members from each of the military’s four services that served as a strategic asset operating outside the regional combatant commands, such as Central Command, or Centcom, established by 1986’s Goldwater-Nichols Act.
That force was itself the result of an earlier fiasco: the failed effort to rescue 52 embassy staff held hostage in Tehran following the Iranian Revolution in 1979. Eight Americans died in Iran, partly because the various Special Operations units involved had not really worked with one another before, and because the U.S. Army had no special-operations aviation unit to speak of—which proved a particular vulnerability in that operation.
The Army responded to the Iranian reverse by forming the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, the famous “Night Stalkers” who flew in Somalia. In addition, the elite Special Operations units in each service began training together on a regular basis. The Ranger Regiment, which historically specialized in seizing airfields and conducting raids deep in enemy territory, began its gradual transformation into the kinetic force it is today.
As they had after Iran, these units learned and evolved after Somalia. This task force became the most lethal man-hunting special-operations outfit the world has ever known. Operations such as the capture of Saddam Hussein, the elimination of Osama bin Laden, and the killing of the ISIS leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi are all testament to that.
The War on Terror that began after 9/11 is over, but our Special Operations Forces must continue to develop. Last year, the civilian and military leadership of the U.S. Special Operations Forces published a new strategy. It says all the right things, shifting the focus away from fighting non-state actors and toward deterring competitor states such as China and Russia. But the national-security leaders with whom I speak convey concern that these forces are too preoccupied with finding and killing terrorists.
That remains an important mission, but one not as strategically significant as in years past. For example, some of those senior figures have also made clear to me their impatience with the conventional forces that have attempted to take on complicated psychological operations. They point to some high-profile missteps in this arena, notably the use of fake accounts on social-media platforms, and express annoyance that the forces best equipped for such work—our Special Operations Forces—have not yet fully committed to the job.
The Battle of Mogadishu was a political and military disaster that forced our Special Operations Forces to recruit, train, and organize themselves differently. Out of respect for the sacrifices made 30 years ago, we should not wait for another lost battle to evolve anew.