UH-60 Black Hawk helicopter. US Army.↗
On October 3, 1993, a US special operations raid to capture Somali warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid's lieutenants turned into a 15-hour battle that killed 18 Americans and wounded 73 more. It changed American military policy for a decade.
The raid was supposed to take an hour. Task Force Ranger—Delta Force operators, 75th Rangers, and the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment—launched in mid-afternoon to capture Aidid's lieutenants in a building near the Olympic Hotel in Mogadishu. The plan was rehearsed and sound. Then two Black Hawk helicopters were shot down.
Super Six One, a UH-60 Black Hawk piloted by Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Wolcott, was hit by a rocket-propelled grenade and crashed in a narrow alley at 4:20 PM. Special operations doctrine requires that no American be left behind. Delta operators and Rangers fought their way to the crash site and established a perimeter around the wreckage as Somali militia fire intensified. A second Black Hawk crashed approximately a mile away thirty minutes later. Two Delta snipers—Gary Gordon and Randy Shughart—voluntarily inserted at the second crash site knowing the ground force could not reach them. Both were killed. Both received the Medal of Honor posthumously.
American forces at the first crash site held through the night, outnumbered and under continuous fire, as a relief column delayed by ambushes in Mogadishu's streets failed to reach them. UN Malaysian APC crews finally provided armored extraction early on October 4. The images of the battle's aftermath—broadcast worldwide—reached the White House before breakfast.
President Clinton's policy in Somalia reversed within days; American forces withdrew by March 1994. The lesson drawn by Osama bin Laden—stated explicitly in later interviews—was that American public opinion could not sustain military casualties, and that therefore determined low-technology opponents could outlast American power. Whether or not this lesson was correct, it shaped al-Qaeda's strategic thinking through September 11, 2001.
Atlantic Monthly Press, 1999
Ballantine Books, 2004
Putnam, 2003
On May 2, 2011, 23 Navy SEALs landed in a compound in Abbottabad, Pakistan and killed Osama bin Laden. The operation took 38 minutes. Getting to that moment took almost ten years.
In November 2004, US Marines and Army forces cleared Fallujah, Iraq of entrenched insurgent fighters in 6 weeks of some of the most intense urban combat since Hue City in 1968. The lessons shaped urban warfare doctrine for a generation.
From February 24–28, 1991, Coalition ground forces drove the Iraqi army from Kuwait in 100 hours. The campaign was a demonstration of American military capability that fundamentally altered how nations assessed the risk of conventional conflict with the United States.
