Friday, August 5, 2011

Somalia 1992-1994 (Operation Restoring Hope)

Brief:
Other than inspiring one of the goriest movies of all time, Black Hawk Down. The intervention in Somalia and the Battle of Mogadishu changed the way that the United States approached humanitarian interventions. The United States military was involved in Somalia in 1991 and 1992, but at that time the mission had solely been to help the general Somalian population, which was starving. 
When President Clinton came to office in 1993 the situation in Somalia had worsened and a half a million Somalians had either died of war or hunger, and a million more were expected to starve that year. Because of the success of the Gulf War the American public was overconfident in its military ability and was angry at military leaders for not intervening in what seemed to be a quick fix in Somalia. 
Ultimately the United States interfered in an internal Somalian conflict. The regular troops on the ground were not trained well enough to do the extreme peace keeping tasks that they were assigned. In the end, the United States sought to do an operation involving specialist forces in order to capture resistance leader Muhammad Aidid. During the Battle of Mogadishu, an attempt to arrest Aidid went wrong and the warlord's fighters were able to down a low flying Blackhawk helicopter. Customary to military tradition, a rescue team tried to extradite the helicopter's crew when bands of Somali citizens and gangsters attacked them with small arms.
Stats:
Americans Killed: 43
Analysis:
This defeat was humiliating. It deflated the confidence gained by the Persian Gulf War. Unlike the Persian Gulf, the military forces in Somalia were simply a bunch of rebels. The view of the defeat back home was very negative. Essentially, the American public said, "We were just beaten by a bunch of hooligans." 
This is however not the case. The strike against American forces in the Battle of Mogadishu was very well planned. Aidid knew that American soldiers would come for their own so he chose to down the Blackhawk in the middle of his "backyard" full of the warlord's supporters. He knew that the Americans were gathering intelligence about him so he used that to his advantage as well. 
But nevertheless the defeat in Somalia was embarrassing. American bodies were dragged through the street on televisions world wide. No matter how sophisticated or well-armed the Somalians may have been, the common perception still remains that they were a group of unorganized rebels who managed to kill a decent amount of Americans. 
Technically, this intervention was a United Nations affair, but it was the United States' decision to start the Battle of Mogadishu which effectively killed the intervention. Technically, the Somalian suffered more lost at the Battle of Mogadishu-only 18 Americans were killed compared to hundreds of Somalians.  None of the technical things matter because the Somalian warlords were able to best United States Special Ops in the eyes of the rest of the world. 
The Bottom Line:
The Intervention in Somalia was a failure and resulted in rule changing in humanitarian interventions (Presidential Decision Directive 25 of 1994)

No comments:

Post a Comment