My Share of the Task(21)

                On the cusp of launching the second leg of the operation, one of the six helicopters was deemed inoperable. With only five helicopters, fewer than the mission minimum, the commanders aborted. Preparing to exfiltrate and blinded by kicked-up sand in the night, one of the helicopters crashed into the nose of a C-130 that was full of soldiers and fuel. The plane caught fire and the fuel bladder in the fuselage ignited, killing eight operators trapped inside.

                Eagle Claw was America’s first attempt at a new type of special operations warfare characterized by politically sensitive, complex, fast, joint operations. Its failure largely owed to insufficient bandwidth of every type. The force did not have command and decision-making processes in place: While commanders on the ground were in contact with the White House, some of the helicopter pilots later admitted they did not know who was in charge at Desert One until the operation was over. The assembled teams were not a bonded joint force, as they had not operated, or even fully rehearsed, together before crossing into Iranian airspace. The demands of operational security were understandably heavy. But the mission was too corseted. Security concerns prevented weather analysts, who knew the helicopters might encounter a haboob, from briefing the pilots; their forecasts were filtered out when the intelligence reports moved through the organization.

                The calamity of Desert One was not a failure of political or military courage. The failure occurred long beforehand when the military—faced with limited resources, talent, and focus—failed to build and maintain the force necessary to accomplish these kinds of missions.

                In response to this failure, the Holloway Commission recommended creating a “Counterterrorist Joint Task Force” that “would plan, train for, and conduct operations to counter terrorist activities directed against” the United States. Following the Commission’s report, there was born a renewed interest in special operations.

                Iranian state television looped footage of the charred aircraft and bodies at Desert One, and Iranian officials triumphantly displayed the blackened remains of the Americans at a press conference in Tehran the next day. Within special operations, “Desert One” became a synonym for failure and a powerful, if at times unspoken, rallying cry. Pictures of the wreckage, with the clearly implied message—“Never Again”—hung on office walls and were posted in barracks. Over the next two decades we rehearsed hundreds of operations to ensure we would get it right when we needed to. There were lessons learned and costs dearly paid, but the force that the nation needed would eventually emerge.





| CHAPTER 4 |

                Renaissance

                February 1982–May 1993



In February 1982, near the end of my tour of duty in Korea, Annie flew to Seoul, and we spent ten days touring where I had been stationed for the previous year. In early March we flew back to the United States, where I was to report for duty at Fort Stewart, Georgia. Although I did not recognize it at first, the Army I joined when we returned was already a different one than the one I’d left just a year before.

                Cold war tensions in Europe, exacerbated by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979, argued for strengthening the U.S. military’s capability, which had been badly weakened by Vietnam and subsequent budget constrictions. As a result, beginning in the final year of Jimmy Carter’s presidency and continuing through Ronald Reagan’s administration, defense spending rose, peaking in 1986 and in the process transforming the peacetime capacity of the U.S. military.

                At first the change was not obvious, but a series of actions taken near the end of the Vietnam War set a course to revitalize the Army’s equipment, doctrine, training, and, most important, its leadership.

                With limited budgets in the 1970s, the Army made the decision to pursue five primary weapons systems, highlighted by the M1 Abrams tanks and Apache helicopters, which would serve to transform the force and to outclass anything fielded by our potential enemies. In 1982, based on lessons learned from the Arab-Israeli War of 1973, a new doctrine of offensive maneuver called AirLand Battle was adopted that leveraged this enhanced weaponry and technology.