In Washington, information about the circumstances surrounding the Mogadishu debacle seeped out slowly. Mounting evidence suggested that the Rangers had been inadequately equipped and assigned to an inappropriate mission, and that U.S. vehicles lacked adequate armor—in part because the secretary of defense himself had refused a request for less vulnerable tanks and fighting vehicles.
The Rangers took heavy casualties because they would not abandon their trapped comrades. It had not been easy to find troops to help rescue the Rangers, because there were no contingency plans, no backup troops, and no heavy armor with which to barrel through. Language problems complicated planning and execution. After the ambush, General Montgomery’s request for more and heavier armored vehicles (which had been turned down at the Pentagon’s highest level only a month earlier) was immediately granted. The Pentagon quickly announced that heavier arms and armor would be sent to protect and reinforce peacekeepers in Somalia.118
“It is very unusual for the United States to be in a position where we cannot really rescue our own forces in a situation like this,” observed Senate Armed Services Committee chairman Sam Nunn (D-GA). Another Senate Democrat, Robert Byrd of West Virginia, said, “Americans are paying with their lives and limbs for a misplaced policy on the altar of some fuzzy multilateralism.”119
In the PBS documentary Ambush in Mogadishu, some of the Rangers who had been trapped in the firefight described having to walk out:
PFC DAVID FLOYD: The thirty or so of us, I guess, that weren’t wounded, there was no room for us, so now we were going to—we’re going to leave out on foot.
SPEC. MIKE KURTH: I got a sinking feeling there. I was just like, “This is going to be worse than yesterday, because they know exactly where we’re at. They know exactly where we want to go.”
SGT. JOHN BELMAN: We all got lined up inside our little courtyard there and just went out into the street. And essentially, there’s this long column of people running out on either side of the road alongside these Malaysian armored cars.
SGT. KENI THOMAS: It’s like, “How in the hell has it come to the point where we have got to run out of this city on our own?”120
In testimony before the Armed Services Committee in May 1994, it became clear that more armor would have made an important difference. Senator Nunn pressed the Rangers’ commander: “It was my understanding…if you had had armor, you would have been able to get to the forces in the original mission that were pinned down sooner. Is that right?” General Garrison replied, “That’s correct.”121 General Montgomery also took heat: “As commander,” Nunn asked, “did you ever say to any of your superiors…‘Look…the UN is asking us to have a much broader mission of disarmament, to some extent nation building.’…At the same time, the major power—the U.S. power—was being reduced. Did you ever say, ‘This makes me uncomfortable’?”122
Larry Royce, the father of one of the fallen Rangers and himself a retired army officer, wrote that the deaths in Somalia were “brought about by weak and indecisive amateurs in the Clinton administration…To put [the Rangers] into combat with no way to reinforce them is criminal.”123
Mohamed Sahnoun, UN special representative for Somalia, commented:
It is unfortunate that members of the Security Council tend to rely solely on reports submitted by the secretary-general. Except for inputs and instructions they receive from their own countries—none of which has an embassy in Mogadishu—they look at no other sources of information. Why does the Security Council not hold hearings where Ambassador Robert Oakley, the U.S. representative, and other distinguished diplomats and scholars could provide useful evidence to complement and check what it is being fed to them by the secretary-general?124
The effort to apprehend General Aideed was the most dangerous task U.S. forces had attempted in Somalia, and it was clear in retrospect that they lacked the forces, weapons, intelligence, and rationale to carry it out. Senator Strom Thurmond (R-SC) asked the U.S. commanders how they came to attempt such a dangerous task with inadequate forces. “When we had twenty-five thousand troops in Somalia,” he pointed out, “our operations were mostly limited to facilitating humanitarian activities. Then, after the transition to UNOSOM II, when we had withdrawn most of our forces and had only about four thousand troops in the country, with only about two thousand of those being combat troops, we became more heavily involved in combat operations—force protection, disarming the Somalis, and trying to capture Aideed.”125
When Thurmond pressed Montgomery to describe how American forces had become engaged in unanticipated combat operations, Montgomery pointed out the distinction between the original UNITAF mission and the UNOSOM II stage. Resolution 837, which targeted Aideed, “changed the nature of the Somalia mission,” he said. “We were under attack from June the fifth, increasingly after that, by a hostile militia force that engaged in, essentially, guerilla warfare.”126
The testimony of administration officials made it clear that the difficulty and danger of the new mission had been underestimated from the start. On October 20, 1993, Madeleine Albright told the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, “Clearly, the difficulty of apprehending those thought responsible for killing the Pakistanis was underestimated…. While the UN was increasing military pressure, the targets of that pressure were gaining strength.”127 She added, “If UNOSOM had had more robust military capabilities last summer, better military results might have been achieved.”128
Peter Tarnoff, undersecretary of state for political affairs, offered a somewhat different explanation of what the United States was doing in Somalia, how the debacle of Mogadishu happened, and why it would not be repeated. Tarnoff was more candid than most about the sweeping U.S. goals in Somalia:
Our goals are humanitarian. We seek to support UNOSOM in its efforts to help the Somali people help themselves in fashioning a lasting political solution to their civil conflict, and to produce a secure environment to enable the free flow of humanitarian aid. The United Nations…has taken on a broad mission in UNOSOM II—to help Somalia develop basic political institutions and to assist in establishing a judiciary and police force so Somalis can keep order in their country.129
Tarnoff assured the committee that nearly all U.S. military forces in Somalia would leave within five months, by March 31, 1994, though, it was clear that the nation-building goals would not have been achieved by then.
In a 1995 review of the Somalia debacle, former UN special representative Howe wrote that the American people and Congress had never accepted a U.S. role in Somalia beyond delivering humanitarian assistance. He observed that deterring nuclear war and responding to regional aggression (as in the response to the invasion of Kuwait) were widely accepted by Americans as national responsibilities, but the kind of intervention we had ventured in Somalia (and, later, Haiti) was not.130
In Mogadishu, American servicemen had risked their lives for an ambiguous cause in a remote place under unreasonable rules of engagement. It was a mission that had never been approved by Congress, a mission in which U.S. forces were expected to coordinate operations among ad hoc multinational units, with troops from other countries who spoke other languages, using incompatible equipment, and without adequate supplies and support. These conditions had set the scene for disaster.
In the wake of Mogadishu, President Clinton abandoned the effort to hunt down Aideed as a mistaken policy. Having come to power enthusiastic about the potential to replace war with peacekeeping, they had discovered how easily peacekeeping could slide into war. Americans would never again see peacekeeping as social work.131 142 (And yet, on the same day that dead Americans were being counted in Mogadishu and a battered American captive was being displayed on Somali television, Madeleine Albright, the U.S. representative to the UN, voted in the Security Council to send a peacekeeping force to Rwanda.)
The Clinton administration and the UN officials had operated under the assumption that unified forces and a unified command actually existed. In a June 1993 CNN inte
rview with Charles Bierbauer, Albright had described the Somali mission this way:
This is one of the most interesting and complicated of the United Nations peacemaking operations. And it is what the United Nations is very much into these days—working to keep the peace and to rebuild societies…. There are now twenty nations that are contributing forces to UNISOM and more than that are participating in the civilian aspect of rebuilding the Somalian society…. [I]t will require…sustained multilateral action to try to bring some peace and security to the international community.132
But the violence and casualties at Mogadishu were not at all what the proponents of collective multilateral action had in mind. Now the question was how to get U.S. troops out. On October 14, 1993, Clinton wrote to Senator Byrd that he would pull U.S. forces out of Somalia before the end of March 1994, “if at all feasible.” The same day, he told a press conference that the casualties in Somalia “would make me more cautious about having any Americans in a peacekeeping role where there was any ambiguity at all about what the range of decisions was which could be made by a commander other than an American commander.”133 (And yet, twelve hours later, he deployed U.S. warships to enforce sanctions against Haiti.) Clinton selected a new commander, Brigadier General Carl Ernst, for the American task force in Somalia and appointed Ambassador Robert Oakley as a special representative who would report directly to the U.S. government rather than to the UN. Planning for evacuation of U.S. troops was put into high gear. On October 15, the Senate voted 76 to 23 for a compromise that did not call for immediate withdrawal of U.S. forces from Somalia, but required U.S. forces to be under command of U.S. commanders.
A MULTILATERAL ENCOUNTER RECAPITULATED
Nothing had worked as intended in Somalia, where Boutros Boutros-Ghali and the UN Secretariat had hastily cobbled together forces from more than two dozen countries with diverse traditions, languages, and levels of development. These forces were never adequately coordinated and equipped. It proved impossible to overcome different priorities, training, weapons, values, goals, languages, habits, and military traditions. Incompatible cultures complicated every action. Disorganization, disagreements, lack of political will, uneven command competence, and wasteful and inefficient administration combined with language difficulties and a general lack of discipline in a number of national contingents.
Everyone associated with the mission had ideas about what went wrong.
First, the problems were very difficult. It was a violent internal conflict in a society without a government, in which several contenders for power made war on one another with murderous weapons. Factional leaders had negotiated but had not implemented a cease-fire and had hindered the delivery of humanitarian assistance.
Second, the operation suffered from progressive “mission creep.” What began as an effort to deliver emergency humanitarian assistance was redefined until it became a far-reaching mission to establish a secure environment for the delivery of humanitarian aid; curb lawless clan leaders and disarm warring factions; achieve political reconciliation, stability, and law and order; rebuild the Somali economy and institutional infrastructure; arrest Aideed; repatriate refugees; enforce an arms embargo; and create a new state. Force levels and equipment were not equal to the changed mission.
In May 1994, General Montgomery testified on the purposes of the operation. “The mission of UNITAF was limited. The objective was very clear. Disarmament was undertaken for the purpose of ensuring that relief would flow….[W]ith the clarity of retrospective [view]…[i]t was not possible to disarm Somalia totally.”134
Not until the Mogadishu ambush did the public realize that the mission had slipped from being a humanitarian effort into nation building and war.135
The third major problem was the complicated chain of command. During the first phase of UNITAF, U.S. forces operated under American command; under UNOSOM II, almost all U.S. and other forces were placed under the command of the UN, with the secretary-general as commander in chief. The respected (Turkish) Lieutenant-General Cevik Bir had operational command.
General Montgomery, commander of U.S. forces and deputy UN force commander in Somalia from March 1993 to March 1994, described the UN chain of command in a Frontline interview: “As deputy UN commander, I was General Bir’s assistant and we worked for Admiral Howe, who was the special representative of the UN secretary-general.”136 Montgomery was also commander of the U.S. forces in Somalia. In this position, he reported directly to the commander in chief of the U.S. Central Command, General Joseph P. Hoar, who was in Tampa, Florida. Montgomery explains:
The…Quick Reaction Force was under my tactical control [but] not my operational control. There was a memorandum of agreement on how that force could be employed—basically, only for emergencies or beyond the capabilities of the UN forces…. As the U.S. commander, I had control of that. Anything else that force did…required the [prior] approval of USCINCENT.137
As retired colonel Kenneth Allard noted, “If it takes longer than ten seconds to explain the command arrangements, they probably won’t work.” In UNOSOM II, Allard said, “You had essentially three chains of command running. You had one that was going back to New York to the United Nations; you had one that was very clearly going back to Washington, DC; and you had another one that was being exercised by the unified command itself, the United States Central Command…. [T]hat is precisely the wrong way to do a command control.” The right way, he said, is to “have one person in charge.” He added, “I think General Schwarzkopf said it very well during Desert Storm: ‘When you get off the plane, you work for me.’…The command arrangements should be the thing that enables effective command control, not an obstacle to it.”138
Some Pentagon officials, such as Assistant Secretary of Defense Walter Slocombe, acknowledged the problems with the command structure. “In my opinion,” Slocombe later told a Senate hearing, “the UN as such does not currently have the capability to conduct Chapter VII peace enforcement operations which entail serious combat, or the potential for it…. It can do these things only with the leadership of a strong nation…or an effective international military organization [such as] NATO. The complexity of these operations currently exceeds the UN’s capabilities.”139
The lack of a central authority over national contingents was yet another source of difficulty—a fact that became especially clear as governments began to make unilateral decisions about withdrawing their forces. In September 1993, Italian forces declined to follow orders regarding the capture of Aideed and threatened to leave because of disagreements with UN methods and goals. The UN command lacked the authority to fire the Italian commanders. Eventually, after the massacre at Mogadishu and the return of Robert Oakley as President Clinton’s special adviser, the United States withdrew its support for the capture. When Clinton announced the planned U.S. withdrawal, shortly thereafter, the governments of Belgium, France, and Sweden followed suit; in the following months, Germany, Greece, Italy, Norway, Turkey, Korea, Kuwait, Morocco, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and the United Arab Emirates all withdrew their forces.140
A formerly confidential investigation conducted by the Zambian chief justice, a retired UN peacekeeping commander from Ghana, and by Finland’s chief of staff into the heavy casualties suffered by Pakistani, American, and other forces in Somalia reached very different conclusions than the Farer report about the causes of the deaths of twenty-five Pakistanis and eighteen Americans. While the Farer report had blamed Aideed, this investigation divided the “blame” among Somali factions, UN commanders, troop-contributing countries, and the Security Council. This investigation concluded that UN forces had overstepped their mandate, interfered in internal affairs, and taken sides in the internal conflict, creating “virtual war situations.”141
Most observers agreed that the secretary-general bore some responsibility for the failures and casualties, because he had assumed unprecedented powers that he was unable to exercise in a professional manner. The “traditional United Nations
peacekeeping culture that often disdains military solutions or even military expertise” created additional complications.142 Boutros-Ghali’s embrace of that culture was apparent in his appointments and decisions. Chapter VII operations were considered peacekeeping engagements, to be carried out under the peacekeeping rules of engagement. Those rules were inappropriate for the situation in Somalia, as they called for geographic balance in forces, minimum armaments, and minimum use of force for passive self-defense only.
Inadequate Force: How Much Is Enough?
The Clinton administration shared the UN attitude of disdain for military solutions, including a reluctance to supply the necessary means. This attitude became an increasing problem as the UN turned more frequently to military solutions. Richard Haass, George Bush’s representative to the Security Council, noted that “the greatest failures come from approaching a mission as one of peacekeeping when it in fact is much more.”143
General Montgomery said that if the UN’s Pakistani troops had had Bradley tanks, Bradley APCs, or M1-A1 Abrams tanks, they could have made a speedier rescue in Mogadishu. The general had repeatedly requested such reinforcements, of both personnel and weapons. In August 1993 he had requested naval battle tanks, a mechanic task force, a cavalry troop, and more intelligence capability, but these requests were rejected in Washington, where the priority was to downsize forces, not strengthen them. The responsibility for this decision lay with the secretary of defense and the upper levels of the Clinton national security team.
General Garrison, commander of U.S. forces in the Mogadishu battle, wrote to President Clinton that “the authority, responsibility, and accountability for the Op[eration] rests here in MOG with the TF Ranger Commander, not in Washington…. A reaction force would have helped, but casualty figures may or may not have been different.”144 But others were less ready than Garrison to absolve the administration of responsibility. In Black Hawk Down, Mark Bowden wrote the following:
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