INTRODUCTION:
In late 1992, the United States intervened in Somalia to prevent
fractious warlords from hindering the distribution of international
food aid in the midst of widespread drought and economic collapse. U.S.
forces performed admirably (as part of UNITAF) and ensured food
distribution. After United Nations forces took over (UNOSOM II) and
pursued a more ambitious reconstruction agenda, they ran into stiff
armed resistance. Following several months of low-level conflict, the
United States sent U.S. special operations forces to Somalia to
neutralize the most troublesome warlord. The mission ended disastrously
on October 3, 1993, when U.S. special operations forces were pinned
down in a protracted engagement. After inflicting close to a thousand
casualties on the enemy and losing eighteen soldiers, a UN relief force
extracted the special operations forces . Shortly thereafter, the U.S.
military withdrew from Somalia. The failed intervention had momentous
consequences at home and abroad. The Somalia intervention also allows
an examination of the U.S. government’s ability to integrate its
instruments of national power, as represented by the multiple national
security organizations involved.
STRATEGY:
Prior to and
during UNITAF’s humanitarian operations, the National Security Council
(NSC) operated without a strategy and on an ad hoc basis. The
intervention was driven more by the president’s personal feelings than
by sober calculations of national interest. The NSC was able to
generate alternative courses of action, and to align its objectives
with the means necessary to achieve them, but absent a controlling
strategy the basic mission and resource issues were addressed in an ad
hoc manner. Even so, the senior U.S. civilian and military
representatives in Somalia developed a strategy for achieving the Bush
Administration’s objectives without exceeding the available resources.
By contrast, the Clinton Administration’s formal, coordinated and
explicit policy for UNOSOM II was codified in a presidential decision
directive that obscured the contradiction between Clinton
Administration objectives and resources.
INTEGRATED ELEMENTS OF NATIONAL POWER:
Ambassador Robert Oakley and Lieutenant General Robert B. Johnston
judiciously combined diplomacy and military power, never failing to
keep open lines of communication and limiting the application of force
to that which was necessary to ensure the delivery of aid. They
integrated force with civic action and information campaigns to
reassure the public that the UNITAF presence was ultimately benign.
Unfortunately, the United States was not able to closely integrate the
elements of national power well in crafting policy for the follow-on
UNOSOM II mission. The interagency decision making system repeatedly
failed, both in Washington and in the field. Interagency decision
bodies were not able to develop common and iterative assessments of the
resources required to execute U.S. policy. Neither could they develop
common assessments of risks nor effective risk mitigation plans to
hedge against undesirable outcomes.
EVALUATION:
The NSC, as
well as other U.S. government assessment and decision making bodies,
repeatedly papered over a fundamental mismatch between objectives and
resources. Hope was a persistent but poor substitute for clear analysis
as the U.S. government stumbled into a high risk, military-centric
strategy, ignoring one warning after another that UNOSOM forces and
special operations forces could not accomplish their assigned
objectives. The decision making system did not respond nimbly to
evolving circumstances or effectively coordinate its own policy
decisions well, particularly with regards to managing the inherently
complex and difficult two-track policy of pursuing military and
political initiatives simultaneously. The national security apparatus
could only digest and act on this reality slowly and incompletely--and
as it turned out, too late to avoid being overtaken by events that
should have been assessed as increasingly likely and prepared for
accordingly much earlier.
RESULTS:
Washington’s
failure to integrate elements of national power effectively produced a
debacle that cost the United States a great deal besides lost lives. It
created deep policy divisions in Washington and increased tensions
between senior civilian and military leaders. Somalia effectively ended
the Clinton Administration’s policy of assertive multilateralism and
Les Aspin’s short career as Secretary of Defense. The failure
disinclined the United States from intervening elsewhere, including in
Rwanda where horrific internecine tribal conflict led to mass murder.
In addition, the defeat undermined the credibility that the United
States had acquired from the successful Gulf War the previous year.
Arguably, Somalia also encouraged America’s enemies to challenge U.S.
interests. Just as the most powerful Somali warlord bluntly told
Ambassador Oakley that American failures in Vietnam and Beirut proved
the United States did not have staying power, Osama Bin Laden and
others similarly concluded from Somalia and other events that the
United States lacked the will to protect its interests.
CONCLUSION:
The United States initially approached the intervention in Somalia
with ad hoc decision making, but leaders in the field were able to
impose their own strategy and integrate the elements of national power
well. As the Clinton Administration took responsibility for the
mission, it formally coordinated a strategy that was unclear and which
failed to reconcile expansive objectives with limited means. Typical
interagency structures and processes were inadequate. They tended to
restrict the flow of information and generate compromise rather than
clear alternative courses of action. The result was a severe failure
with long-term repercussions for U.S. security interests.
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