Would the battle have been more successful for the American troopers if they had acted in more methodical and slower pace?
No. Fast decision-making and execution are powerful advantages in any battle, period. I don't think a lot of tactical errors were
made on either side of the Battle of Mogidishu. That is- soldiers on both sides executed according to plan.
The primary intellience failure was an underappreciation of the capacity for a single rocket-propelled grenade to bring
down a blackhawk helicopter. That threat seems to have been misjudged in spite of several good reasons to re-evaluate
in the preceding weeks.
The strategic assumptions of the US and the UN were wrong but not really wrong-headed situationally. The US and the UN went into
Somalia with a plan to feed a mass starvation event and an explicit intention not to take sides in the civil war. When Aidid ambushed
UN Pakistani forces in June, that was probably the time to acknowledge that no foreign aid was worth delivering at the point of a gun,
no respect for civil liberty ought be taught by violence.
By all competant hindsight accounts, the July 12th attack on Aidid's war council was the real blunder. It didn't kill Aidid. It didn't weaken
the insurgents, that attack actually strengthened them: that raid: "
inflamed anti-UN and anti-American sentiments among Somalis, galvanizing
The lesson to be learned is that was the time to withdraw from that intentionally humanitarian mission. That is the moment when the US decided
to increase risk to a higher casualty tolerance and the possibility of a battle as it happened in size and scope approved. US aid to Somalia was
popular in the US right up to the moment when dead soldiers' bodies were dragged through downtown Mogidishu- that gesture, essentially,
more potent than the fact of the price paid in body count.
A co-worker of mine was the gunner on Super 64. He once estimated for me that he shot four hundred people- men, women, and children but
mostly men during that battle. Then the army came and got him. He never even got shot. Geez- has there ever been a more efficient killing machine
than the modern American soldier?
