 I remember being a kid when the movie Black Hawk Down came out and it really banged then and let me tell you that movie still bangs now. Hello everyone, Dylan Schumacher, Citadel Defense and we are back with another edition of Toodalidge in Blood and today's battle is the battle of Mogadishu also known as the Black Hawk Down incident or maybe better known as the Black Hawk Down incident. I have reviewed the book Black Hawk Down by Mark Bowden on this channel in my book review series. Highly recommend that book for more information on the battle. As far as I know it is the most comprehensive documentation of that battle to date so would highly recommend that checking that out if you are interested in learning more about this battle. There's also a very good two-part YouTube series that I will link below that basically from what I can tell just goes through the book and explains this battle because as always we won't be able to dive into the deep historical implications of the battle and all the details. We're just going to give a brief overview of the battle so that we can then learn some lessons. So if you're interested in a more in-depth take on the battle please click that link. Please read the book. This incident happened in 1993 in Somalia so about 30 years ago so a lot of it's recognizable and some things obviously are lessons that we have learned and some things are lessons that we should learn. So let's go through the battle and then we'll learn some lessons. The basic mission and setup for this battle was that they were going to drop in some Rangers to secure the four corners of this building. This is the target building and then they were going to send in the Army Delta teams in order to go in there and nab some high-value targets, right? So they're going to send the D-boys in to clear the rooms. Rangers are going to hold security outside. They're going to get the bad guys. Then they will have a convoy that will leave the HQ at the same time. This is all a city by the way I didn't draw the blocks but that's what this is, the city. Convoy will leave. Convoy will park outside. They'll load all of the high-value targets and everybody else that they arrested in the building onto the trucks and then they'll drive home. That was the basic plan. So all the helicopters take off. They all go to the target building. The Rangers three out of the four Blackhawks get dropped off in the right corners. The fourth Blackhawk ends up getting dropped off like a block high, a block or two high and Private Blackburn, one of the soldiers that was in the Ranger Chalk that was getting dropped off. He ends up falling from the helicopter for whatever reason. He actually survives, surprisingly he was a 60-foot fall, but he survives. So they have a casualty right off the bat. All in all the actual mission part of doing what they wanted goes pretty well. The Delta boys get in. They arrest the high-value targets. The convoy shows up. They get all the guys loaded onto the convoy. They send the convoy out of there. The problem comes when bad things start happening. So Cliff Wilcott is the first Blackhawk to be shot down. He ends up taking an RPG in the tail rotor. Long story short he crashes about 10-ish, 12-ish blocks, somewhere between 6 and 12 blocks. It's not that far from the target building over here. So of course they're like, oh crap, they send a bunch of the Rangers over here on foot. The rest they load into the convoy because they're going to drive over to the crash site. Everybody starts moving to the crash site. Meanwhile there is a second helicopter, Mr. Mike Durant, that ends up getting shot down over here. There are no forces to end up going to the second crash site. So let's just cover that quickly. Long story short what happens at the second crash site is there are no resources to be able to go and queue our after quick response force right for that crash site because everything has been deployed to the first site. So after this crashes Randy Sugart and Gary Gordon are two snipers that are on a helicopter circling that crash site. They end up volunteering, requesting multiple times to go down and protect the potential survivors. They get down there. They end up giving their lives in defense of this. It's an incredible last stand. It's a really, really cool story that we don't have time to go into. But these guys end up dying. Mike Durant the pilot of that helicopter ends up being captured and he ends up getting returned days later after the after the battle is done. But that's really all that ever happens at the second crash site. By the time they get to the total rescue mission for the whole battle they get out here everything's already played out at that crash site. So at the first crash site there are people that we said that walked over and were able to get there. Everybody else got in the convoy. The convoy long story short ends up driving around trying to get directions from the helicopter. They're working through roadblocks they're being shot at. They drive around for a couple hours getting really shot up and eventually are so ineffective they have to drive back to base to take care of their casualties, to reload up with ammo in order to try to get out of there again. So meanwhile you end up with something like a hundred Rangers and a couple teams of Delta guys so maybe you know 150-ish guys total that end up getting stranded at this crash site overnight and they're in different buildings around the crash site trying to hold down overnight. Now this was supposed to be a short duration mission so as you probably know if you're at all from this incident a lot of guys took out their like plates right they called it their chicken plate but like a plate that went in their vests at that time that made them rifle proof otherwise it was just kind of like a flak jacket. So guys had removed those plates a lot of guys had not brought water or food or anything like that so you know guys are starting to get tired, hungry, thirsty, running out of bullets the whole nine yards nobody brought their night vision equipment of course because this was a just a day mission a quick in and out. So these guys are stranded overnight take several casualties lots of people are injured and it ends up that 19 Americans end up dying in this incident. Somali casualties are unknown but they're high we're probably talking in the thousands. Eventually the the US team is able to partner with their Pakistani partners in the area get some armed personnel carriers they plan a long route and at about 11 o'clock midnight something like that they end up driving into the crash site again they stop at the second crash site but there's nothing to be done there they end up getting to the first crash site and then spend all night working to cut out the the survivors or not the survivors but the bodies of the fallen servicemen in the helicopter in order to get them loaded up and get out of there. So something like five six o'clock the next morning they get everybody loaded onto the armed personnel carriers and they drive back to the stadium. Apparently not everybody though because about a dozen dozen and a half guys ended up having to run back to the APCs because they were forgotten initially so they had to run like 10 or something blocks to get into the APCs and then they all drove back to the stadium. This is also an interesting battle because Paul Howe if you're familiar with him at all combat shooting and tactics he has a school down in Texas I believe and he was actually in this battle he was one of the Delta boys that was involved in this battle and so if you read the book it's interesting because he's a semi-prominent character that comes up somewhat and you know he's still alive still with us today and he's still teaching people how to shoot guns very effectively. So that is the broad strokes of the battle. Again if you want more detail please watch the videos below it gives you a much more play by play and blow by blow iteration of the battle. However let's learn some lessons from this battle. As always I'm sure there are more and or other lessons from this however this is the list that I was able to come up with and because this is a more recent battle I've got quite a few of them so I'll try to keep this as short as I can. The first lesson is the statement kit and plates. Again if you've seen the movie or if you're at all familiar with this one of the major things is that a lot of the guys didn't bring enough stuff right and I get it as a soldier you always got to carry way more crap than you ever want or need so if you have an opportunity to drop something surely you're going to take it and a lot of the guys again they took out their their plates for their full armor out of their armor and they also didn't bring things like water or an emergency ration and stuff like that matters and this is a perfect example of why that matters. So even if your mission your planned mission duration is 30 minutes which that was the original planned mission duration if that ends up expanding into 15 hours if these guys would have brought a couple canteens and an emergency ration they would have been sitting a lot better not to mention other stuff like night vision. Paul Howe is is a good example in the book it talks about how Paul never not carried night vision again he always had his night vision in his bag from then on throughout the rest of his career because if this ever happened again he of course wanted to be set up for success. So there is certain sustainment gear that you should always have in your kit all the time night vision included water and food next if you can carry more bullets hey that's always great but primarily the other stuff to be able to sustain you for that magic 8 to 12 hour time range so that if things go bad on your 30 minute mission you're not sucking wind and rather you get to be an asset rather than a detractor. They had to end up flying a one mission in during the middle of the night in order to just drop off ammo and water. Now of course they have to drop off ammo because you always need more ammo right like you can never have too many bullets in a fight. That being said they had to drop off water too so a lot of these guys are probably severely dehydrated. When you're tired and you're dehydrated and you've been fighting all day and you're scared you're going to start making very bad decisions. So sustainment gear is more than just like oh I can tough it out I don't need water for a while it's less that and it's more you need to keep your mental faculties up as much as possible because you're in a high stress environment and if you are actually hydrated and you have some food in you you are able to think much clearer in a situation that requires thinking rather than not being able to do that. We have talked about it on this channel before but you can go look at my patrol plate carrier setup and it would have been an ideal setup for something like this where you have a plate carrier and you have all the sustainment gear on it so again that if something goes bad you're equipped to deal with that. The second lesson is expect a fight. This comes out more in the book and didn't really come out in our recap but a lot of these guys are rangers right and rangers are tier one operators and a lot of these kids going in are 19 20 years old and it comes off in the book that they're very shocked to have found an actual fight and it's the kind of a somewhat cliche thing of guys screaming in the middle of the night oh we're all going to die and people are freaking out because they're injured people and they're trapped now and there's a lot of problems and I'm not saying it's not a high stress situation and I'm not saying I'd behave or respond better what I am saying is that a lot of these guys going in particularly the ranger kids and I say kids because they're 19 20 and not the delta teams who were much more experienced had much more combat missions under their belt and obviously have been in tough spots before they were freaking out that they had actually found a fight and now things weren't unfairly weighted in their advantage so you need to expect a fight if you're going into a fight you of course have to expect a fight now they had been in multiple runs in Mogadishu in the city before and they hadn't found a fight yet and so this was the first time they really got their nose bloodied and like I said a lot of them just weren't ready for that and because they weren't ready for that fight it broke their udaloupe and a lot of them got stuck in there and were unable to respond because they weren't prepared and they weren't mentally in the right head space to have the right mindset to deal with an actual fight. Number three have contingencies and honestly this is a part where the leadership does a pretty good job in this whole battle. They had a QRF force set aside in case something happened so when that first crash happened with Cliff Wilcott's crash happening they were actually able to respond pretty well they had a medical team to get in there right away they had some extra support and some Rangers to drop off right away like they had support in order to be able to get to and help that first crash site. What of course happened is they had a second crash which didn't help anything. Ended up four Blackhawks got shot down during this battle only two crashed the other two were able to limp back to base but there was a lot of problems and they just didn't have enough resources and contingencies to deal with it. Now of course you can plan into eternity and you can always say well what if and you should have however without Monday morning quarter backing this too much honestly I think the leadership did a pretty good job during this battle of being calm, of having contingencies, of trying to work the contingencies the best they could given the circumstances. My point here is that you need to plan for when things go wrong and have a contingency and a backup plan. The next one is IFAC so this is of course before we started issuing IFACs as normal parts of kit and a lot of these guys didn't have IFACs they maybe had a bandage but nobody's carrying tourniquets so we've of course corrected this and that's kind of general tactical knowledge now that of course you should carry an IFAC but if you ever wonder man why am I carrying this thing this battle is why because a lot of these kids again are getting tagged and they don't have any immediate action medical in order to be able to take care of that problem and they got to call in a medic or whatever carry an IFAC. I think we're at number five here walk so one of the lessons here is that when this initial crash happened a lot of the guys at the target building could see the crash site but several of them did walk over the others did not they got in the convoy because they were ordered to and they did what they were told and then the convoy again got lost in the city for hours driving around and imagine just driving around in the car not knowing where you're going getting shot at and getting blown up for a couple hours it's not a fun time for anybody it would have been a better tactical decision for everybody to walk over to the crash site and have the convoy get back to base as soon as possible to drop off the captured high-value target in an urban area where vehicles can only go down certain paths we call them streets and then those paths start getting roadblocks start getting put up everywhere it severely limits the ability of vehicles to move in urban areas and you are much more mobile ironically on foot than you are in a vehicle vehicles of course are great for covering larger distances quickly however in this kind of environment it would have been better initially if the whole team would have just been able to move on foot to the crash site and started to set up shop there that would have got them there quicker it would have required less casualties and they would have been more mobile so keep that in mind when you start thinking about urban environments next lesson be brave and be brave and go bag these really go together because these are two lessons that we can take from Randy Sugart and Gary Gordon again a phenomenal last stand that two guys observing situation from the air knowing that things are not going to last at the second crash site knowing that no one else can come help them decide to get on the ground and fight for the lives of these remaining crew members there are two lessons to learn from that one is sometimes the trips are down and you just got to be brave and really that's what it comes down to with these two guys they saw the situation they knew it was a time to go all in and put it on the line and they did and because they pushed all their ships into the middle they ended up paying with their lives and they were able to save the life of the pilot and had they not done that the life of the pilot probably would not have been saved so because these guys were able to be brave and make a bold call in the moment they were able to save the life of an american service member additionally one of the main problems that they had as they ran out of ammo they got dropped off here the helicopter was able to make some some runs around them to keep the crowd off of them eventually that helicopter was running out of fuel and or ammo i can't remember which and that helicopter had to go back to base and now it's just these two delta operators on the ground trying to fight off this crowd eventually again they run out of ammo and that's what ends up costing them it would have been a good idea for those guys since they're gonna be based in a helicopter anyway to have a big bag full of magazines and water and some medical that if the situation were to come up they could grab and go right so if you're ever in any kind of situation like that where you're based out of a vehicle or a helicopter or whatever and you think there might be a contingency when you would have to leave that vehicle to go do something have a bag there that's specifically full of bullets and water and medical so that you can grab it on your way out and you're going to be able to again sustain yourself and keep up a fight a lot longer than if you didn't have this bag next lesson is armor matters so again again we talked about the lack of mobility of vehicles in an urban area however when those vehicles are armored that of course is a helpful asset the united states military had to end up borrowing armored personnel carriers from the pakistanis in order to get on this rescue mission because of course those vehicles were armored they were able to withstand things like RPGs which some of them bounced off and they were also able to withstand some AK rounds on all small arms fire having armor on something like this makes a difference and having your armor prepared and usable also makes a big difference the pakistanis were not aware of what the u.s forces were doing because the u.s forces didn't bother to inform them which may or may not have been a good decision for operation security and all that kind of stuff however they eventually ended up needing that armor and because it wasn't prepared and it wasn't ready it took a lot of time to get over there to explain the situation to put together a plan to work through the language barrier to get everything gassed up and then get out of there you can imagine how much time that's going to take so having armor ready when you need it is also helpful making sure all your resources are prepared as much as you can going back to the having contingencies is going to of course make a difference friction friction is a real thing in combat uh it's also called the fog of war right you've heard that term but i prefer the term friction meaning things just don't work as well as they should a perfect example of this is that convoy so this convoy leaves because they're going to get directions of the target building and like i said they end up having a route that's something like this and then they go home where they drive by the crash site this next line should be right here they drive by the crash site about two different times because they are unable to find it and they keep getting directions over the radio and the helicopters confused where they're at and they don't know where they're at and so they're told to turn left they turn left they're like no no no that's too late you have to go back around and turn left again and so there's just this chatter on the radio of trying to give directions to this convoy that is can't stop because they're being shot at so they're constantly moving and by the time they're getting directions they're turning and it's too late and there's this real friction part the teams that can work through friction better are going to have more success in combat than teams that cannot and the larger team is in this case we're talking about hundreds of guys in the us side the more friction that's going to be inherently in that system you've experienced this because if you're just working with three people it's pretty easy if you all of a sudden start working with 25 people well now there's a lot more opinions and thoughts and there's more friction so friction of course is multiplied when bullets start flying and bombs start exploding knowing that no matter what you do friction will occur in combat the best thing for you and your team to think for and practice and train for is how to work through the friction not necessarily to minimize the friction although of course we want to do that but we need to have the skills in order to work through the friction because we know it's going to happen no matter what unified command on the ground at the crash site you end up having several buildings so the crash i think ends up happening in this alley and there's a house here and there's a building here and there's a building here the delta boys i think ended up in this one and you have rangers down here in this one and i think the q r f was somewhere in this building the problem was they did not have unified command because the rangers reported the captain steel the delta boys kind of had their own command structure and then the q r f reported up the captain steel so you had this somewhat of a little bit of a rivalry on the ground between the delta boys and captain steel in charge of the rangers because there wasn't a unified commander on the ground so both of these units are radioing back to headquarters asking for instructions because there's no again there's no unified command on the ground having a unified command makes a big difference when you get into the muck and the shooting starts there needs to be one person who's making the decisions in order to move things along not multiple elements vying for command and control that doesn't help anybody air power we mentioned earlier that the united states ends up losing 19 service members who die in this battle and the Somali casualties are somewhere in the thousands a major major major reason for that was because the united states had complete air supremacy they were able to run their helicopters both black hawks and these littler birds i don't know what they're called with mini guns and all kinds of armament against the crowds and the people that were trying to attack the americans and kill people by the hundreds on these runs because they were able to just dump an excessive amount of ordinance on to the bad guys having air power makes a difference and having air power is very effective when the other side does not have air power or any kind of anti air capability the battle plan on the Somali side the battle plan was to shoot down some black hawks and collapse the city around them and in that regard they very much succeeded in that battle plan because they shot down four black hawks like we said two crashed but two made it back but they were able to really hamper the american supremacy but because they're able to shoot down two of the black hawks they were able to turn that air supremacy on its head a little bit by causing an issue for the americans and now have to deal with and rescue these down black hawks all that being said of course you would always choose air supremacy over not having it because when you look at the casualty numbers it's completely lopsided and that is entirely due to air power and being able to dump in an excessive amount of ordinance from the sky on bad guys i had murphy's law up here but it seems like we've already kind of hit that one just in the sense that things are always going to go wrong and you have to have contingencies to deal with it you need to be prepared in the mindset and expect the fight and be planned for stuff to go wrong and plan for how you're going to deal with it when it does knowing that something is going to go wrong because it's combat and in combat the bad guy always gets a vote the last lesson is dangerous unarmed hostels one of the interesting and sad thing that comes out of this battle is that the armed somali militia use unarmed civilians as human shields and they push them in front of them in crowds i read about one account where a somali militiamen was laying in the prone shooting americans and he had two kids like five six ten years old whatever sitting on his back while he was doing this because of course he thought he'd be less likely to be shot at and there are also multiple instances of americans deciding at some point forget it and they just start shooting everybody because there's a huge crowd coming towards you some of them are not armed but there's bullets coming from that crowd at you and of course they just say forget it they're all they're all a threat to me personally and so they start shooting and i can actually understand where they're coming from in that regard and you might want to judge them for the morality of that we can have that discussion later my point being you have to have a plan for dealing with dangerous unarmed civilians i'm going to put that one in heavy quotes because whether they're combatants or not could be argued what are you going to do and how are you going to deal with when people are start getting used as human shields or there's another account of a woman standing in the street and some guy in the prone between her legs shooting between her legs and eventually she got shot because again someone's shooting at you you're going to return fire at some point in the modern era as we have combat in urban areas you are going to have more and more situations where it's murky between a unarmed civilian and a dangerous unarmed combatant and how you treat them and how you draw that line is still open for debate however thinking about that and having a plan to deal with that is going to be helpful so that was quite a few lessons there are a lot more from this one because it's a more modern battle and there are many more details that we can relate to i hope that was helpful do brave deeds and endure