Liam Collins, Jayson Geroux, and John Spencer | 10.03.24

The Battle of Mogadishu occurred on October 3–4, 1993. Mogadishu is the capital of Somalia, sitting along the coast of the Indian Ocean, and at the time of the battle it had been ravaged by two years of civil war. White-towered mosques were still standing but other buildings and walls were heaps of rubble or pockmarked with bullet holes. Most structures were one or two stories tall but a few, including the Olympic Hotel in the city center, reached four or five stories. The buildings were mostly mud or adobe construction, so they offered little cover, even against small arms.

Due to the ongoing civil war, tens of thousands of Somalis had moved into Mogadishu, surging the city’s population to over one million people. Many of the city’s new residents packed themselves into larger government and educational buildings, constructed ramshackle huts, or built lean-tos using tin, wood, and rags attached to existing buildings. In some places, lean-tos had been built on lean-tos, so many of the city’s streets were too narrow for vehicles or completely closed off. The road network was mostly a grid pattern with roads composed primarily of dirt and sand, though main thoroughfares were paved. Yet even these were crumbling and covered with garbage, debris, and burned-out vehicles. Telephone poles leaned at ominous angles and had been stripped of their cables because they and everything else of value had been looted or stolen.

The Battle

Somalia descended into a civil war in January 1991 after warlord-led groups, many linked to specific Somali clans, overthrew Marxist dictator Mohammed Siad Barre. The population had already suffered from competing clan battles throughout Barre’s reign but now the violence compounded and severely augmented the poverty, disease, and hunger felt by the civilian population. To address the growing humanitarian crisis, the United Nations authorized humanitarian operations in April 1992 to protect food and medical shipments and to rebuild infrastructure. When this limited support failed to stem the crisis, the United Nations authorized additional measures and the United States announced Operation Restore Hope. Yet the violence continued. As a result, the United Nations broadened its mandate from peacekeeping to peace enforcement.

In response, warlord Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s forces ambushed a Pakistani force, killing twenty-four and wounding forty-four, and the UN mission responded by issuing a warrant for his arrest. Aidid had been a general in Barre’s army and now headed the Somali National Alliance. He was the leader of the Habr Gidr clan, several thousand fighters from which were armed with assault rifles, rocket-propelled grenades (RPGs), and machine guns or other heavy weapons mounted on vehicles.

The United States deployed Task Force Ranger to Mogadishu as part of Operation Gothic Serpent in August 1993 to capture Aidid. Task Force Ranger was comprised of soldiers from the 75th Ranger Regiment and 1st Special Forces Operational Detachment–Delta, helicopters from the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, and other special operations personnel. Major General William Garrison commanded the task force.

On the afternoon of October 3, Task Force Ranger learned that two of Aidid’s senior advisers were meeting with other clansmen at a building one block north of the Olympic Hotel. The building was near the Bakaara Market, the epicenter for the Habr Gidr clan. Like its previous six missions into Mogadishu, the task force would infiltrate on helicopters and exfiltrate via ground convoy, and it was believed the mission would last an hour. Given the crowded and debris-filled city, it was nearly impossible to land MH-60 Black Hawk helicopters inside Mogadishu, so ground exfiltration was the only feasible option.

At 3:32 PM, the assault force and ground convoy launched from the task force’s base at an airfield three miles from the target. The assault force consisted of special operations forces that would raid the target building to capture Aidid’s men and Rangers in blocking positions at the road intersections surrounding the target building to isolate the target. Eleven minutes later, four Little Bird helicopters successfully inserted an element of the raid force. Moments later, six Black Hawks inserted the remainder of the raid force onto the target and the Rangers into blocking positions surrounding the target building. Within twenty minutes the special operations forces had secured the target building and had captured twenty-four of Aidid’s personnel, including one of his top lieutenants. The assault force commander then ordered the ground convoy to move from its holding area behind the Olympic Hotel to the target building to load the prisoners and the assault force.

Because the Black Hawk helicopters could not safely land in the city, they had to hover during infiltration while the Rangers fast-roped to the ground. Private First Class Todd Blackburn had slipped off the rope, falling sixty feet. Due to the seriousness of his injuries, the ground convoy commander broke off three Humvees from the ground convoy to return to the airfield with Blackburn, while the remainder of the convoy waited to evacuate the rest of the force.

Blackburn’s fall was only the first of many challenges for Task Force Ranger, as tensions outside the target building began to escalate quickly. The militia fighters had learned the Americans’ patterns after observing six previous raids, all involving helicopter insertions with vehicle support. On this day, their reaction was almost instant. As soon as the first helicopters landed, militants used cell phones and set tires ablaze to signal and summon militia members to the fight. Almost immediately, an estimated two to four thousand battle-seasoned clan fighters converged on the American troops while others established roadblocks to prevent the assault force from departing or other elements from reinforcing.

The mission dramatically changed when the clan fighters struck a Black Hawk, call sign Super Six One, at 4:15 PM with an RPG, causing it to crash four blocks northeast of the Olympic Hotel. One week earlier fighters had shot down a 10th Mountain Division helicopter and subsequently desecrated the bodies of those who had died in the crash. Task Force Ranger had subsequently developed a contingency for a downed helicopter to prevent this from happening again. As soon as the helicopter crashed, air assets were directed to fly to the crash site and evacuate survivors while the Rangers located at the nearest blocking positions and some of the special operations forces from the target immediately ran to the crash site. The Rangers wanted to secure the site before nearby armed clansmen could overrun the downed helicopter.

The first to arrive was a combat search and rescue team that fast-roped in from another Black Hawk. Shortly thereafter, Rangers from the nearest blocking position arrived, barely beating the clan fighters. Some of the special operations forces from the target area had also attempted to move to the crash site with Rangers from a different blocking position, but they never made it. After one of the Rangers in this group sustained a critical injury, the others were forced to seek refuge in courtyard only half a block from the crash site, not realizing how close they were until hours later.

As soon as the assault force finished loading the detainees onto the vehicles, the ground convoy set off for the crash site. It should have been an easy move—one block north and three blocks east—but the vehicles never made it. The convoy drove around for forty-five minutes, twice passing within a half a block of the downed helicopter without realizing it. While this might not seem possible under normal conditions, it is important to remember they were under constant and heavy small-arms and RPG fire, visibility was poor due to dust, burning tires, and smoke, and many streets were blocked with hasty roadblocks or lean-tos that encroached well into the street. Eventually, the ground convoy was forced to return to the airfield or risk being too disabled to ever make it back. Of the approximately seventy-five soldiers and prisoners that made it back to the base on the ground convoy, eight were dead or near death and roughly half were injured.

The challenges only worsened when the armed clansmen shot down a second Black Hawk, call sign Super Six Four, at 4:49 PM, causing it to crash seven blocks south of the Olympic Hotel. Task Force Ranger had a contingency for one helicopter going down but not two—the combat search and rescue force had already been inserted. When it became clear that no ground convoy was coming to their immediate rescue and after having confirmed that the pilots had survived the crash, two snipers, Master Sergeant Gary Gordon and Sergeant First Class Randall Shughart, inserted themselves from one of the remaining helicopters—which was also hit by incoming fire, but managed to limp away from the battle before the severe damage forced it down—to defend the injured pilots. They held out for nearly forty-five minutes, killing dozens of armed clansmen, before the clan fighters overran and killed them. The clansmen also killed copilot Chief Warrant Officer Ray Frank but captured pilot Chief Warrant Officer Michael Durant to use for propaganda purposes.

After the first helicopter had been shot down, Task Force Ranger had alerted the 10th Mountain Division’s quick reaction force (QRF) to be ready. Given the challenges that the ground convoy had navigating to the crash site, Major General Garrison decided not to send the QRF deep into the heart of the city without having Rangers that had just been there to lead the convoy. The only problem was the division QRF was located at the UN compound on the other side of Mogadishu, so they would have to drive through enemy fire to reach the airfield and pick up the Rangers.

Feeling he could not wait for the 10th Mountain Division QRF to arrive, Major General Garrison cobbled together a small QRF from Task Force Ranger that consisted of four Humvees and three five-ton trucks. By this time, militia members throughout the city had been activated and had established dozens of roadblocks with ambushes all along the route from the airfield to the crash site. Lacking armored vehicles, the Ranger QRF had to abort its mission long before it had reached the crash site. By 5:45 PM, both the ground convoy and the Ranger QRF were back at the airfield, leaving the small force in the heart of a city of over one million people, many of them armed clansmen, with no exfiltration plan.

As night set in, the assault force’s members were split into six separate positions within a couple blocks of the first crash site. They had not necessarily intended to occupy these positions. For some elements, that was as far as they had moved before sustaining casualties that forced them to stop. It resulted in the assault element having fairly good mutually supporting firing positions, although it was difficult for the separated groups to coordinate with each other due to the space between their positions, radio communications hampered by buildings, and the absence of night-vision devices, which had been left since the operation was not intended to stretch into the night. The force remained there most of the night and fought hundreds or thousands of clan militiamen, but they were not completely on their own. The task force’s helicopter gunships conducted nonstop gun runs throughout the night. After exhausting their ammunition, the pilots returned to base, landed, grabbed water, refilled gas, reloaded ammunition and rockets, and then returned to support the assault force even though the clans had already downed three helicopters.

At the airfield, the Task Force Ranger headquarters was trying to find a way to get the stranded soldiers out of the city. The situation had progressed beyond all preplanned contingencies, so the headquarters personnel were building the plan from scratch in the heat of battle. They needed armored vehicles, but the only armored vehicles in Somalia belonged to the Pakistani and Malaysian peacekeeping contingents. They were located several miles away at the port of Mogadishu, and the task force had never worked with either of them. Thus, it would take hours to bring the forces together and get them ready to conduct a very contested movement to the two different crash sites.

The Ranger QRF and 10th Mountain Division QRF left the airfield at 9:30 PM to link up with the Malaysians and Pakistanis. When the recovery force finally departed at 11:24 PM, it included almost one hundred vehicles—including twenty-four Malaysian armored personnel carriers and four Pakistani tanks—and stretched nearly two miles in length. Cobra helicopter gunships from the 10th Mountain Division supported the convoy’s movement while Task Force Ranger attack helicopters continued to support the stranded assault force.

It was less than three miles from the port to the Olympic Hotel, but the force had to fight through dozens of roadblocks and a constant barrage of small arms and RPG fire, so it took over two and a half hours to get there. The recovery convoy moved together to a bus stop near the Olympic Hotel, where it then split. Most of the convoy laagered at the bus stop while smaller elements broke off to move to the crash sites, each approximately four to six hundred meters away.

The movement from the bus stop to the crash sites was a mix of dismounted infantry, mechanized infantry, and special operations forces with helicopter gunship support. The clan militias had built roadblocks of burning tires at every intersection, so the dismounted infantry and special operations forces had to reduce each obstacle before the vehicles could continue. Several times during movement the Malaysian drivers refused to continue, but task force members convinced them to continue each time.

The convoy eventually edged its way forward and made it to the first crash site at 1:55 AM. Yet despite being stranded for hours, the assault force refused to depart and leave behind the body of Chief Warrant Officer Cliff Wolcott, which remained trapped inside the crashed helicopter he was flying. After several more hours they finally freed him, but by now the sun was coming over the rooftops. At that point they knew it would be a race to get out of the city before daylight. It was now 5:42 AM.

After loading the casualties, the assault force discovered there was not enough room for the uninjured soldiers in the vehicles. Thus, some soldiers had to run on foot behind the vehicles to the laager site at the bus stop near the Olympic Hotel. The distance was four to six hundred meters, but it became known as the Mogadishu mile. After finally loading everyone onto vehicles at the bus stop, the entire convoy departed for the stadium, which served as the Pakistani peacekeepers base of operations. Somali clansman fired on the convoy throughout the entire drive, killing two of the 10th Mountain Division’s soldiers. The convoy reached the stadium around 6:30 AM, with much of the force exhausted and dehydrated.

The planned sixty-minute raid had turned into a complicated rescue operation that had lasted nearly fifteen hours. In the aftermath of the battle several bodies of US soldiers were dragged through the streets of Mogadishu by local civilians and clansmen. US and UN forces collectively suffered twenty killed (eighteen Americans and two Malaysians) with another eighty-eight wounded. Estimates of enemy casualties ranged from the hundreds to the low thousands. On October 14, the Somali captors released Durant and the remains of the other Americans killed after Ambassador Robert B. Oakley brokered a deal.

Lessons Learned

At the strategic level, one lesson is that any time military forces deploy to an urban area, they must be provided with the full complement of combined arms systems. Although the mission to Somalia was primarily a peacekeeping and peace enforcement operation, urban operations of any kind can quickly escalate. In September 1993, Task Force Ranger had requested tanks, armored vehicles, and AC-130 gunships, but Secretary of Defense Les Aspin refused to deploy them because he believed that sending these types of systems ran counter to the US desire to reduce its presence and lower its profile in Somalia. While armored vehicles or tanks may not be required to deliver humanitarian aid—although in Mogadishu it could be argued they might have been, given the warlords’ violent methods of hijacking food and medical supplies—these missions are only performed in the worst environments, ones where escalation is most likely. Had Task Force Ranger been equipped with armored vehicles, it is almost certain that the ground convoy would have been able to recover the assault force without the QRF or recovery force. Many lives would have been saved and the battle might have gone down as a footnote in history as opposed to one of the most famous battles of the 1990s.

At the operational level, Mogadishu demonstrated that major urban areas require constant intelligence preparation of the operational environment. Cities are like living organisms; resources come in (food, water, commodities, and even people) and byproducts (waste, trash, etc.) go out or build up. Cities are constantly changing, especially war-torn ones like Mogadishu. The city of Mogadishu had drastically changed due to the influx of refugees caused by the civil war; thus, most maps were of little use because they showed streets that were now completely blocked. To return to the organism analogy, Task Force Ranger was like a foreign entity: when it entered the city, the city responded with antibodies—the clan militias. Much like an organism, the response was not instantaneous, but the clans had been learning to respond over the previous six missions, so they were ready when Task Force Ranger entered the city a seventh time. There were signs that the militias were learning—they had shot down the 10th Mountain Division helicopter one week prior—so the enemy response was something Task Force Ranger could have anticipated. Militaries operating in cities need to understand that cities change faster than any other operational environment and constantly reassess their tactics and realize that what worked yesterday might not work tomorrow.

A second operational lesson is that contingency plans should be constantly reevaluated and rehearsed. Task Force Ranger had developed many different contingency plans for a wide variety of missions and scenarios: downed aircraft, convoy ambush, roadblocks, noncombatant evacuation operations, personal security detail, sniper support, and response to coalition partners in extremis. The task force had been planned and practiced ahead of the deployment but had not reevaluated or rehearsed sufficiently during the deployment. After clan fighters shot down the 10th Mountain Division helicopter the week prior, the task force should have added a contingency for two helicopters being shot down. Since task force leaders had identified the need for armored vehicles prior to deploying, they knew there were scenarios where they might be needed. Thus, they should have planned and rehearsed with the Pakistani and Malaysian peacekeepers beforehand. Likewise, a QRF is only needed when things are going poorly, so it would have been reasonable to conclude that the Rangers should have considered the need to guide the QRF to a specific location in the war-torn city where many streets were closed off. For example, maybe anytime task force personnel departed for a mission, the QRF should have moved to the airfield, so it could be colocated with the task force headquarters for a worst-case scenario instead of miles away. These are not observations that can only be made in hindsight; these are plausible scenarios that the task force should have considered or better rehearsed.

At the tactical level, Mogadishu demonstrated the need for all soldiers to be proficient at treating casualties and for units to be capable of effectively evacuating casualties. This is especially important in urban battles given the potential for high numbers of casualties. All soldiers must be trained in tactical combat casualty care. The Rangers had installed a four-tier system that resulted in a high level of medical training for the unit. One Ranger private first class had been trained as an emergency medical technician and was credited with opening airways, assessing and treating injuries, and saving lives. Other Rangers effectively treated terrible wounds inflicted due to the high rates of fire. The Rangers’ training priorities before deployment were physical fitness, marksmanship, medical training, and battle drills. These efforts paid off because many more casualties did not become fatalities. It was noted by the task force surgeon that many of the injuries suffered during the battle occurred on the extremities—arms and legs—because the body armor that was worn prevented trunk, chest, and abdominal wounds. Other trends from the battle included a higher percentage of burns, shrapnel wounds, and crushing injuries from falling walls. Dehydration was also a challenge given the heat, the duration of the battle, and the fact that soldiers could carry only so much water. Soldiers must be trained and ready to deal with a high number of these injuries while senior leaders must ensure units have the capability of evacuating casualties from difficult urban locations—from subterranean systems or the upper floors of tall buildings, for example, and through congested, rubble-filled streets.

Another tactical lesson from Mogadishu is that enemy forces will often use civilians as human shields. Early in the battle, one Somali woman fired on the American troops with a gun in one hand while holding a baby in her other arm. During another part of the battle, a Somali gunman was laying in the prone position attempting to engage American troops while four children sat on him and two women kneeled in front of him. While the American soldiers could have risked civilian casualties to engage him without violating the laws of war, they did not because they were armed with flashbang grenades. After throwing a flashbang at the group, the women and children scattered, which allowed the Americans to kill the gunman without harming the alleged noncombatants. Yet, most soldiers lack nonlethal means, leaving them no choice but to kill civilians to protect themselves. When civilian casualties climb, political pressure tends to mount. There should be moral outrage at civilian casualties, but this outrage is often misplaced against the force that is protecting itself as opposed to the force that is violating the laws of war by using civilians as human shields. Whether or not the blame is warranted, the political pressure that mounts can often derail an operation at the strategic, political level. Therefore, it is critical that soldiers have nonlethal means of defense in urban environments where civilians are present.

Conclusion

The Battle of Mogadishu was the beginning of the end of the US and UN missions in Somalia. Shortly after the battle, the United States finally deployed armored vehicles and AC-130 gunships, but it was clear that these assets were there to help facilitate the withdrawal of US personnel. Most of the troops were out of Somalia by March 25, 1994 and all forces had completely withdrawn a year later. The United States had entered Somalia in 1992 to help stop the imminent starvation of hundreds of thousands of Somalis. While the efforts to prevent starvation were largely successful, efforts by the coalition to help the Somalis establish a stable government proved futile.

The Battle of Mogadishu was the first high-intensity urban battle fought by Western ground forces for many years. It demonstrated that, as is the case far too often in war, superior firepower, training, and equipment does not guarantee success in war and the urban environment in particular can neutralize many of these advantages. It also highlighted how an organized force armed with little more than small arms and RPGs can be extremely effective if it knows how to use the urban terrain to its advantage. Whether a force is deployed for offensive, defensive, stability, peacekeeping, or peace enforcement operations, it must have a full complement of combined arms systems given the potential for violence to escalate quickly. As an illustration of this escalation potential, a hallmark of urban operations, this is one of the lasting legacies of the Battle of Mogadishu.

Liam Collins, PhD was the founding director of the Modern War Institute at West Point and a Fellow at New America. He is a retired Special Forces colonel with deployments to Iraq, Afghanistan, Bosnia, the Horn of Africa, and South America, with multiple combat operations in Fallujah in 2004. He is coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.

Major Jayson Geroux is an infantry officer with The Royal Canadian Regiment and is currently with the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre. He has been a fervent student of and has been involved in urban operations training for over two decades. He is an equally passionate military historian and has participated in, planned, executed, and intensively instructed on urban operations and urban warfare history for the past ten years. He has served twenty-eight years in the Canadian Armed Forces, which included operational tours to the former Yugoslavia (Bosnia-Herzegovina) and Afghanistan.

John Spencer is chair of urban warfare studies at the Modern War Institute, codirector of MWI’s Urban Warfare Project, and host of the Urban Warfare Project Podcast. He served twenty-five years as an infantry soldier, which included two combat tours in Iraq. He is the author of the book Connected Soldiers: Life, Leadership, and Social Connections in Modern War and coauthor of Understanding Urban Warfare.

The views expressed are those of the authors and do not reflect the official position of the United States Military Academy, Department of the Army, or Department of Defense, or that of any organization with which the authors are affiliated, including the Canadian Army Doctrine and Training Centre, the Canadian Armed Forces and the Canadian Department of National Defence.