145. Black Hawk Down: What Osama bin Laden Learnt from Somalia (Ep 4)

17:15David:And I mean, that's the thing that the film and the traditional story of Black Hawk Down ends immediately after the battle when they get back to the American base and, And, you know, there's relief and a sense also of loss and obviously, you know, of tragedy. But actually, the aftermath of this is so important and so interesting, isn't it? Because, you know, first of all, there's the political aftermath for, you know, President Clinton, who, of course, is pretty new to office there. You know, this is the first year in office. Following day, October the 7th, after Reherson, as you said, had been killed, you know, President Clinton addresses the nation from the Oval Office.

17:48David:and it's got a kind of tricky thing isn't it because he it originally been a humanitarian mission had been started by president george hw bush before him and he'd continued it and he's trying to justify it saying you know we saved close to a million lives but now having to acknowledge that something had gone wrong kind of it's interesting isn't it he blames it on a mistake of going after id of almost personalizing the conflict and suggesting that the manhunt element of it, turning it into that very kind of intense struggle between the US force and ID was an error. Privately, he's furious.

18:26Gordon:He'd been getting briefs on task force ranger missions, but this one had spun up so quickly that he actually hadn't had known about it. And I do think in this, you know, Clinton at this time is also, I would say, not the most popular guy in the American military. And this makes him look even more aloof, disengaged for military matters. There's a whiff of Bay of Pigs here in, I think, President Kennedy kind of thinking, well, I've been maybe not tricked, but I've been misled by my military advisors and my senior people. What's that about? I get the sense here from Clinton that he's feeling in sort of similar straits after the Battle of Mogadishu.

19:08David:Yeah, you're right. He had a difficult relationship with the military. Of course, during Vietnam, he'd not served. He'd been, amongst other things, in Oxford and other places. So he's slightly struggling with that as someone who'd been elected to focus on domestic issues, suddenly being pulled into foreign policy in this area. I think it was definitely tricky for him. And the result is, effectively, he's going to call it quits on the mission. He's going to say, we're done. We're done in Somalia, even if the humanitarian mission had been important and successful.

19:41Gordon:All Americans, he announces, will leave Somalia by March 31st, 1994. There will in the short term be substantial reinforcements. So there's an aircraft carrier and a contingent of Marines who are sent. But this is to enable the withdrawal. This is about force protection. This is not for combat. And really, the nation building element of the UN mission and the kind of complement that Task Force Ranger had tried to apply on the security side, they're abandoned. American involvement in Somalia, which had begun with a tremendous amount of optimism in December of 1992, ends in absolute failure and retreat.

20:25Gordon:And I think you could hear in the testimonials of many of the soldiers, this is the part that outrages so many of the American soldiers. It's not second guessing the way that the battle was conducted or the decisions leading up to the battle. It's this decision to just hightail it afterward that has so many of them wondering what was the sacrifice for.

20:44David:Which I'm afraid does have echoes of some of those who in a very different context and much longer wars would serve in places like Afghanistan, wouldn't they? And when they did 20 years of nation building and then you leave and the Taliban come back and people go, well, what was that for? was that intervention for? So I think there's echoes of it there, I think.

21:06Gordon:And Clinton also has another track going. There's a diplomatic track to this that we have not talked much about so far, but that becomes really important in the days after the battle because Clinton is looking for a way to withdraw to leave and to solve some of the problems, the immediate problems that he has in the aftermath of the battle, which is that you have Americans who are unaccounted for and being held hostage by Idid's militia. So what Clinton does is he goes and he taps a guy named Robert Oakley, who had been the US Special Envoy to Somalia in 1992 and early 1993, before Task Force Ranger had entered the picture.

21:51Gordon:Oakley had run the original humanitarian intervention and had been pretty successful. He'd worked with Klan leaders, including ID'd. Clinton sends Oakley back to Mogadishu on the 9th of October, so just five days after the battle. And Oakley arrives with a mandate to end the crisis. He's there to secure Michael Durant's release and to enable this withdrawal in many ways. And we should maybe put a brief trigger warning here. If for some reason you have made it to this point in listening to the series with children, this might be a point where you ask them to leave the room or turn it down because - It gets even worse than we've heard before.

22:34Gordon:I mean, who'd have thought? It does get worse because what happens, and this is, I mean, this part is absolutely enraging to so many of the Americans, to all of the Americans who were there, which is that the bodies or pieces of the bodies of Gary Gordon, Randy Shugart, and the crew chiefs in that Black Hawk. These guys are most likely confirmed killed when pieces of their bodies are returned to the base in garbage bags. And there is some debate over whether that's the Somalis actually just trying to return them.

23:18David:It just feels to the Americans disrespectful somehow for it to arrive in garbage bags.

23:23Gordon:The intent is, I think, up for debate, but the impact it had at the base is not, which is that it made everyone absolutely furious and enraged. So with this as the context, Oakley, the Clinton representative, meets with representatives of ID, does the within hours of landing. And he doesn't demand that Idid surrender, but he basically, Oakley basically says there's not going to be any trade for Michael Durant. He threatens Idid's men and says, if you don't hand over Durant, there's going to be absolute hell to pay. And you do not want us to turn loose on your city, on your neighborhoods, these forces who have been through what they've been through the last couple of days.

24:08Gordon:It's going to go very, very poorly for you. We're sending an aircraft carrier, we're sending more Marines. You're going to hand over Michael Durant. And Idid basically recognizes that Durant's value to him is going to depreciate very quickly. So on October the 14th, less than two weeks after the battle, Idid announces Durant's release. Idid actually announces it on CNN. Durant is back at the Ranger base the next day on the 15th of October. He's greeted by a force of now more than a thousand people. They form a corridor leading from the base driveway to the apron of the transport plane that's going to take Michael Durant to Germany for medical treatment.

24:46Gordon:Because remember, he's been treated by the Somali doctors, but he's in bad shape. Everybody has a paper cup that is filled with a tiny bit of bourbon. Now, remember, while he's in captivity, Durant could actually, through the Red Cross, had been able to write some letters. And he had a handle of Jack Daniels in his belongings. And he had written in one of the letters threatening the other pilots and everyone at the base that if they drank it, there would be hell to pay. So everybody had a paper cup that was supposedly filled with the bourbon from his fifth of Jack Daniels. And Durant is transported to medical facility in Germany, goes back to the US.

25:31Gordon:he will eventually recover, returns back to flight status, which is absolutely amazing.

25:37David:I know. I find that extraordinary. Yeah. Both physically and emotionally and psychologically that he can do that, that he goes back to being able to fly. Yeah.

25:46Gordon:Retires years later, ends up writing a book, which I highly recommend to all listeners called In the Company of Heroes.

25:51David:Now, meanwhile, I mean, one thing we lost sight of perhaps amidst the battle was the reason for it was to go after some ID lieutenants, But they get released. I mean, they get released as part of the deal, I guess, to get Durant out. So 24 Somalis captured during the raid, all eventually freed. So it goes back to that idea that actually, you know, nothing was gained from it, ultimately. I mean, which must be one of the reasons for that kind of anger in some parts, as well as the withdrawal ultimately from Somalia, but also the fact even that raid itself doesn't bring about any benefit.

26:28Gordon:And then in March of 1994, five months later, all US forces are out of Somalia. So I'll be there. Let's take a break. And when we come back, we will look at the legacy of this intense battle.

26:48David:so welcome back so american forces have left the somalis they captured during the raid were released what did it all mean uh intense battle but what was the significance of it and i guess The first thing to say is it does have a huge lasting effects on America and American foreign policy. That one battle, you know, less than a day, that actually really does, I think, shape the American mindset through the coming years, particularly in the 90s. I mean, they talk about this thing called the Mogadishu effect, don't they? And it is particularly the aversion to casualties and military casualties in situations like that.

27:38David:The combination, I guess, of mission creep, of a lack of a clear objective over the overall mission, and then the sustaining of casualties. But also the fact that it feeds back into American public opinion. Because as we'd said right at the start of the series, this is the kind of era in which cable news is just emerging, CNN is emerging. So the fact that when you have these casualties, in a way much more immediately than say in the Vietnam War, the reality of what's happening is being fed back to the American public and creating this kind of aversion to it, isn't it?

28:11Gordon:I think it's hard to explain, or you shouldn't bother explaining the foreign policy decision making of really the rest of the 1990s without talking about Mogadishu, without talking about this battle. Because you can almost draw a straight line, for example, from the outcome in Somalia to the genocide in Rwanda, which erupts just six months after the Black Hawk Down incident. I mean, between 800 ,000 and a billion Rwandans are murdered in roughly 100 days in 1994. And the Clinton administration does nothing. And when you look back at declassified documents or even just the official memoirs written by the Clinton national security team, it's clear that Somalia was a factor in the decision making around staying out of Rwanda.

29:04David:Yeah, because in hindsight, people said, well, actually, if a relatively small number of troops, perhaps to secure Kigali Airport in Rwanda and create safe havens, could have had a massive impact. But the legacy of Mogadishu is there because the US just doesn't want to risk going into another African war zone, inserting troops into there.

29:25Gordon:You could also make the case that the kind of shadow of Somalia fell on opportunities to strike Osama bin Laden that popped up in the late 1990s, where you had examples in Sudan or in Afghanistan, where a special operations raid that would have involved groups like Delta Force or the SEALs operating, you know, being inserted in and helicopters to capture or kill Osama bin Laden. Those proposals got dismissed. And, you know, I think the memory of this incident, and in particular, the massive political fallout from sustaining casualties, and from having those casualties then paraded around on CNN, it sticks in the hearts and minds of senior, you know, national security officials in the Clinton administration and shapes their decision making on Rwanda and on counterterrorism.

30:25David:Yeah. And what's interesting is, of course, you mentioned Al-Qaeda, Osama bin Laden on that. They also learn from this incident. And bin Laden himself tries to understand what's happened. And the conclusion that bin Laden takes from it is that if you can inflict just a few military casualties on the US, you can force them to withdraw. In other words, American public opinion will not sustain military casualties. And he used this phrase that America is a paper tiger. The idea is it looks really impressive, but all you need to do is inflict those casualties and they'll back away. And that actually becomes part of the strategic philosophy of Al-Qaeda.

31:11David:I mean, that's a really significant impact of it, isn't it?

31:14Gordon:I think you could make the case that the East Africa bombings that Al-Qaeda conducted in 1998, the destruction of a U.S. destroyer off the coast of Yemen in 2000, and then maybe ultimately 9-11 itself, are all influenced to some degree by what bin Laden saw in Somalia. It's a very, again, it's not an exactly straight line, but without Blackhawk down, I'm not sure that Osama bin Laden has in his own deluded mind such a clear theory of victory for what he could accomplish with even just a few casualties. You know, I mean, the other piece of this, Gordon, is what's the legacy for Somalis and Somalia?

31:58Gordon:I mean, the long-term legacy is exceptionally bleak. I mean, the international withdrawal essentially leaves Somalia to more than two decades of just state failure, Klan warfare, humanitarian crisis after crisis, the rise of violent extremism. I mean, Mohammed Farah Adid, you know, he doesn't, spoiler alert, he doesn't wind up stabilizing the country. He winds up dying in a battle with another clan in July of 1996. And over the course of the next few decades, I mean, you have this complete absence of a functional central government creates conditions for an extremist group very similar to Al-Qaeda called al-Shabaab to emerge and kind of grow in power and confidence throughout the 2000s.

32:46Gordon:ends up controlling large portions of southern Somalia, implements a very harsh interpretation of Sharia in areas it controls, commits terrorist attacks in Somalia. A huge one was the attack on the 2010 World Cup in Kampala. It killed 74 people. So you have an international community through the UN, the US military, a whole bunch of allied nations - Trying to fix the place. Who are trying to fix things. And none of it comes to pass. I mean, you also have famously Somali piracy flourishing in that security vacuum.

33:21David:Yeah. And taking down shipping, particularly in the 2010s with huge impact. And I mean, still, I was remembering that actually, some of the first military strikes that Donald Trump did in his second term of office, so in early 2025 were against Somalia. And I think what he described as IS in Somalia. And so it continues to be a major security concern as a potential hub for whether it's piracy or terrorist violence ongoing, as well as, of course, we shouldn't underplay the suffering of the Somali people who are going to suffer terribly in the years to come, both from the civil war, but even also Famine comes back again, doesn't it?

34:00David:I think in 2011, it kills between 50 ,000 and 260 ,000 people, many of them children. So the consequences for the country are pretty enormous.

34:11Gordon:I also think that the US military and intelligence apparatus look at this battle, and it forces fundamental changes in how the military trains for and equips for and conducts these kind of special operations raids, right? Because I think there are tactical deficiencies that are revealed by the battle on October 3rd and 4th, and they get addressed pretty systematically in the decade that follows. And in many ways, you could draw a line from Mogadishu to these kind of special operations raids in Iraq and Afghanistan, and then also the raids against high-value targets like Osama bin Laden and Nicolas Maduro.

34:56Gordon:Gordon, in the episodes we did on bin Laden, we talked about how the Joint Special Operations Command had set up a replica of the Abbottabad compound where bin Laden was heidic and actually trained, did the pre-mission rehearsals on that compound. This is a lesson that runs almost directly from the confusion of the market and the target building, because months and years after the Battle of Mogadishu, the American military, particularly the special operations units, developed the practice of constructing full-scale replicas of target compounds to do this kind of pre-mission rehearsal, the models, right?

35:35Gordon:So we have a SEAL Team 6 rehearsing on a model of Abbottabad. We've got Delta Force training on a replica of the Maduro compound. That practice comes out of this battle. It was like, we should have a replica of what we're going to be operating in, and we should train on that. You know, interesting, I mean, just talking about the Osama bin Laden raid, I find it fascinating that Black Hawk Down has almost become American foreign policy decision maker shorthand for some kind of horrendous, accidental, unforeseen disaster. That shadow was, I mean, present in the room, a cabinet official in the Obama administration said, well, we can't afford another Black Hawk down.

36:21Gordon:So it becomes this kind of shorthand for a disaster that could have incredible political consequences, right? But I also think that Mogadishu made Abbottabad possible. It made these kind of manhunting raids that characterized U.S. special operations during the war on terror possible. We have better aircraft in training. We have a joint special operations command that has spent almost two decades developing doctrine for exactly this kind of complex hostile environment raid like they did in Pakistan, like they did in Venezuela. When you look at the mission to go get bin Laden, one of the helicopters did crash.

37:06David:Yeah.

37:06Gordon:And the mission continued and Osama bin Laden was killed and the entire force was out of Pakistani airspace before the Pakistani military even understood what had happened. And so you can't, obviously, those are two different situations, but you can make some loose comparison to say 2011 versus 1993 big difference i guess your

37:28David:point is that it's big difference and they learned from black hawk down and adapted and deliberately have worked out ways to avoid it happening again i suppose the other thing to say though is it was probably quite fine margins between something going wrong and you getting another black hawk down because you know both the bin laden raid you said something went wrong and managed to recover from it in Bin Laden. Maduro kind of went like clockwork in one sense. But it doesn't take much for a helicopter to go down or to get hit or for something to happen for them to be into another disaster. But I guess they now build more redundancy into operations in case something goes wrong.

38:06David:That's the thing. Because the reality is things do go wrong. I think the redundancy is one of the major learnings.

38:12Gordon:Because when you talk to you know seals or delta operators or night stalker pilots who are thinking about how you would do a raid today if you needed let's say in theory you're going to hit a target and you you think you need 15 men 15 operators that's maybe one kilo there would be a there would be a contingency of exactly the same force on another yeah helicopter that would be accompanying the So guys who are actually going to go and hit the target. And if one of those helicopters goes down, everybody could go back in the other helicopter. And in some cases, you might even have three. So there's an incredible amount of redundancy that's built in.

38:55Gordon:I also think, you know, talk about Maduro, which happened just in January of this year. Operation Absolute Resolve. Look at the units that are involved. It's Delta Force. It's the Night Stalkers, the pilots, the same pilots. intelligence preparation over months, full-scale replica of the target compound that was built in Kentucky, over 150 aircraft in coordinated roles. And when one of the Chinooks is hit and struggles to stay airborne over the capital, I mean, it doesn't end up going down. Now, again, different situations. But I think when you look at the way that the Maduro raid is conducted and that you look at how the Battle of Mogadishu went down, I think you can say that the military, the intelligence apparatus behind it had adopted a lot of the lessons of 1993 and had adapted these special operations units, the equipment, the gear, the tactics to conduct these kinds of raids.

39:52Gordon:And we're very good at it. Yeah, I think that's true.

39:54David:But I guess one of the lessons though, for me is, you know, even with the best military in the world, even with all the planning, even with all the redundancy even with all those things unpredictable stuff happens and if you're fighting on your opponent's terrain mogadishu was part you know was a character in this story for a reason because it was it was difficult terrain which the the adversary knew and and the u.s side didn't that lesson to me is still there is that even if you've got all the intelligence all the firepower there's a level of unpredictability that that's real when combat operations start which can lead something to disaster, however much preparation you've got, and however much you've got the technological advantage.

40:39Gordon:I was struck in watching both the film Black Hawk Down, and in watching the Netflix documentary in particular. At multiple points, I was wondering to myself, it's like, why are we in Somalia? You know, I'm kind of, why are we there? And it's interesting when you peel the history apart, each decision kind of makes sense. The UN mission actually did some real good to help ameliorate the conditions that brought about the famine. But then once you're there, you're faced with this awful decision of, well, to actually give this whole thing a fighting chance of being sustainable, we then have to deal with the fact that we have these rival clans and militias who are fueling the famine or who will step in and sort of recreate the conditions that created the famine in the first place if we don't leave.

41:34Gordon:So now it's a security thing.

41:35David:And then it becomes a manhunt.

41:37Gordon:And then it becomes a manhunt. And so you can kind of see how each of those decisions, they're being made by smart people who are in general, I think, well-meaning. And yet you end up at a, you know, at a really a position by the time you get to October of 1993, where the gap between means and ends is a chasm.

42:00David:Which is the mission creep problem. On a much different scale and over a longer period, you could say that was one of the issues with Afghanistan. The original mission was, you know, remove the Taliban from power and get Al-Qaeda. And then you get an expansion into, well, is it nation building? Is it counter-narcotics? Are we rebuilding political institutions? How far do you get into that? And if you don't have the clarity of objectives, you do risk mission creep or mission complexity, which can draw you into situations which you can't always control and can draw you into those kind of situations of insurgency and occupation, which are problematic.

42:39David:So I think that issue of clarity of objectives and mission creep, those are surely the kind of big strategic lessons, which I'm not entirely sure everyone's learned since then.

42:49Gordon:I might argue that they're unlearnable. Is that a word? It can be. Because you can't anticipate, or it's very challenging to anticipate, the second and third order problems that will crop up after you've dealt with the first problem. But I think it is true that there's an echo of Somalia in the wars that we'll fight in Iraq and Afghanistan, where we'll enter that conflict with maybe a muddled objective, but certainly a more limited one than what we ended up with, you know, 10, 20 years later, where, you know, as soon as you intervene to break a political structure. well it's a lot easier to kind of break it it's a lot easier in the Somalian context to you know just kind of hit militia guys and put them in prison than it is to resolve the underlying political and military conflict that's creating which becomes nation building the major problem in the first place so you end up on this kind of slippery slope to nation building I also think one other piece that I think bears some discussion before we close this out is there's a tendency to frame this battle as a loss for the US.

44:11Gordon:And I think it's important to parse that out because in pure military terms, it's absolutely not. The Rangers and Delta Force, they had targets. They went and got those targets. They brought those targets back.

44:26David:They paid a heavy price though. They paid a heavy price.

44:29Gordon:It's a very lopsided battle.

44:32David:Well, if you do it by casualty figures.

44:34Gordon:But I think that's one valid lens through which to look at this battle, which is 18 Americans killed maybe up to 300 to 500 Somali militia.

44:47David:But that's body count metrics. That has echoes to me of Vietnam accounting going, we're winning because look at the body count. It feels to me like a defeat. I mean, because they're out of Somalia within months of this happening and the kind of strategic effect.

45:09Gordon:I'm not arguing that point. I'm just saying that when you look at the battle, the US won the battle.

45:17David:Well, you can win a battle and lose a war.

45:20Gordon:Exactly. And that's exactly what I'm saying is that the battle, the tactical success was not translated into a strategic victory. And it was a bloody tactical success.

45:34David:But it goes back to, this is a longer discussion we could have, but it goes back to whether you see military battles purely in military terms or whether you see them in kind of political strategic terms. It's a bit like saying, I mean, because we're talking as, you know, the US and Israel are pounding Iran. And in terms of, you know, they're saying we hit 5 ,000 targets, 10 ,000 targets. You can hit five or 10 ,000 targets and militarily have complete dominance on one level over a country like Iran. But if they close the Straits of Hormuz and have an impact on the global economy, then actually you're fighting almost, you know, you're discussing different things about who's winning or who's losing.

46:10David:And I guess, you know, I agree. If you still are in a very narrow tactical mission, the Americans go in, they take casualties, but they get out and they get their people out. But I just think that's a narrow lens through which to see this battle. But I suppose it all goes to saying how consequential it is.

46:25Gordon:It is also worth saying that when you look at the individual stories of the people who fought, Gary Gordon and Randy Shugart, we should say, I mean, they both received the Medal of Honor posthumously. They're the first Medal of Honor recipients since the Vietnam War at that time. I mean, many of the Americans are decorated with silver stars, bronze stars, of course, purple hearts for the battle. And there is, and I think we'll see this as we talk about the film, you know, in our bonus episode, is that when you examine the battle through the lens of the individuals who fought it, it's an incredible story, I think, of heroism, bravery, sacrifice.

47:10Gordon:and then when you layer on the kind of as you're doing i think rightly this question of well did the battle produce a better political outcome strategic victory the answer is obviously no and and in that sense and this is this is why so many of the people who fought them fought in the battle so angry with the the clinton administration's response afterward is we ended up with 19 people killed, dozens and dozens wounded, and we achieved nothing for it. I mean, neither side really wins, and yet it's... The reason we've been telling this story is that it's also, weirdly, an extremely important battle that affected the history of foreign policy decision-making in the 1990s and the way that the US conducted the war on terror.

48:13David:A remarkable story on lots of levels, I think, David. So thank you for joining with us, all of you out there. And a reminder that if you're a declassified club member, you will be able to hear our bonus episodes on this, including us looking at kind of doing a bit of film review on the film Black Hawk Down and looking at the reality versus the fiction. So do join up at the restisclassified.com where you'll also be able to get details about our tickets for our live show coming up in September. The South Bank, we're doing a show in which I think Fact and Fiction may well feature again. So do sign up for those tickets for the live show in September and we will see you next time.

48:56Gordon:We'll see you next time.

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