by Mark Greif
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The changes in the US military go back to the Vietnam War, but the place to start to understand today’s warfare is Mogadishu. On October 3, 1993, US special forces troops entered the Black Sea neighborhood of the Somali capital. They engaged local belligerents in the longest sustained firefight since Vietnam. The operation had been intended to take an hour. A journalistic account—Black Hawk Down, by Mark Bowden—details step-by-step the fourteen hours of fighting by US Army Rangers and Delta Force commandoes that followed.
The American humanitarian mission to Somalia was meant originally to safeguard food aid during a famine. It turned into a campaign against the Habr Gidr clan and its obstructionist leader, Mohamed Farrah Aidid. By autumn of 1993, US troops had become accustomed to speedy arrests (or kidnappings) of clan officials. On October 3, soldiers landed in helicopters and captured two of Aidid’s lieutenants. After that capture, however, a set of unanticipated events extended the fighting. A soldier fell from a helicopter. A helicopter was shot down by Habr Gidr militia—a feat not thought possible by Pentagon planners. A rescue convoy got lost in the streets. A second helicopter fell to a rocket. Repeated rescue sorties went out, returned, or were pinned down. Eighteen Americans were killed by sunrise and seventy-three injured. Americans killed five hundred Somalis and injured another thousand.
To anyone acquainted with the Iliad and its battle of Greeks and Trojans, this description of the fight in Mogadishu may make a comparison to Troy seem arbitrary. All that I have failed to indicate, perhaps, is how strange the details of contemporary combat practices feel to anyone accustomed to modern war in its twentieth-century guise. This does not look like war. It is odd to find today’s US soldiers inserted and extracted for the briefest acts of violence, whisked away at the first sign of injury. It is unsettling to see a military offensive of sorts turn into a continuous rescue mission. It alters our picture of war, as the contemporary surgeries in which the heart is deliberately stopped and restarted after the completion of the procedure alter our picture of life. But the thrust of the comparison depends less on the circumstances of the conflict, and more on the status of the fighter.
What does a Homeric hero look like? He armors himself. Well-made greaves defend his legs, a breastplate burnishes his chest; a massive shield, slung on his arm, turns away spears with its layers of leather and bronze. The modern warrior of the Argonne Forest or D-day had been nowhere so well protected except for his metal helmet. But the technology of armoring has radically improved: US forces now suit up fully. Fighters don body armor, helmets, and goggles. They wear Kevlar vests, formed of layers of shielding to turn away bullets, and tough Kevlar helmets. They tuck bulletproof ceramic breastplates into their flak vests, cushion their legs with kneepads, fight with personal sniper rifles, rocket launchers, super-precise and powerful weapons.
And how does the Homeric hero fight? The Achaean or Trojan wades into the slaughter, sending the shadow of his spear hurtling over the ground, killing as many as he can before he himself is wounded or withdraws. The structure of the battle follows a steady pace of attack and withdrawal. With Diomedes’s advance, or Agamemnon’s, or Achilles’s, Greek warriors drive their foes far back across the plain toward the gates of Troy. One peculiarity of this ancient method was that each army retained a steady place of rest. As chariots whisked them forward and back, soldiers attacked when angry and withdrew when wounded.
And today, the postmodern speed of helicopters and land vehicles recovers the ancient method from centuries of disuse. US troops maintained a secure camp on the beach in Somalia, unmolested, three miles from the center of Mogadishu—a broken-down Troy, with its burning tires and dung, its maze of littered streets and untouched mosques. American fighters “rope” in, rappelling from helicopters hovering fifty or seventy feet above the fray. With weapons blazing, they kill anyone who crosses their path. The dead fall around them until they themselves—by mischance or fate—are wounded. As injuries occur, US fighters are “extracted”—by speedy vehicles on the ground, or by small, agile helicopters that can land in the narrow streets.
Nor does any injury, in the Iliad or today, stop the hero but the one that kills. Men like the Homeric heroes are never half-men, never maimed or in-between. An arrow in the foot or shoulder is cause to go home temporarily in a chariot. The puncture is healed by a medic or, occasionally, the succor of a god. When a US soldier is shot, anyone can make a quick calculus to know the significance of the wound. In the face or beneath a joint of armor, it will be fatal. Any other injury will be reparable, practically, as long as the mechanisms of extraction work successfully to take a soldier off the field. Even a frightened soldier can work out his chances, as Ranger Sergeant Raleigh Cash did in Mogadishu: “He had thought it through methodically. He was wearing body armor, so if he got shot, it would probably be to the arms or legs and there were medics who would take care of him. It would hurt, but he had been hurt before. If he was shot in the head, then he would die. If he died then that was what was meant to happen.” The invocation of fate by this soldier is tempered by the sense that fate has but a slim margin within which to do its grisly work.
And substitute gods watch over the troops in their desert camouflage and flak vests just as the Olympians watched the furious mortals in their sport, bronze helmets flashing, on the plains of Troy. OH-58 observation helicopters pass over Mogadishu with cameras; a high-flying P-3 Orion spy plane regards the fighting from the clouds. Satellites watch from above earth’s atmosphere. A command-and-control helicopter hovers within range of the active soldiers, poised to give battlefield directions. The cameras also stream images in color video, plus infrared and heat display, to senior officers in a control room miles away, who watch until—very rarely—they attempt to intervene; or to more senior generals in Tampa, Florida; or, if necessary, to Washington, DC, where higher echelons may contemplate the mayhem.
But the importance of the eye above a contemporary soldier at all times—just as it was with the eye looking down on the ancient soldier—is not really the efficacy of these gods, in pulling out wounded fighters or sending in bursts of terrible fire. It is, rather, the knowledge that someone is always up there, a peculiar reliance by the soldier on the sense that he is always, in some way, beneath the hovering US helicopter, under the range of the satellite, under the eye. He matters as a subject for attention. Even his agony registers in a higher consciousness.
All these practical features confer superior value. This is the attribute that unites the Homeric to the American hero. Other words capture subsidiary senses of the quality that adheres to the armored, murderous, god-monitored fighter: singularity, irreplaceability, distinctness, visibility. The real uniqueness of the US fighter is located in his being seen and counted, monitored and protected, simply worth more than any enemy he could face. The maintenance of his life seems more important than any goal he could achieve.
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One is also struck by two deep differences between Homeric and contemporary war. The first is that US postmodern fighters, unlike Greeks and Trojans, do not expect to die. The second is that US postmodern battle is one-sided—a fight against no other commensurable force.
Contemporary US fighters, regardless of their military goals, will go to great lengths to avoid the deaths of any of their own personnel. They nearly aborted the Mogadishu mission, releasing the men they had arrested, the whole point of their mission, when it looked as if these captives might slow down the soldiers’ own rescue. Rescue becomes the ruling angel of warfare; rescue and bare survival.
And so the United States begins to fight on a strategy of survival. The Mogadishu firefight as it is recounted in Black Hawk Down includes killings of civilian noncombatants glimpsed just out of the corner of one’s eye. If you keep a list, you can gradually develop a picture of what such fighting must mean to anyone not a US soldier, or reporter, or citizen. As the assault begins, US fighters kill a few Somalis by accident. They shoot an innocent woman. They shoot a fe
w boys. Their “rules of engagement” dictate they “shoot only at someone who pointed a weapon at them.” But as risk accelerates, US soldiers and attack helicopters stop shooting civilians by mistake and start shooting them deliberately. They shoot anyone advancing on the troops, then anyone suspicious in the vicinity, then any groups in the city moving in the direction of the pinned-down troops, then anyone at all. They gun down crowds on purpose.
Somali fighters, of course, are killed with just the same lack of registration as the crowds. Visible—they must be spotted, to be shot—but invisible. As the heroes occupy their peculiar haloes of bodily safety, a strategy of survival makes it harder to gaze out through this glare to identify anyone who might inhabit a different, more traditional order of life, such as these low-tech Somali fighters—a grim, unromanticizable bunch—who nevertheless cannot be extracted by helicopters, who cannot be remade by medicine, who fight as modern war taught them to, aiming at goals, expecting to die, and wiped out by American fighters in extraordinary numbers.
The Somalis become a natural or biological menace, a menace made of men. And this licenses any degree of killing of combatants or noncombatants. Again, that death toll: in fourteen hours, Somalis had fifteen hundred casualties, a third of whom were killed. Fewer than one hundred American casualties occurred, of whom only eighteen were killed. We can remind ourselves that Americans’ abstract moral beliefs are second to none. Whenever things go right, our adherence to certain conventions of war, at the level of planning and training especially, is admirable. But whenever things go wrong, a different order obtains. The strategy of survival bleeds into a reality of extermination, and a form of warfare in which, for the Americans, there may be an enemy group, but there is no equal other side.
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The analogy to the Iliad is an aid to thought. Homer’s poem is an example of warfare everyone knows. It is so different from what our warfare is supposed to be like now that it jogs the mind.
The long-term trend of recent US military planning, however, is to expand and accelerate the features of ground combat that were most startling in Mogadishu. This has gone along with a particular line of military thought, now dominant in the Bush administration, which seeks to remodel all of the United States military on the example of special operations forces. The US Army’s “I am an army of one” advertising campaign, before September 11, already recruited on the basis of the new model, picturing individual soldiers, alone, wearing futuristic armor, almost unrecognizable as human beings, or accomplishing extraordinary feats by themselves. As Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld has sold his idea of “transformation” of the armed forces—which was originally more a matter of corporate-style “downsized” military organization, budgeting, and goals—by concrete examples from the special forces, and by their conspicuous recent successes.
The conventional wisdom on the 2001–02 war in Afghanistan was that it was won almost entirely by a tiny number of special forces soldiers who called in massive air power. US heroes mobilized the “proxy fighters” of the Northern Alliance, target-spotted for precision bombing, and overthrew the government of a vast country—leaving a large ground force to be called in only later, when there was little left for it to do.
Pentagon planners love this model because it is quick, requires less funding to manpower and more to technology, and is more free from public scrutiny and national opinion than the use of the regular military. Journalists have fallen in with it, too. The hagiographic literature of special forces in Afghanistan is both unilluminating and extensive. Many of the Afghan engagements are classified, but the few that are not resemble storybook tales. Heroes come roaring out of a curtain of precision explosions—as at Mazar-i-Sharif—on horseback, surrounded by faithful Northern Alliance fighters, to overwhelm a Taliban stronghold. Or heroes radio home the GPS coordinates for targets, or paint them with lasers, and moments later the enemy vehicles, or houses, or men, are vaporized by munitions dropped from Stealth bombers; the heroes melt back into the landscape, creeping among the native population. Rumsfeld himself, in a policy article in Foreign Affairs, likened the new forces of transformation to an opportunity to take an M-16 back to the Middle Ages. You wouldn’t joust with the knights you met; you’d machine-gun them. Such was the curious charm of the special forces in Afghanistan.
The far more important development, however, may be that the armor and tracking devices which belonged to only the highest-value fighters in 1993 have been made increasingly available to a wider, though still relatively small, cadre of frontline fighters, in the regular infantry and Marines. A Marine rifleman now wears a ceramic plate in his SAPI vest, like a Delta operator ten years ago; an Army infantryman can be watched by drone planes, and his vehicle followed on the “Blue Force tracker” at headquarters. This is what we saw in Iraq, during our brief war.
Iraq—we now are coming to understand it better and better, as commentators relive our twenty-one-day war, then ask what went wrong. Iraq is the real test for the new conditions of combat.
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New accounts of last year’s war are arriving at a steady pace. We have David Zucchino’s Thunder Run: The Armored Strike to Capture Baghdad, Rick Atkinson’s In the Company of Soldiers: A Chronicle of Combat, Bing West and Major General Ray L. Smith’s The March Up: Taking Baghdad with the 1st Marine Division, Williamson Murray and Major General Robert H. Scales Jr.’s The Iraq War: A Military History, and John Keegan’s The Iraq War, among others. Each of the accounts by “embedded” journalists adds something new. The military histories mostly confirm the larger picture that the journalists sometimes can, sometimes cannot, see.
In Iraq, the trends toward the making of “heroes” continued. The heroic aspects of monitoring, armor, and medicine appear in these books in familiar form. During the war, the death of any US soldier from hostile fire is rare and shocking. Operations pause, to evacuate wounded soldiers by armored vehicle or helicopter. Medics see the benefits of the new personal armor: in one firefight recounted by Zucchino, twenty men were wounded but “there were no head wounds, no sucking chest wounds, no wounds to vital organs.”
And the United States fought another low-casualty war, with few personnel killed during the actual campaign; and remarkable numbers of Iraqi deaths whenever US forces encountered resistance. Murray and Scales cite one engagement west of the Baghdad International Airport on April 3, 2003. It began in late afternoon: “By early morning the bodies of nearly 500 fedayeen littered the ground in front of American positions.” West and Smith recount an engagement at Diwaniyah: “In six hours, the battalion estimated two hundred Iraqi soldiers and fedayeen had died, not an unusual number, for the length of the battle and the panoply of weapons applied.”
Zucchino gives figures for some of the dead in the fighting around Baghdad—where the massed dead can be counted in one-mile stretches of highway, and intersection by intersection. In a morning-long engagement on April 5, “the Desert Rogues [tank] battalion had just killed between eight hundred and a thousand enemy soldiers….It had cost them one dead.” On April 7, at one intersection, US forces may have “killed as many as two hundred and had destroyed at least forty-five vehicles. The company had not lost a man.” At another: “Hubbard figured his men had killed up to four hundred enemy fighters and had destroyed eighty vehicles. A single American soldier had been injured—a minor shrapnel wound.”
The strategy of the US ground campaign in Iraq was simple. The United States had two large forces, both of which left Kuwait at the same time, pursuing roughly parallel paths north to Baghdad. The main force was the Army V Corps. It included the Third Infantry (Mechanized)—a powerful force of tanks and fighting vehicles—the paratroopers of the 101st and 82nd Airborne, and the commandoes of the Special Operations Command. The I Marine Expeditionary Force had a comparable mix of tanks, helicopters, fixed-wing air support, artillery, and infantry. The Army struck along a western route, on highways and briefly through the desert on the far side of the Euphrates. The Mari
nes fought their way north on an eastern route, between the Euphrates and the Tigris. The two forces converged on Baghdad.
At the battle for Baghdad, they reached what could have been the most elaborate and dangerous ground engagement the United States had fought in decades. The original US strategy was to conquer Baghdad by making raids from stable bases outside the city, using the relatively small cadres of the 101st and 82nd Airborne and the special forces, backed with every kind of firepower and support imaginable. This would have been like Mogadishu. Perhaps as late as April, official war plans called for these troops, who are transported in Black Hawks and closely supported by Apache attack helicopters, to strike into Iraq’s capital city and clear neighborhoods day by day, in raids of attack and withdrawal.
The US forces made a discovery during the earlier campaign, however, which changed all this. In the unique Iraqi environment, tanks could perform urban warfare as well as fight traditional open-field engagements in the desert. Because Iraq had maintained a full highway system—with road signs in Arabic and English—tanks could move as swiftly as they liked. Because the monumental architecture of Saddam’s Baghdad, not unlike the Mall in Washington, DC, gave tanks room to maneuver at the heart of the capital, they could drive to the center of Baghdad and collapse the city’s defenses from the inside. Because the Baath defenses included fixed roadside bunkers, light gun-mounted pickup trucks, and suicide cars—all easy targets for tank guns—the tanks were lethal and unstoppable. The armed hero found a new way to “walk” into a hostile city, in other words, with an even lower risk of injury—clad in even more invincible armor and more unimaginable firepower, looking at the enemy streets over the sill of a turret, wearing the skin of a tank.
On April 5 and then April 7 and 8, 2003, Third Infantry tanks led so-called thunder runs into the city of Baghdad, killing all the fighters they encountered along the way. Nothing went wrong this time. The US forces killed, and killed, and killed. The main worry for the Americans, in the hottest engagements, was only that they would run out of ammunition.
