October 3, 1993. Most know it as “Black Hawk Down”. Now, a new report using the “Little Bird” Night Stalkers perspective sheds light on a long forgotten and missing After Action Report.

American forces launched rapidly in Somalia at 15:32, because the two target lieutenants had just been located an hour earlier at a known residence. This is how the daylight deployment window was set.

And then a deadly analytic mistake was made in the plan. During daylight in a dense city, the discrimination and survivability objectives were placed in direct opposition. To put fire down that spares noncombatants, aircraft must engage low and slow enough to see what they would be shooting at. Low and slow in a daytime Bakara Market is the maximally exposed profile, and the minimum of survivability. One orbit could never achieve both the civilian protective order and the soldier survival requirement.

This was especially true because, as was well known at the time, Mohamed Farrah Aidid’s forces were trained on RPG shots at low and slow moving helicopters. It’s a tragically obvious mix, and not just today in retrospect.

The MH-60 were the wrong platform, pushed into the wrong orbit ring. And daylight should have made the entire protection decision incoherent. Any shoot down of one converts any rapid extraction force into a prolonged urban battle and siege warfare subjecting hundreds of civilians to heavy automatic weapons, cannons and rockets. And that’s exactly what happened.

Ordering very discriminate fire eroded the conditions for survivability of those teams, which is how top professionals were forced into a mass casualty disaster. The high volume of indiscriminate fire, from surrounded forces trying to hold out for rescue, was the result. Estimates are that around 300 people were killed, with more than double that wounded. The exact opposite of task force doctrine, was created by a simple error made in task force doctrine.

The Little Bird perspective coming out now proves that the controlled raid should have been a fixed duration and a fixed footprint, nothing else. The Black Hawk deployment into clear skies filled with RPGs is what converted it to a crash recovery with open-ended battle that sprawled across blocks of housing and pulled crowds toward the wreckage, with an expanding urban firefight; generating the worst possible environment for civilian survival.

The impossible choice that was pushed on troops, clearly meant to spare civilians, instead only raised the probability of the one event that guaranteed mass civilian death. Self-defeating at the second order.