For people more interested in the nitty gritty (or gory details) than the global politics or who’s too blame there are hair-raising accounts of what happened to the unfortunate American combatants in a special issue of Military Medicine (the international journal of the Association of Military Surgeons of the United States) that was published in April. It contains a lot of first hand descriptions of the carnage and the battles. It is basically an edited transcript of a workshop on tactical management of urban warfare casualties in special operations held at the 1998 meeting of the Special Operations Medical Association.
The thread on Somalia bears a striking resemblance, in one sense, to the thread on why the British lost the American Revolution.
The recurring theme that lurks behind both threads is that some problems do not have a military solution.
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There was nothing the armed forces could have done and no mission that could have been defined for them in Somalia that would have accomplished any goal acceptable to the United Nations or the American government. If the Somalis didn’t want to be helped, there isn’t anything anyone could have done to help them. You canot save another country from a civil war they enjoy fighting.
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There was, similarly, nothing the British could have done in the Colonies to prevent eventual desertion from the Empire. As has been pointed out, they won a great many battles and still lost the war. There was no objective that would have ended revolution short of killing every revolutionary in the entire country.
We live in the era of big wars, and the prevailing assumption when we think of war is that war is an extension of politics; ergo, if you want to play hardball politics, use war. The reality is, though, that an army is a tool of specific and limited effectiveness, and cannot solve some problems in much the same way that a hammer can’t solve every carpentry problem.
I think you are referring to the goal changing the Somali government. The military forces were used, apparently successfully, to combat the famine in that country. But otherwise I agree with the comparison in that we were in no position to dictate Somali’s internal politics and were therefore doomed to fail when we tried.
Technically I think if we had brought enough firepower to bear, it would have been possible to change their government for the better. But it would have likely caused the deaths of thousands of innocent Somalis, who we had come to save from starvation in the first place.