The helicopters came in low, using ground clutter to avoid radar and obscure line of sight. The purpose of the flights was to deliver military ground forces -- members of an elite team – on a difficult mission that required them to cross territory not in US control. Once on the ground they would need to enter secured locations, deal with numerous unknowns, and complete their objectives with the kind of constrained violence that in military terms is often called "surgical." All involved were well trained and well supplied; the best of the best on a mission where victory was needed in the worst way. But what happened next was a different story. Actually, it was three different stories...
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At sunset on the evening of 24 Apr 1980, eight RH-53D "Sea Stallion" helicopters under the command of Marine pilots left the deck of the USS Nimitz and sped low across the Arabian Sea. Codenamed Blackbeard 1 through Blackbeard 8, the helicopters were part of Operation Eagle Claw, a complex military action that had been weeks in planning and execution. Only a few men were aboard each helicopter, since the majority of the force they were intended to carry was being put in position through other means. As the helicopters moved over land, 120 members of Delta Force were waiting for them at a tiny makeshift outpost in the Iranian desert. A place called Desert One.
On the afternoon of 3 October 1993, a mixed flight of six MH-6 Little Bird attack helicopters and four MH-60L Black Hawk helicopters – part of an overall airborne armada that totaled 19 aircraft – left the Task Force Ranger base near the shore of the Indian Ocean. The smaller helicopters carried members of Delta Force. Onboard the Black Hawks were 75 Army Rangers. The expected duration of Operation Gothic Serpent was only about an hour. After all, the trip they were making was almost ludicrously short: three miles from the US base to the Olympic Hotel, in the center of Mogadishu.
At Desert One, the delivery of the Delta Force team had gone as planned. An enormous Air Force C-130 Hercules roared in skimming the ground, lights off, to deposit men, vehicles, and gear. The plan was for the men to board the approaching helicopters, which would then ferry them to a location called Desert Two much closer to Tehran. From there they would drive into the city, overpower the militants surrounding the US Embassy, and extract the hostages. The Delta Force men, and a small group of Rangers, waited patiently for their ride. Only up in the air, things weren't going quite as planned. Blackbeard 6 had to ditch on the desert sands when a sensor indicated a serious mechanical failure. The crew was picked up by one of the other helicopters and the reduced force continued. Then some of the helicopters in the increasingly spread-out flight encountered an atmospheric phenomenon called a haboob that left fine sand suspended in the air. Facing poor visibility and unsure of the effect on systems, Blackbeard 5 turned back. The six remaining Sea Stallions flew on.
Only ten minutes after leaving base on the outskirts of Mogadishu, the Little Birds were in position to begin firing on the residence of their target. Meanwhile, the Black Hawks hovered at the corners of the block and Rangers began rappelling to the ground. The idea was that they would move fast, enter the house where Mohamed Farrah Aidid was meeting another clan leader, capture the two warlords, and return them to base. True to that plan, twenty minutes after the assault began, the radio crackled with the news that both men had been captured along with several other prisoners. But outside, the helicopters came under fire from not just small arms, but rocket propelled grenades. One of the soldiers fell during his descent and slammed into the pavement 60 feet below. A ground convoy moving through the city in support of the assault came forward to try and assist.
Six helicopters landed at Desert One, but only five of them were capable of continuing. Technically, Bluebeard 2 could have been flown, but its backup hydraulic system was malfunctioning, making operating the craft risky. There were spare parts, but they were on the helo that turned back. The commander in charge of the helicopters refused the use of Blackbeard 2. The commander in charge of the assault forces argued that the mission could not go forward with only five helicopters. After more than two hours of arguing, they contacted President Carter and insisted that the plan be aborted. A few minutes later, that order was approved. If the mission had ended there, it might have been a footnote. There might have been another attempt within days. But as one of the helicopters moved around to be refueled, it's prop wash blew painful gusts of sand at the Air Force officer trying to direct traffic. Unable to see, the officer stepped back. Unable to see anything but the officer, the helicopter moved forward thinking that he was holding position. Moments later, the blade of the helicopter cut into one of the C-130s. The night was split by a fireball in which eight men died. On the orders of the assault commander, five functional helicopters were left on the sands while the helicopter crew joined the Delta Force for evacuation by C-130. At least four of the helicopters would eventually become part of the Iranian Air Force.. The Iranians had triumphed without firing a shot. In the wake of Desert One, the 52 hostages were taken away from the embassy and scattered around Tehran, making another attempt to rescue them all but impossible.
The convoy moving through Mogadishu never reached the location of the firefight. Instead it took a wrong turn, and as the column drove with increasing desperation they encountered dead ends, improvised barricades, and hostile fire. As they pushed through the labyrinthine streets, a second Black Hawk was brought down. An emergency convoy sent out to help only managed to become another target. Two hours after the fight had begun, both convoys staggered back to base. At that moment, a hundred men were pinned down around the first crash site. At the second crash all but one of the men were already dead. Those fighting for their lives at the first site would have to wait another five hours before a convoy fortified with tanks and supported by more Little Birds reached them. Even then the rescuers had not thought to bring enough vehicles to offer the Rangers a lift. Men who had fought and survived through the night were forced to walk out of the city under a storm of gunfire. 18 US servicemen died and 83 were wounded.
By 1 AM in the morning following the disaster at Desert One, President Carter revealed the failure and took responsibility for the action. Carter's position in the polls, already in decline, took another steep drop. Both at the time and in his memoirs, President Carter marked this moment as the turning point in his chance of reelection.
It took a bit longer for responsibility to be claimed for the Battle of Mogadishu, but two weeks after the event, Major General William Garrison submitted a letter to President Clinton accepting full responsibility. It was the end of Garrison's career as a field commander. For Clinton the hit from Mogadishu was muted. He had been in office for nine months, but Somalia was still seen as Bush Sr.'s war.
That third group of helicopters setting out in the middle of the night on Operation Neptune Spear – the group that a week ago successfully ended the life of Osama bin Laden – is currently the most obscure of this trio. We know that roughly two dozen men, most of them members of Seal Team 6, were helicopted into Abbottobad in the early hours of 2 May 2011. We know they lost one helicopter to unspecified "maintenance issues," possibly due to a hard landing. One helicopter set down inside the walled compound, the second outside. We know that like the other incidents there were more people on the ground than those who arrived by helo – someone turned off the power in the neighborhood then switched it back on following the raid. We know that the total time of the operation, from the point where the helicopters neared bin Laden's compound to the time the functional helicopter flew away with his body, was around 40 minutes.
After the incident, the helicopter containing the body landed on the aircraft carrier USS Carl Vinson, but we don't know if that was the launching point for the raid. We also don't have an authoritative count on how many, or even what kind, of aircraft were involved. A few hours later, President Obama was on television.
What lessons can we draw from these events? Well, the clearest one seems to be don't screw up. Despite how many times we've been told that America is the land of second chances and that Americans love bold action, that doesn't seem to be quite the case. History (not just in these cases but going back two centuries) shows that Americans love winners. Take all the bold action you want, but it better be effective action if you want to see four more years at the helm.
Likewise, no matter how many times we've been told that Americans want people to man up and take responsibility, that seems far from true. President Carter stepped in front of the cameras to own up to the Desert One disaster, even though it could be easily argued that decisions of commanders on the ground were far more to blame. It didn't save him from a mauling in the press or at the polls. At the far end, President Bush (W) evaded responsibility for the disasters in Iraq and the disgrace at Abu Ghraib. Unlike Mogadishu, not even a general officer needed to be sacrificed as blame was scattered among those comfortably far down the chain of command.
Oddly enough, there is one kind of disaster that doesn't seem to hurt presidents at the polls: getting caught with your pants down. It's not just 9/11 that sent the tickers moving upward. When 241 Marines were killed in Lebanon, Ronald Reagan's poll numbers, which had been all the way down to 35%, climbed back to 50-50. Jimmy Carter's polls rose when the hostages were taken in Iran. It was only after the crisis lengthened, and after the events at Desert One, that the burst of support evaporated.
As several diaries have pointed out, President Obama may very well have put his presidency on the line with this operation. If it had failed -- leaving bin Laden to escape and American dead in his wake -- the timing would have been very similar to that in the 1980 cycle, and President Obama would have been subject to much of the same "Democrats don't get defense" criticism that plagued (Naval Academy graduate and former lieutenant) Jimmy Carter. An engine failure... A lucky shot... that might have been all it took to hand us President Romney / Huckabee / Whoever. So thank goodness for good service mechanics and plain old good luck.
Far from rewarding the risk takers, the evidence of the polls is that Americans reward those who get caught by surprise and punish those who take chances. Unless, of course, those chances succeed. It may not be true that America loves a risk taker, but it does seem to be true that America loves a winner.
Note
If you want to read more about either the events at Desert One or in Mogadishu, you could not do better than to look to the words of Mark Bowden. Bowden's book Black Hawk Down was the basis of the motion picture. His 2006 article on Desert One is still fortunately available on the Atlantic site.
One last thing. It's easy to think that the disaster at Desert One came from poor planning or hasty execution, but the truth is this mission was in the works for months. CIA operatives scouted locations weeks in advance, and everything from highway conditions leading into Tehran to soil conditions of the landing areas were studied closely. It's hard to say exactly where things went wrong. Certainly the commanders on the ground acted with extreme caution and extreme inflexibility. The helicopter that turned back was minutes away from clear air. It's not clear that the helo that put down in the desert had any real problem. The helicopter that reached Desert One with hydraulic issues was still usable. Even if none of them were available, the mission was still theoretically possible with only four helicopters. Going with six was in anticipation of losing one or two helos later in the mission. Five helicopters might have been pushing the original boundary, but there were options to change the force mix -- some of which had been gamed out in advance.
The real issue is likely that the whole idea of this kind of operation was just too new. No one had ever planned anything like it. The procedures, the chain of command necessary, the experience with tackling unconventional missions -- it just didn't exist. Even Delta Force had only been around for two years at the time. In that kind of environment, tackling a mission that involved landing men and vehicles, then coordinating actions of fixed wing aircraft, helicopters, ground troops, and CIA operatives as they crossed half a country and entered a major city still half in chaos, was probably more than anyone could have accomplished.
Desert One might have been a disaster at the time, but the next generation of special operations went to school on what happened there. Without Desert One, there would not have been an Abbottabad.