In trying to make sense of the post-9/11 state of Infinite War in which the Bush administration has embroiled the country, I find myself reflecting a great deal on the experience of Somalia, where I participated as a member of the ill-fated Task Force Ranger in 1993. This debacle, now lionized and mythologized by Columbia Pictures in the hugely successful propaganda piece Black Hawk Down, can instruct us about the current military adventures in Afghanistan and elsewhere.

The experience in Somalia can begin to tell us something about the doctrinal frameworks driving US military actions. If we examine that doctrinal framework, we can identify systemic weaknesses in US military doctrine in Afghanistan: weaknesses in the military realm, and weaknesses that are reproduced out of the larger political system within which this military is embedded, which potentially carry with them direct military consequences. Some of those weaknesses are temporarily remediable at the military level; however, others are systemic and thus essentially insurmountable in the absence of systemic change.

It is important to understand that military doctrine is not developed in a vacuum, but is influenced by biases from past doctrine, competing military science theories, inter-service rivalry, bureaucratic protectionism, weapons contractors and their elected representatives, the politics of promotion to the highest levels of command, and the peculiar biases, opinions, illusions, and delusions of the members of the National Command Authority (the President, the Secretary of Defense, and the National Security Advisor). One of the dominant tendencies within the military that has emerged out of that mix is called the Powell Doctrine.

Somalia: The Powell Doctrine at Work

The UNOSOM mission to Somalia, Operation Restore Hope (ORH), set the stage for the famous defeat in the Bakara market district of Mogadishu, Somalia on October 3, 1993. The UNOSOM mission transformed from a multi-national humanitarian-civic action (HCA) mission (whatever the cynical motives for various participants), with a military security component, to military operations to "stabilize" Somalia. (One can already hear the echoes in Afghanistan.)

The HCA, for all practical purposes was then essentially over. These two missions are antithetical and cannot be carried out simultaneously with equal emphasis on both, unless the military actually arms, lives with, and shares hardship with the "protected" population. This is true, even if there is a coherent state with a singular and coherent enemy. There was neither in Somalia.

It's hard to believe they made a Hollywood movie out of a defeat as shocking and complete as the Somalia intervention.

An inherent weakness for outside forces in this situation is the necessity to develop fixed installations, then supply them. The airport had to be secured to maintain an air-head. The roads from the airport to Sword Base (the main installation), a good forty-minute drive by armored convoy, past a miniature Maginot line of 10th Mountain Division roadside bunkers (each one vulnerable to small attacks), went all the way around Mogadishu to avoid the mines everywhere and mortar/sniper attacks. These two installations and the corridor that linked them were all "fixed."

Against a highly mobile, lightly equipped enemy, this translates into a total loss of battlefield initiative. The mobile indigenous force can pick away at the edges of the fixed positions, when they want, and how they want, at minimal risk to themselves (especially in the urban areas). Each mildly successful strike can inaugurate a whole new set of policies, procedures, and counter-measures from the fixed force, keeping them perpetually in a state of responding to the initiatives of their enemies. The US political emphasis on "force protection" (that is, an obsessive avoidance of any US combat casualties, an implicit component of the Powell Doctrine) only increases the loss-of-initiative vulnerability. This not only drains resources and decreases flexibility, it is very hard on troop morale.

There is a way out of this dilemma from a strictly military perspective, and that is to regain the initiative through audacious, aggressive, and sustained ground action against a specified military organization. But the Powell Doctrine is one that seeks to avoid ground combat engagements, unless there is overwhelming technical superiority and a low likelihood of American combat casualties. For the ground tactical commander, ever mindful of the priorities of his or her superiors, that translates into a powerful reluctance to engage in decisive combat, or to even risk combat, and an inordinate emphasis at every level of command on force protection.

Audacious, aggressive, sustained offensive operations against a singular enemy organization will yield tactical victories, but it will inevitably cost "friendly" lives, and thereby risks losing the unseen but essential element in all military operations—the support of the civilian population at home. This is a systemic contradiction.

A key and integral part of the Powell Doctrine is information/spin control. The US population is fed "information" not to inform, but to gain their acquiescence for a military action. They tend to remain quiet until American bodies begin to be flown home; then they start to ask questions. So regaining the tactical initiative depends on a type of action—one with a higher probability of "friendly" casualties—that could threaten domestic acceptance of the military action. This is one reason the Bush-Rumsfeld regime is warning the public so much about "the costs" of the Infinite War. We are being inoculated in order to give the military more tactical flexibility.

Controlling the public's perceptions of operations is as important a part of military operations, under this doctrine, as logistics or intelligence. One of the primary difficulties for the US military, for example, in Haiti (where I participated in "Operation Restore Democracy"), was that Haiti's porous borders allowed swarms of uncontrolled international reporters loose across the country. Not so in Iraq, and not so in Afghanistan. These actions were sifted, sanitized, and packaged for public consumption. With the release of Black Hawk Down, we have seen the retroactive application of this policy to past operations.

The Blunders of Task Force Ranger

I was part of Task Force Ranger (TFR), though I was sent home after a conflict with a dim-witted captain named Steele several days prior to the Bakara defeat (a blessing in disguise, perhaps). Several of us, veterans of Special Ops blunders like the Grenada invasion, informally complained to one another about the way we conducted the series of raids leading up to the Somali National Alliance (SNA) ambush that trapped TFR on October 3rd.

Our complaints centered on the execution of one raid after another, using the exact same template, which we were convinced was giving the SNA and others an opportunity to analyze that template and prepare counter-measures. Each time we raided another target, we would simply go back to the airport and hunker down for a day or two until we did it again—the same way.

Our little group of malcontents were saying that we should fire up the coffee pots, and launch one raid on top of another, using a different template each time, as fast as we could re-arm and refuel, until we were dropping out from exhaustion, then sleep for six hours and start again. But, alas, we were not in charge.

The Powell Doctrine mandated "force protection" and overwhelming offensive action. The Special Operations commanders were a generation removed from an earlier Special Ops establishment that made the soldier, the team, and creativity the centerpiece of its doctrine, and had been raised under a regime that constructed its doctrine around its technology (instead of the reverse). And the political context—political science being a different "course," you see, than military science—was very poorly understood.

We had a little warning at a traffic circle on one of the raids just before I was "sent home."

I was with a vehicle strong point outside a stadium adjacent to the traffic circle, and it was pitch dark. The Delta teams were inside the target, a building two blocks away. The supporting MH-60 "little bird" gunships had pulled off to avoid drawing fire. Then out of nowhere, we were probed with close range machine gun fire, very close—like right across the street. The SNA knew where the outer edge of our security was, based on observation of prior raids, and they had come right to us.

The fire was directly in front of me, and I shot the machine gunner, firing around ten rounds of tracer to designate the target for the rest of our strong-point defense team. The Rangers on the strong point had .50 caliber machine guns, MK-19 40-mm automatic grenade launchers, and a phalanx of small arms, and they cued on the tracer fire, pouring an ungodly volume of ammunition into the stadium wall. Then we received fire from the opposite direction, further off, and without tracers, so we couldn't orient on it right away. When the Somalis took one of the helicopters under fire with tracers, we identified their position and opened up again at a little structure on a low hill, filling the night with a wild arcing river of tracers.

As it turned out, the fire into the stadium, which was filled with homeless people in raggedy cloth huts, killed quite a few civilians in addition to the two or three who fired on us, and our fire at the hill arced across Mogadishu and rained down on US Sword Base. We had a couple of wounded, and I had to hold a glowing green Chem-lite in my teeth, a nerve-wracking experience, to start an intravenous infusion on one of them. When we got back to the airport, we found a .50 caliber bullet hole in the door of one of our vehicles. We had the only 50s out there.

According to the Powell Doctrine, of course, we did the right things (though we could have prevented our minor casualties by carpet bombing, I suppose). We responded with overwhelming force to ensure force protection. We also reacted to a probe and drew the SNA an even better picture of our operational template.

This raid was called a success, because we pulled a couple of SNA leader Aidid's lieutenants out of the primary target. The impact of the dead civilians was never factored in. The danger to which we subjected Sword Base was never factored in, nor was the failure of coordination. But most of all, no commander stopped and said, "Hey, it looks like they have figured out this plan. Let's change it."

That's partly because success is measured technically, not politically, and only from a tactical standpoint, in the same simple-minded way it was all the way back in Vietnam. The political measure and the critique of the system, as opposed to technical problems, are absent. I eliminated one threat with the shots that hit the machine gunner and suppressed whoever might have been with him. But I probably recruited 100 new militia with the civilians I (and the rest of us) killed and wounded behind him. And our technology, far from affording us an advantage, was becoming a danger to ourselves.

Even had TFR pursued a more tactically sound course of action—sustained ground operations against Aidid—a tactical success against the SNA would have only strengthened one or more other factions relative to them. The fundamental problem would have remained. In the absence of long-term, sustained ground actions—with significant US casualties—the non-indigenous (US/UN) forces, battened down in their fixed installations, remain a static target, ceding the initiative to the more flexible, mobile, and variable forces that surrounded them... with no such misplaced sentimentality about the necessity of risking casualties.

Drawing Lessons

The occupying forces in Somalia were destined to come to harm. Those in Afghanistan will too. No one can predict how, but we can predict that it will happen. The key similarity between Afghanistan and Somalia is the lack of political coherence and the existence of multiple, well-armed, potentially warring factions. The Bush folks know that, and that's why they are making such a vain and ridiculous effort to cobble something together as a government. This is a tar baby for them, because once together, it is the American military that will have to take ultimate responsibility for maintaining it. The Turks and others are being brought in to take up the slack for now, but the US will be back. The bases have already been built.

An indigenous force fighting a foreign invader or an existing state can use a military action as a first course of action, as a catalyst, as the centerpiece of its political struggle, because it is not fighting to retain economic and political control, but to disrupt or prevent that control by another force. Military actions are intrinsically better at creating instability than stability.

The US military is an instrument, and it is subordinated to a foreign policy that is first and foremost about investments and, thus, stability. The fact that it is being used at all is generally an indicator that the US has gotten itself economically and politically cornered. Somalia was a sideshow that came center stage for a few weeks, then receded again. The US felt relatively secure politically and economically, and Somalia was an anomaly. But the US is now in the throes of a political crisis (masked for the time being by the chauvinist fervor being whipped up around September 11), a national recession that is synchronized with a global recession, the collapse of Argentina foreshadowing a generalized Latin American crisis, the slow implosion of Japan, trade war with Europe, and a rising tide of anti-American sentiment around the world. Latent in these turbulent and sullen winds is the potential for the "perfect storm."

If ever there were a propitious time for people around the world to rebel against the diktat of the US, it is right now. Because the floundering and desperate Bush Administration would not be able to handle two, three, a hundred Somalias. The greatest risk, of course, but one that is there whether it is thinkable or not, is that Bush might listen to Wolfowitz, the Dr. Strangelove of American politics, and consider the use of tactical nuclear weapons in the quest to restructure the planet's political geography.

But as the Haitan proverb goes, if you don't say good morning to the devil, he will eat you. If you do say good morning to the devil... he will eat you. There is no option but to fight imperialism.

Full-Spectrum Dominance (FSD) Doctrine

"Full-spectrum dominance" is the key term in "Joint Vision 2020," the Department of Defense "blueprint" issued under Henry Shelton. Full-spectrum dominance means "the ability of US forces, operating alone or with allies, to defeat any adversary and control any situation across the range of military operations." It did use the word "any" twice, making it perhaps the most grandiose hallucination in US military history, in contrast to the semi-conscious caution inherent in the Powell Doctrine.

"Full-spectrum" refers to three things: geographic scope, level of conflict, and technology. This doctrine implicitly aims at world military domination, taking on everything from street riots to thermonuclear war, accomplished with a blank check to weapons developers for an array of highly (some would say overly) sophisticated gadgets. Rumsfeld, possessing a breathtaking faith in this last, is devoted to the doctrine. This explains his selection of military mediocrity Air Force General Richard Meyers, who shares Rumsfeld's techno-religiosity, as Chairman of the Joint Chiefs.

These two doctrinal tendencies, the Powell Doctrine and Full-Spectrum Dominance, are both being employed, to one extent or another, in Afghanistan. Media control and high-altitude indiscriminate bombing are Powell Doctrine stand-bys. The attempt to coordinate the mass (foreign) casualty tactics of the Powell Doctrine with Special Operations troops employed in various styles of low-intensity warfare runs into conflict on the ground. They are each myopic doctrines on their own accounts, and they are absolutely incompatible when employed together, when a significant part of that "full spectrum" is Special Forces work.

The attempt to combine massive destruction of lives and property through high-altitude carpet bombing with rapport building and military cooperation among the population was tried once before by the US—in Vietnam. And the attempt to co-exist as a (foreign) military force in an essentially stateless combat milieu, with ethnic and clan-based warlords making and breaking alliances with each change of the political wind was also tried once before by the US—in Somalia.

To date, Afghanistan has been an unmitigated military bust. Every independent source available (the US corporate press is not remotely independent) confirms it. The Evil Genius has not been captured or killed. The Taliban has simply gone to ground around Afghanistan and Pakistan to wait for the US to become more deeply submerged in the growing quagmire. The poppy harvest will be the best in a decade. Pakistan proper has become destabilized to the point of risking nuclear war with its neighbor, India. The potential fossil fuel pipeline easements still cannot be secured. And the collateral damage inflicted by bombing and bad intelligence, combined with support for the corrupt and inept Karzai regime, turns ever-larger segments of the population against the Americans each day. The Turkish Army, well known in Turkey for their brutality, can be expected to handle it for a while with their usual aplomb, further alienating and enraging the various factions throughout Afghanistan. Then the US will have to intercede again with ground operations.

Morale of the Troops and the Masses

When military planners evaluate the "enemy situation," they take five material categories into account: size, location, composition, disposition, and strength. But included in that evaluation is a sixth category. Morale. It is something difficult to quantify and operationalize, as the positivists would say. And it doesn't correlate well with material well-being. I've seen a highly provisioned, well-cared-for Special Forces A-Detachment turn into moping adolescents, and I've seen troops in protracted and gruelingly austere conditions imbued with a wild fighting spirit. Consider the conditions of the NLA in Vietnam or the Cuban revolutionaries, whose morale seldom flagged.

Morale at home is also a factor, and as the de facto American rulers continue to reconstruct the world by dint of arms, the economic costs, then the social costs, will rekindle the political crisis that was temporarily quenched by the 9-11 outburst of chauvinism. But the official story is becoming more difficult to sustain each day. It persists now only because of the grandest of American appetites: denial. Even that can't last forever. And when it does end, this administration can add a legitimacy crisis to their lengthening list of woes. It may be this crisis, at the end of the day, that is their undoing.

Stan Goff also participated in Operation Restore Democracy (in Haiti), and he provides an extensive critique of Special Forces and the US military there in his book, Hideous Dream: A Soldier's Memoir of the US Invasion of Haiti (Soft Skull Press, 2000). Hope was not restored in Somalia. Democracy was not restored in Haiti.

Stan wrote this piece in Summer, 2002. Since then, his column Military Matters has appeared frequently on this website. Check it out.