Day of the Rangers: The Battle of Mogadishu 25 Years On

by Leigh Neville

  Steele was instrumental in a program known as Psychological Inoculation of Combat that was taught at Fort Campbell to his unit after he left the Ranger Regiment. Based in part on the writings of retired Colonel Dave Grossman and his contentious book On Killing, the program was an effort to desensitize his soldiers to killing. Once deployed to Iraq, his command guidance to his troops was brutally direct. A “kill board” was established to rank the number of insurgents killed, with the best-performing troops rewarded with a challenge coin known as a “kill coin.”

  His interpretation and indeed understanding of the rules of engagement in place at that time were questionable. On one mission – Operation Iron Triangle – he appears to have ordered all positively identified military-age males to be killed, whether armed or unarmed. This command culture had its inevitable and tragic consequences. The Army found that, “Although clearly unintentional, confusion regarding the ROE was the proximate cause of the death of at least four unarmed individuals, none of whom committed a hostile act or displayed hostile intent.”20

  Four soldiers from Steele’s unit were also later charged with murder when unarmed detainees were executed. Two pleaded guilty to murder whilst another pleaded guilty to negligent homicide. The fourth was convicted of a lesser assault charge. Another inquiry found that Steele had not “encouraged illegal, wanton, or superfluous killing”21 and Steele wasn’t charged with any offence, but his reputation was indelibly tarnished and his Army career over.

  Military historian Thomas Ricks quotes Steele’s brigade’s former commander, Colonel James Hallums: “The supermacho image that Steele projected permeated his unit, and in my opinion, led directly to atrocities.”22 This “supermacho” posturing was commented upon by a number of Task Force Ranger veterans interviewed for this book. Some noted “a big man complex” in Steele, who viewed serving as a Ranger as “a purely physical thing.”23 Another’s candid assessment was that Steele “was overbearing, stubborn, and a bully.”24 An operator mentioned that “The Rangers on the ground did what they were told, it was just that one of their leaders was a bully.”25

  Mike Steele could not be reached for interview for this book.

  TEMPLATES

  “If you use a tactic twice, you should not use it a third time.”

  COLONEL ALI ADEN, SOMALI NATIONAL ALLIANCE

  Task Force Ranger based all of their operations on variants of two basic templates – one for targets that were in a building, the second for targets that were mobile in vehicles. This approach has received criticism in some quarters for telegraphing American tactics to Aideed and his militia. In response, it must be remembered that there are only so many ways to “skin a cat,” as one operator explained.

  Tom DiTomasso agreed, arguing:

  A lot of people say, “Well, you set a pattern,” but there’s only five ways to get from point A to point B– you can fly, drive, walk, swim, or parachute. You’re not going to parachute and you’re not going to swim so we infiltrated by foot, by vehicle, and by helicopter and tried to mix it up as much as we could. I felt that every time we went and did a mission, the enemy found out more about us – that’s true with any military action. Same thing occurred in Bosnia, same thing occurred in Iraq and Afghanistan. The more we do missions the more the enemy learns about us so every time you go out it gets a little more dangerous.

  Mike Moser explained: “When we embarked on this operation, I was very confident in the ‘mousetrap’ mechanism – the flight package, if triggered by timely and accurate intelligence, was capable of successfully capturing any HVT [high value target]. However, as we settled in, each time we performed another ‘Signature Flight’ or an unsuccessful hit, the enemy learned more and more about how to counter us.”

  Another Delta operator, Kelly Venden, added: “When you start doing daylight rather than nighttime hits … we have never in all my years done a daylight hit because we own the night. Over time, complacency kills,” although he conceded that “One thing I’ve learnt is that Murphy is always there. You just never know when things will go wrong. It’s a dangerous business, so sometimes things just go bad.”

  On the decision to launch on a daylight raid, more than two decades later, DiTomasso is still adamant:

  The decision to launch that day was made by General Garrison and I absolutely support it. There are lots of factors you have to weigh to make that decision – what is the mission, what is the value of the target, is it fleeting in nature, is it a time-sensitive target, do we think we’re going to be able to find him again? You also have to understand how well your guys are trained and what risk are they taking. As a commander, this is a constant evaluation. Your job as a commander is to mitigate the risk to your guys as much as possible, and accomplish your mission. Major General Garrison is one of the best commanders I have ever worked with. If he called me today, I would show up.

  Counterinsurgency specialist David Kilcullen wrote in his later study of urban asymmetric warfare:

  In the case of Mogadishu, the Rangers had poked a hornet’s nest in the Black Sea district: they had attacked the city itself, only to be chewed up and spat out, stunned and bloodied … even today local civilians know [the battle] as “Maalintii Rangers”, “the Day of the Rangers”, marking it as an unusually intense episode – even for a city that had already become habituated to enormous bloodshed during the civil war …26

  Kilcullen believes that:

  previous raids (in particular, an attack on a Mogadishu house [the Abdi House on July 12] by helicopters that fired … missiles, killing fifty-four people, including many noncombatants) had generated intense hatred of the Rangers and even greater hostility toward their helicopters. This contributed to the ferocity with which local fighters – Aideed’s militia and armed civilians alike – responded after the two aircraft went down on October 3. By assaulting straight into the area [of the Bakara Market], in broad daylight, TF Ranger was directly challenging Aideed’s powerbase and courting a strong counterpunch.27

  FOREIGN FIGHTERS

  “[It] was a starting point for the long war between the mujahideen of al-Qaeda Organization and America. Sheikh Osama himself pointed this out in his speeches and he mentioned that they got to witness the weakness of the American soldier and his fragility through this war.”

  AHMED ABDI GODANE, AL-SHABAAB

  In 2011, the leader of Somali insurgent group al-Shabaab claimed that three al-Qaeda representatives had been present in Mogadishu: “Actually, they had a prominent role that includes many fields. For example, the field of training, supplying help in actual participation in the fighting, etc.” The al-Shabaab leader who made the claim, Ahmed Abdi Godane, was later killed in a 2014 drone strike. In a final irony, the Reaper unmanned aerial vehicles responsible were from JSOC.28

  A later study also claimed:

  The Habr Gidr received external advice from Islamic fundamentalists from Sudan who had experience combating Russian helicopters in Afghanistan. From the Sudanese the Habr Gidr learned some clever techniques on the use of RPGs in an anti-helicopter role for which the weapon had never been intended … New tactics included methods of concealing the shooter from the helicopter gunners, waiting for the helicopter to pass overhead before rising to shoot, aiming at the tail rotor – the helicopter’s most vulnerable spot, and shooting from pits that enabled a skyward shot. Heartened by the success of downing the QRF Black Hawk, the Habr Gidr deliberately planned to concentrate their RPGs on helicopters in future engagements with the Rangers.29

  Jim Yacone, formerly of the 160th SOAR and one of the pilots of Super 62, left the Army to join the Federal Bureau of Investigation where he became the commander of the Bureau’s elite Hostage Rescue Team. In a 2001 trial of terrorists accused of bombing US embassies in Tanzania and Kenya, Yacone said, “I am not really sure who was training Aidid’s [sic] group.” He did contend that “you probably have to get some training” to be able to engage helicopters with RPGs. He also testified that the signals intelligence intercept
s of the mortar strikes against the Task Force hangar were in Arabic: “It led intelligence people to tell us there may be other people here training Aidid’s clan.”30

  Ahmed Abdi Godane’s self-serving proclamations aside, it has never been conclusively proven that foreign jihadists were involved in either the training of the SNA or actively assisted them on the ground on October 3. Usama bin Laden later made statements that October 3 had encouraged al-Qaeda as it had shown the Americans could be beaten, but he never actually claimed any fighters allied to his organization had taken part. On the balance of probabilities, it seems probable that the SNA success against Task Force helicopters had more basis in the incredible number of RPGs fired than any external training.

  THE POLITICAL DIMENSION

  “Mogadishu … spooked the Clinton administration as well as the brass, and confirmed the Joint Chiefs in the view that SOF should never be entrusted with independent operations.”31

  PROFESSOR RICHARD SCHULTZ

  Clausewitz famously declared that “War is the continuation of politics by other means.” Mogadishu and the Gothic Serpent mission was no different. By September 1993, the White House was actively looking for a political solution that would allow the United States to disengage from the Somalia mission. Elements within the Department of Defense had expressed doubts as to the ability of Task Force Ranger to find its target and supported Department of State efforts to increase their efforts at finding a political agreement with Aideed and, by extension, with the United Nations.

  The White House seems to have decided to allow the Gothic Serpent missions to continue, despite the chance of friendly casualties, to provide leverage against Aideed to join the negotiating table – a carrot and stick approach that was apparently never communicated to Garrison and Task Force Ranger.

  In a cable to Powell and Wisner in early September, General Hoar admitted the overall humanitarian operation in Somalia was lost: “After four months of operations with extraordinary help from the U.S., the U.N.’s successes have been modest. A coherent plan which encompasses the political, humanitarian and security needs for the country has yet to emerge. Control of Mogadishu has been lost.”32

  Admiral Howe explained:

  We weren’t going to negotiate with him directly, but either through the … Ethiopians and Eritreans who were trying to help, or through our direct contacts. We could meet with some of his people, and we even got to a point later on in which we were discussing who could be there at the table and so forth. Of course, it was in our interest to guarantee the safety of anybody that would come to these kinds of discussion. We got to the point [later] where we said we may have to call off these arrest operations that were being run by the Rangers and Delta because we had gotten to a point where there was genuine reciprocation in terms of interest in working this thing out peacefully. We never got quite to that point. But certainly it was in our minds.

  … As a general proposition in these sort of complex situations, in which you hope you’d never have to use force, I think you always have to have a peace track that is available, and hopefully you can persuade the right people that are causing the problem, or at least their followers, to follow that track and to get on that track. I certainly think that the force that was sent in in August, the Ranger [and] Delta Force, provided [that] pressure because I think there was a real concern perhaps on Aidid’s [sic] part that he would be captured. These were serious forces, they were very capable and therefore this alternative of finding this peaceful resolution became more attractive.33

  Whether such dual-track strategies seem duplicitous or not, they are a constant in warfare and an intelligent commander like Garrison would have known that such overtures were likely. As Howe noted, Task Force Ranger was operating as the impetus that was forcing Aideed to rejoin the political settlement process. In the aftermath of October 3, his SNA was critically wounded, undermining his power. Soon after, however, the United States decided to leave Somalia to its fate and Aideed to live another day.

  One claim that often appears in certain sectors of the media, and particularly on the internet, is that the operation was somehow doomed as it was under United Nations command. This is patently untrue, both in terms of Task Force Ranger and the wider Joint Task Force-Somalia. Both were under direct US command and operated under their own rules of engagement. The only real effect of the UN presence on the October 3 mission was the provision of armored vehicles that proved pivotal to the relief of Task Force Ranger. In fact, the Senate hearings on the matter went out of their way to note “the willingness of allied forces to respond … foremost in this regard were Malaysian and Pakistani forces.”34

  Gothic Serpent did cause significant political repercussions for the American special operations community. In some quarters of the military it rekindled old arguments and biases dating from Vietnam that SOF should be restricted to supporting roles rather than as the main effort. There was still an institutional distrust of SOF, best exemplified by General Norman Schwarzkopf during Operation Desert Storm, who had resisted nearly all attempts at integrating SOF apart from embedding Special Forces as liaisons with Coalition partner forces and a limited role for Delta hunting the infamous SCUDs.

  In Vietnam, Schwarzkopf had experienced SOF getting into trouble only to require bailing out by conventional forces under his command. The debacles in Grenada and to some degree in Panama had only reinforced his thinking. The efforts of Delta in Iraq’s western deserts went some way to alter his thinking, but the specter of Mogadishu undid much of their good work. Indeed Gothic Serpent may well have contributed to the reluctance of President Clinton to deploy JSOC against Usama bin Laden in 1998 when a valid opportunity existed to launch a Delta-led assault on one of his training camps in Afghanistan.

  The mission also reinforced Vietnam-era fears of mission creep and increasing American casualties in an unwinnable conflict that many felt the United States should not have been involved with in the first place, particularly after the first American soldiers and Marines began returning in body bags. Ironically, the events of September 11 cured the public’s fear of casualties as the long and bloody war in Iraq and the continuing “forever war” in Afghanistan have demonstrated.

  Gothic Serpent also effectively ended the US military’s involvement for many years in humanitarian and peacekeeping efforts. The so-called “Mogadishu Effect” has been blamed for inaction during the genocide in Rwanda to the later commitment of US troops to the Balkans. During the 1990s, October 3 hung over American foreign policy as a constant reminder of what might go wrong on such operations.

  The mission also understandably angered the families of the fallen, often directed at then-President Bill Clinton. Herbert Shughart, Randall Shughart’s father, attended the Medal of Honor presentation ceremony at the White House, where he refused to shake hands with President Bill Clinton. He then proceeded to criticize the president, reportedly saying, “You are not fit to be President of the United States. The blame for my son’s death rests with the White House and with you. You are not fit to command.”35

  TACTICS, TECHNIQUES, AND PROCEDURES

  “The future [of war] may well not be ‘Son of Desert Storm,’ but rather ‘Stepchild of Somalia and Chechnya.’”

  GENERAL CHARLES C. KRULAK, FORMER UNITED STATES MARINE CORPS COMMANDANT

  Mogadishu produced many lessons learned which were adopted across the special operations community. Many of these led directly to reduced casualties and greater success in the thousands of missions conducted during the Global War on Terror. Delta operator Norm Hooten commented: “We learnt lessons that day that helped us in future conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.”

  In terms of personal equipment, the lack of night-vision devices available during the night of October 3 was a grave miscalculation. Mike Moser recalled: “We received some criticism regarding the decision to cut our NVGs before this raid, anticipating an early return. I really believed that reduction of weight would translate to better performance (mor
e agility, faster response, etc.), and I was always looking to cut more. I wouldn’t do that again.”

  “Oh, and always having extra batteries for any [and] everything electronic on your person,” he added. “This was really already a standard, but on the Radio Mogadishu hit my NVGs died and apparently I neglected to restock my spares – very disconcerting.” Today, every operator and Ranger carries at least one night-vision device into combat without exception.

  Indeed, within several years of the battle of Mogadishu, the Ranger Regiment adopted a new basic load-out for each Ranger rifleman that each soldier carried into combat, which included a pair of AN/PVS7 night-vision goggles. Other newly issued items included a squad communication system allowing individual Rangers to communicate similar to those used by Delta on October 3, improved Ranger Body Armor with front and back trauma plates, and a number of items of personal protective equipment including gloves, ballistic goggles, and knee, elbow, and shin pads.

  Following Delta’s use of chest rigs over their body armor, the Rangers issued a system known as RACK or Ranger Assault Carry Kit that carried their water, ammunition, grenades, and medical and breaching kit in a vest over their RBA. The Rangers also followed Delta’s lead and began to issue infrared laser pointers called the AN/PEQ-2 laser illuminator mounted on their then-new M4 carbines. Their M4s also mimicked Delta with Aimpoint red dot sights as issue.

  Such advances were also experienced within Delta, although the Unit had its own integral research and development team that was constantly innovating: “As far as gear we now have helmets that we can shoot with that will stop frag, we have better ammunition, [although] weapons are similar [but with] better sights, better body armor, better water containers … Medical gear and tourniquets are the biggest and most important improvement.”