Our Special Forces’ Capacity to Evolve Despite Failure
The lesson 30 years on from the Battle of Mogadishu is that, with the right response, defeat can be a better tutor than victory.
Thirty years ago today, the U.S. military was involved in a brief but brutal battle in Somalia. In a series of firefights over two bloody days, 18 members of America’s most elite Special Forces and hundreds of Somali militiamen were killed. This was the Battle of Mogadishu, which the journalist Mark Bowden (now an Atlantic contributing writer) famously reported for The Philadelphia Inquirer and later adapted as the book and the film Black Hawk Down.
Although the American units involved fought courageously, and inflicted heavy losses on their adversaries, the Battle of Mogadishu exposed significant
