The Rest Is Classified - 145. Black Hawk Down: What Osama bin Laden Learnt from Somalia (Ep 4)

Episode Date: April 7, 2026

What was the legacy of the Battle of Mogadishu? How did the fallout change the US presence in Somalia forever? And how did the experience in Somalia inspire Osama bin Laden’s acts of terror? Listen as David and Gordon conclude their four-part series on the extraordinary events of Black Hawk Down. ------------------- THE REST IS CLASSIFIED LIVE 2026 at The Rest Is Fest: Buy your tickets ⁠⁠⁠HERE⁠⁠⁠ to see David and Gordon live on stage at London’s Southbank Centre on 4 September. ------------------- Sign-up for our free newsletter where producer Becki takes you behind the scenes of the show: ⁠https://mailchi.mp/goalhanger.com/tric-free-newsletter-sign-up⁠ ------------------- Join the Declassified Club to go deeper into the world of espionage with exclusive Q&As, interviews with top intelligence insiders, regular livestreams, ad-free listening, early access to episodes and live show tickets, and weekly deep dives into original spy stories. Members also get curated reading lists, special book discounts, prize draws, and access to our private chat community. Just go to ⁠⁠therestisclassified.com⁠ or join on Apple Podcasts. ------------------- Get a 10% discount on business PCs, printers and accessories using the code TRIC10. Visit https://HP.com/CLASSIFIED for more information. T&C's apply. ------------------- EXCLUSIVE NordVPN Deal ➼ ⁠⁠https://nordvpn.com/restisclassified⁠⁠ Try it risk-free now with a 30-day money-back guarantee ------------------- Email: ⁠⁠⁠[e-mail]⁠ ⁠ Instagram: ⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠⁠@restisclassified⁠ Video Editor: Joe Pettit Social Producer: Emma Jackson Assistant Producer: Alfie Rowe Producer: Becki Hills Head of History: Dom Johnson Exec Producer: Tony Pastor Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Malcolm in the middle, life's still unfair. A special four-part event, streaming April 10th on Hulu on Disney Plus. The US soldiers trapped in Mogadishu are running for their lives. But how does the true story of Blackhawk down end? Well, welcome to the rest is classified. I'm Gordon Carrera.

And I'm David McClarski. David, last time we left off at the crash site where Super 6-1, one of the Blackhawks had gone down, the group of Rangers and Degers and. Delta had fought through their night, their ammunition running low, lots of wounded around them. They'd been waiting for their rescue convoy to come, which is complicated because it's a joint UN-American rescue convoy with complicated command structures. It finally assembled, left at 2am, got to the crash site. And when we left last time, amazingly, the convoy had gone,

but had left some of those Rangers and Delta who had been there all night, behind. And now they're faced with once again being stuck almost abandoned, I guess, in Mogad issue as the sun is coming up and as a new day is dawning with Somali fighters all around them. This episode is brought to you by HP. In intelligence work, it's rarely the obvious problem that causes failure. It's the overlooked detail or the flaw nobody quite solved. The kind of vulnerability intelligence services look for. And running a business is the same, especially. when you're building or growing a team, it's the risks you can't see or don't understand.

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There wasn't enough room on the vehicles since some contingent was always going to have to run, but the plan had been for the runners to be able to. to use the vehicles as cover. And as we talked about last time, that cover is now gone. So maybe 60 men will need to run. Now, the soldiers running, they've been in continuous combat for around 16 hours. Many are severely dehydrated. Many are wounded. And I think it's safe to say that many are experiencing something close to the limits of human endurance. They're also going to have to run in full combat gear. So this is maybe 60 pounds of the body armor, ammunition weapons. That's hard even when you're in peak physical condition and obviously in this situation.

It's even harder. Some of the Rangers describe this run, which has come to be known as the Boga Dishu mile, in almost hallucinatory terms, right? That combination of exhaustion and dehydration, dreadaline depletion and terror creates almost altered mental states, right? So it, You read the accounts of this. Time becomes distorted. Pain becomes distant. There's weird cases of just, again, these really significant injuries that are almost not even noticed in real time.

And the environment on this run gets reduced to these kind of immediate sensory inputs, right? So you can hear your own breathing or your feet hitting the pavement, the crack of bullets passing by. They follow the same route as the convoy. And same as the convoy yesterday. these intersections are really deadly for the runners and for the vehicles, right? Because they get this crossfire through the intersections. One ranger is shot through the leg and falls. Other soldiers dragging him back to his feet and support him between them, kind of carrying him

while they continue to run. Another takes shrapnel from an RPG blast across his back and shoulders, which is painful enough to make movement difficult, but he keeps on running. Another has a sort of a golf ball-sized piece of flesh scooped out of his shoulder by a round. One guy, and you actually do see this at the film, one guy is deaf from the battle because he had had his head so close to a heavy machine gun that he loses hearing. One runner has literally his pants have been shot off and he's running almost naked, actually naked from the waist down. So they're shooting at everything that appears at this point in the battle. And you see this, if you watch the Netflix documentary, the Rangers who were part of this, say that at this point, they weren't making any distinction, really, between civilians or who's part of the militia.

I mean, basically, you know, there's this mortal danger that comes, as we've discussed, from stopping. So no one wants to stop. You just have to keep moving. And the convoy fights on through Mogadishu streets. Some of the vehicles are at their breaking point because they're so overloaded with people. People are packed into these vehicles like sardines. The Somali attacks are intensifying. One of the armored personnel carriers engines overheats and actually fails from overloading.

I mean, there's 30 people packed into a vehicle that's designed to hold 10. Another vehicle's suspension collapses under the weight. And it's just, it is an absolutely chaotic and mind-boggling thing that after all of this, up to this point that they've experienced, the end of this experience, what they hope will be the end, is just this mad dash under fire through the streets of Mogadishu. And eventually the runners will reach the kind of the full complement of the Pakistani of the tanks and the armored personnel carriers and some of these Humvees. they reach that full complement of the vehicles. At the intersection of Howlidig Road at National Street, there's another roadblock ahead. The vehicles plow through the roadblock, and the rest of the vehicles roar through past them, and the runners are coming along.

And finally, the convoy reaches the Pakistani Stadium in the early morning hours. The distances aren't that large, are they? From the Pakistani Stadium to the crash site, it's actually a short distance. yet it's taken them hours to do that return journey. And overall, it's been, what, 16 hours since the mission first began, what was supposed to be a one-hour mission? And the crew that has arrived, this force that has arrived at the safety of the Pakistani stadium, is in some state of shock, right?

Bodies are being unloaded. They're having to triage the wounded, figure out, well, who needs immediate attention and who can wait. a lot of people with what you think of as really horrendous injuries are made to wait because there are so many people who are even more awfully wounded than they are. There's people with bruised holes in their bodies, limbs mangled, parts of their bodies shot off. I mean, just on and on, right? But they're still not done yet because they need to go back to the American base. This part of the journey is not as bad as what had come before it.

vehicles turned north through Boga Dishu. They go back to the Task Force Ranger compound at the airfield, which was the spot where the previous afternoon, they're watching football games hanging out on what had felt like. It might be a quiet Sunday afternoon. That mission was supposed to take an hour, and it is now the morning of the next day. Now, General Garrison, head of Task Force Ranger, he's there where the vehicles come in, he walks out to meet them, and he has already written a letter to President Clinton, taking personal responsibility for everything that has happened. He's going to send it before the day is out. Does it fall on him? I mean, in one sense, it does in the chain of command. He's running it.

He decides on the mission. But I mean, he does the honorable thing by writing the letter. But whether it was predictable, it's hard to say, isn't it? Well, I think you'd have to say it wasn't predictable, given that they'd done six missions already that had gone quite well. Yeah. On the other hand, some of these decisions around not having armor, I actually think the AC130 gunship would not have been that helpful. But that wasn't his fault. It wasn't his fault.

No, no, no, no, not his fault. But I think as you look back and say, well, could it have gone differently? There's a lot of different ways you could unpack the decision making around this battle and come up with a different outcome. Now, back at the base, the silence is the thing that a lot of survive. described very vividly, because after 15 or so hours in which there was almost constant gunfire, screaming, RPG detonations, thud of mortars, the crackle of radio traffic, right? It's just this kind of soundtrack of war. The compound is relatively calm and quiet. There are engines cooling. They can actually hear the call to prayer coming from mosques in Mogadishu. Some people are crying.

the morning progresses and they are accounting for what's happened, the first casualty count becomes clear. It's that 18 Americans have died. 73 are wounded. That's one third of Captain Steele's Ranger Company had been killed or wounded. And at this point, those two Delta operators who had gone in to stave off the militia around Michael Durant's crash site, that second crash site, they're still out there not accounted for.

along with the crew on Super 6-4. So that's six men missing. Now, Delta operators will embed with a sympathetic local NGO to provide them with cover so they can go out into the city and civilian clothes. They're actually going to look for the bodies. At this point, they're assuming that, you know, at least some of them might be dead, or they're trying to figure out where they're being held if any of them are alive. and there is only one of those missing persons that is still alive, and that's Michael Durant. He, we'd left him, I guess he'd been, you know, holding out with his pistol by the very end

and surrounded by Somali militia. And then he's captured. I mean, he was battered, you know, we'd left him with his back pretty much broken from the crash, his leg shattered. He gets treated by a Somali doctor, which is interesting, because as we'd said, they wanted to have someone alive. That had been always one of the targets for ID'd. And then there's this fascinating bit where there's going to be a propaganda video,

which is being made of him. And the Netflix documentary surviving Black Hawk Down is fascinating because I actually get the guy who's brought in, don't they, to be the cameraman, interviewing, you know, Michael Durant and who's captured some of these things. And you see him being asked questions and being interrogated. And he looks just terrible. I mean, he looks absolutely, you know, he's. eyes are kind of black and he's bruised.

And they're clearly trying to get him to say, we were killing lots of civilians. You know, that's clearly what they are trying to get him to do in that propaganda video. And I think you can tell he knows that and he's trying to avoid saying those kind of things and doing the absolute minimum. But that now becomes one of the key focus of American operations is trying to get him out. And he's going to get visited by Red Cross and, you know, even some journalists. but he's held by the IDD forces.

Idid is basically paid for him to use him as a bargaining chip with the U.S. just to continue the accounting. So two Malaysian soldiers are killed, seven wounded, two Pakistani soldiers are wounded. And then there are those Somali casualties of this battle. Estimates on this range widely, several hundred, maybe three to five hundred killed up to at the higher end estimates of maybe a thousand or more killed, with many more wounded. The overwhelming majority of these are men who came to fight.

Of course, not all of them. This is really telling the biggest hospitals in Mogadishu by morning are at capacity. Surgeons are operating around the clock. The hospital that is closest to the American base had been largely empty since the arrival of Task Force Ranger because locals were too afraid to go there. But now all 500 beds in that hospital that morning are full. So massive number of Somali casualties in comparison to the Americans. And what's interesting is it is now, I guess, in the US late Monday morning.

And already the images and the news of what has happened in Mogadishu are starting to filter into the United States. We talked earlier about how, you know, actually the White House didn't really understand what was going on as the battle was unfolding on the Sunday and into the earth. early hours of Monday morning. But once you get into Monday, some of that footage shot by Somali cameraman is sent out very quickly and reaches American newsrooms. And this is really important, I think, for the legacy of the Battle of Mogad issue, because, I mean, the footage is pretty graphic. And looking back, when you look at the archive footage, I'm astonished that they showed it on American TV. I mean, they show it with a warning. And they say, you know, warning, this is graphic, but it's the bodies of American soldiers, of dead American soldiers,

being literally dragged through the streets, the mutilated bodies, by crowds who are celebrating. I mean, that's what the images are. And suddenly, everyone is realizing that something huge has unfolded and that there are soldiers who've died. And you've got Michael Durant, the capture pilot who we spoke of, being interviewed by his captors, and these kind of footage of, you know, down Blackhawk helicopters. and of carnage. I mean, it is a massive impact that day on American public opinion, isn't it? As it makes the news. It's hard to overstate the impact that I think in particular the videos and images of the bodies being dragged through the streets had on American public opinion

because the political mood shifts overnight. There had been an ABC news poll done in May of 1993, so five months earlier, that showed that the intervention at Somalia had a 65% approval rating. that's gone overnight. It evaporates. And President Clinton will suspend all combat operations in Somalia just a few days later. So effectively, he ends the manhunt for IDD and in his organization right after the battle. But we still have Americans in Somalia. Michael Durant's still a prisoner.

Not all of the bodies are accounted for. And we talked about how Delta teams have been going into the city in the days after the battle, trying to account for the dead. Now, there's another footnote to this, which doesn't often get included in the accounts of the, of that battle itself, which is that there are militia mortar teams that fire on the airfield on the ranger base regularly. And up to this point, they had been woefully inaccurate. The Rangers and the Delta guys would, I mean, in some cases, just kind of mock how terribly inaccurate the mortar fire was. But on the 6th of October, one of those borders finds its mark and kills a Delta operator named Matt Ryerson. So he's killed an immortal strike.

And you get this sense in the days afterward of this confused picture where clearly there is no political fuel left to do much of anything in Somalia. And yet we still have Americans there and we still have people unaccounted for. And I mean, that's the thing, the film and the traditional story of Blackhawk Down ends immediately after the battle when they get back to the American base 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, is 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 Rearsen, as you said, had been killed. You know, President Clinton addresses the nation from the Oval Office.

And it's got a kind of tricky thing, isn't it? Because it'd originally been a humanitarian mission. It'd been started by President George H.W. 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. 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. He'd been getting briefs on Task Force Ranger missions, but this one had spun up so quickly that he actually hadn't 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, and the American military. And this makes him look even more aloof, disengaged for military batters. 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, you know, in sort of similar straits after the Battle of Mogadishu. Yeah, you're right. He had a deal. He had a deal. difficult relationship with the military. Of course, he'd, you know, 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. 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. 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. Which I'm afraid does have echoes of some of those who in very different contexts and much longer wars, you know, would serve in places like Afghanistan, wouldn't they? And when, you know, they did 20 years of nation building and then you leave and the Taliban come back and people go, well, what was that for? What was that intervention for? So I think there's echoes of it there, I think. 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 ID's militia. So what Clinton does is he goes and he taps a guy named Robert Oakley, who had been the U.S. Special Envoy to Sibalia in 1992 and early 1993 before Task Force Ranger had entered the picture. Oakley had run the original humanitarian intervention and had been pretty successful. And he'd worked with clan leaders, including IDD. 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. I mean, Hugh would have thought. It does get worse because what happens, and this is, I mean, it's just, 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 that has, there's, there is some debate over whether that's, the Somalis actually just trying to return them. It just feels to the Americans disrespectful somehow for it to arrive in garbage bags. 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, and, and it rained. So with this as the context, Oakley, the Clinton representative, meets with representatives of IDD, does though within hours of landing. And he doesn't demand that ID'd surrender, but he basically, Oakley basically says there's not going to be any trade for Michael Durant.

He threatens ID'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 neighborhood. these forces who have been through what they've been through the last couple days. 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 ID 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, IDD announces Durant's release. Id did 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. 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 a cup that was supposedly filled with the bourbon from his fifth of Jack Daniels. And Durant is transported to medical facility in Germany. He goes back to the US.

He will eventually recover, returns back to flight status, which is absolutely amazing. 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. Retires years later, ends up writing a book, which I highly recommend to all listeners called In the Company of Heroes. 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 lie lie lie lie lie 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 the 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. And then in March of 1994, five months later, all U.S. forces are out of Somalia. So maybe there.

Let's take a break. And when we come back, we will look at the legacy of this intense battle. So welcome back. So American forces have left. The Somalis they captured during the raid were released. What did it all mean? 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, but 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. 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? 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. Yeah. Because in hindsight, people said, well, actually, if a relatively small number of troops, perhaps to secure Kigali Airport in Rwanda and, you know, create safe havens, could have had a massive impact.

But the legacy of Mogadishu is there because the US just doesn't want. want a risk going into another African war zone inserting troops into there. 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 in 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. 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. You know, the idea is it looks really impressive. But all you need to do is kind of inflict those casualties and they'll back away. And that becomes, I mean, that actually becomes part of the strategic philosophy of al-Qaeda. I mean, that's a really significant impact of it, isn't it? 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 diluted mind, such a clear theory of victory for what he could accomplish with, you know, even just a few casualties. You know, I mean, the other piece of this, Gordon, is what's the legacy for Somalis and Somalia? I mean, the long-term legacy is exceptionally bleak. I mean, the international withdrawal essentially leaves Somalia at more than two

decades of just state failure, clan warfare, humanitarian crisis after crisis, the rise of violent extremism. I mean, Muhammad 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, I mean, Al-Qaeda called al-Shabaab to emerge and kind of grow in power and confidence throughout the 2000s,

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, you know, an international community through the UN, the U.S. military, a whole bunch of allied nations who are trying to fix the place. Who are trying to fix things. And, you know, none of it comes to pass. I mean, you also have, you know, famously Somali piracy flourishing in that security vacuum. Yeah. And taking down shipping, you know, particularly in the 2010s with with huge impact. And I mean, still, I mean, 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, we're 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, you know, we shouldn't underplay the suffering of the Somali people who are going to, you know, suffer terribly in the years to come, both from the Civil War, but even also famine comes back again, doesn't it, and kills, you know, I think in 2011, it killed. between 50,000 and 260,000 people, many of them children. So the consequences for the country are pretty enormous. I also think that the U.S. 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 Nicholas Maduro. Yeah. Gordon, in the episodes we did on Bit Laden, we talked about how the Joint Special Operations Command had set up a replica of the Abadabad compound where bin Laden was Heidek 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 develop the practice of constructing full-scale replicas of target compounds to do this kind of pre-mission rehearsal, the models, right? 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 always, we should have a replica of what we're going to be operating in and we should train on that. Yeah. 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, you know, so it becomes this kind of

shorthand for a disaster that could have incredible political consequences, right? 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, you know, better aircraft in training. We have a joint special operations command that has spent almost two decades developing doctrine for exactly this kind of like complex hostile environment raid like they did in Pakistan and like they did in Venezuela. And you look at the mission to go get bin Laden, one of the helicopters did crash. Yeah. 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 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 they 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 then to be into another disaster. But I guess they now build more redundancy into operations in case that in case something goes wrong. That's the thing. Because the reality is things do go wrong. I think the redundancy is one of the major learnings because

when you talk to seals or delta operators or nightstock or 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 think you need 15 men, 15 operators, that's maybe one helo. There would be a contingency of exactly the same force on another helicopter that would be accompanying the 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. I also think, you know, to 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 and coordinated roles. And, you know, When one of the Chinooks is hit and struggles to stay airborne over the Capitol, 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 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 kind of raids. And we're very good at it. Yeah, I think that's true. 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 difficult terrain which the adversary knew and the US 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'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. I was struck in watching both the film Blackhawk 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 thing. Why are we there? And it's interesting when you, 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, you know, sort of recreate the conditions that created the famine in the first place if we don't leave. So now it's a security thing. And then it becomes a manhunt. 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 really a position by the time you get to October of 1993, where the gap between means and ends is a chasm.

Which is the Mission Creek 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, you can draw you. which are problematic. 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. 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 him 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 is a loss for the US. And I think it's important to parse that out because in pure military terms, it's absolutely not. The Rangers in Delta Force, they had targets. They went and got those targets. They brought those targets back. They paid a heavy price,

though. They paid a heavy price. It could be a very, it's a very lopsided battle. Well, if you do it by casualty figures. But that's, I, I think that's a valid, that is one valid lens to through which to look at this battle, which is 18 Americans killed maybe up to 3 to 500 Somali militia. But if you, but that's kind of, that's body count metrics. That, that, that, that has echoes to me of Vietnam accounting going, we're winning because look at the body count. I feel to me like a defeat. I mean, because, because, because they're, they're out of some earlier within, you know, months of this happening. And the kind of strategic effect. I'm not arguing that point. I'm just saying that when you look at the battle, the U.S. won the battle.

You could, well, you can win a battle and lose a war. 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, it was a bloody tactical success. 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 the, 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 5 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. 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 very, a narrow lens to which to see this battle. But I suppose it all goes to saying how consequential it is. 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. 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 in that sense, and this is why so many of the people who fought them, fought in the battle, so angry with 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 the 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. 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 rest is classified.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. We'll see you next time.