The plan was ambitious and complex, and
its execution met with disastrous results. Mechanical failures
in three helicopters led to the decision to abort the mission
at Desert One. To compound the defeat, a collision between
aircraft during the withdrawal phase caused an explosion
that killed eight soldiers. The mission's failure was a
disappointment, and its disastrous aftermath had eroded
the faith of the American people in the Carter administration.
The hostages were eventually released after 444 days in
captivity.
Using the failed rescue attempt as a focal
point, this research paper seeks to highlight salient aspects
of crisis management and joint operational planning, particularly
in the context of low-intensity conflict (as relevant now
as it was then in 1980). This case-study approach is necessarily
inductive, using a single event to derive or support more
general conclusions about issues facing decision-makers
and planners.
This paper proceeds in three parts. Firstly,
possible pitfalls and pathologies in the political decision-making
process are identified and explained. Secondly, the military
planning phase of the mission, Operation Rice Bowl, is examined
for other issues and ambiguities which arose. Thirdly, we
examine the events and issues most related to the decision
to terminate the mission, centred upon the failure of three
helicopters to continue the mission.
Part I: Problems with
the Decision Process
Statistical tests by Herek et al confirm
our most fondly held notion that better decision-making
is usually associated with more successful policy outcomes.4
This notion, however, applies ex ante to a large
enough sample of events, like a series of independent coin-flipping
trials; we must analyse historical case studies with an
appreciation for the fact that specific political events,
against a backdrop of particular circumstances, happen once
and only once. A social scientist is compelled by training
to see patterns everywhere, but we would do well to anchor
the following account with a historian's appreciation for
the uniqueness of every political event in national histories.
Establishing Probabilities:
of Base Rates and Historical Metaphors
In order to reach the decision to launch
a rescue mission, it was necessary for the Carter administration
to convince itself that the rescue mission had a good chance
of success. This was an exercise that was fraught with difficulties,
since the operation was novel and estimates of success were
embodiments of hope and thought experiments rather than
any infallible science.
Using an organisational perspective, Rosenzweig
(1993) finds it notable that there was an unwillingness
to quantify the mission's probability of success in numerical
percentage terms, which was inconsistent with most theoretical
notions of procedural rationality. He notes that "there
was never an explicit estimate of the mission's chances
of success" and deplores the lack of quantification
of risk. Yet, he concurs with White House Press Secretary
Jody Powell who reckoned that an explicit percent estimate
would have been a "fake number, a sort of false empiricism."5
A conventional practice of establishing
at least a qualitative estimate of success probabilities
is to study past events which resemble the imminent decision.
An appropriate sample of past events would provide "base
rates" for estimates of success, as well as offer historical
analogies to encourage optimism or caution as the case may
be.
Unfortunately, a serious study should have
encouraged pessimism about the chances of mission success,
but did not. Base rates were difficult to establish because
the mission was unique and Delta Force was only created
and fully operational in 1979. Nevertheless, a survey of
US commando-type special operations reveals a less than
50% success rate and should have augured ill for the chances
of success.6 Instead, the administration had
chosen to justify its hopes by pointing to the recent successes
of counterterrorist actions at Mogadishu (by Germany) and
Entebbe (by Israel).7
The choices of historical analogy in guiding
decision-making had important prescriptive implications.
Dr Zbigniew Brzezinski, the Assistant to the President for
National Security Affairs and one of the rescue mission's
most bullish proponents, was deeply encouraged by the successes
at Mogadishu and Entebbe. However, this contradicts the
initial professional judgement of Colonel Charlie Beckwith,
the commander of Delta Force:
"Logistically speaking it would
be a bear. There were the vast distances, nearly 1,000 miles,
of Iranian wasteland that had to be crossed, then the assault
itself, against a heavily guarded building complex stuck
in the middle of a city of 4,000,000 hostile folks. This
was not going to be any Entebbe or Mogadishu.8
Nothing could be more difficult."9
Gary Sick of the National Security Council
writes in a post-crisis review: "There was never any
illusion on the part of anyone... that it was anything but
a high-risk venture... that would not only strain the limits
of technology but would also press the endurance of men
and machines to the outer margins."10 How,
then, did the administration eventually decide to undertake
a rescue mission widely viewed as very risky?
The Path to a Dangerous
Decision
Perhaps, it was simple wishful thinking
that had prompted the Carter administration to descend the
slippery slope of decision-making. Various theoretical explanations
have been advanced to explain the progression from the recognition
of high risk to the eventual acceptance of this risk.
One explanation squares with the aphorism
that "a committee can make a decision that is dumber
than any of its members." Smith (1984) claims that
the Carter administration had been afflicted with "groupthink",
whereby "excessive esprit de corps and amiability
restrict the critical faculties of small decision-making
groups" and "leads to irrational and dehumanising
action directed against out-groups."11 Sick
writes, "Once one accepted the necessity of action,
the selection of the rescue mission quickly asserted
itself as a logical inevitability."12
This squares with Alexander George's description of a possible
malfunction of the decision process: "When the President
and his advisers agree too readily on the nature of the
problem facing them and on a response to it."13
The failure of negotiations had predisposed the administration
toward stronger action. Escalating military pressure through
naval mining or airstrikes was punitive but would do nothing
to secure the release of the hostages. Secretary of State
Cyrus Vance had been the only articulate and determined
objector to the rescue mission proposition but the momentum
of groupthink had drowned out his voice.
Thus, when Vance provided serious arguments
against the execution of a rescue mission, by asserting
that the hostages would not be harmed further and that a
rescue mission would likely endanger other American journalists
in the vicinity by provoking Iranian retaliation, his ideas
were dismissed. Narrative accounts indicate a certain desperation
to take some form of positive action, instead of playing
the patient waiting game advocated by Vance.
Another way to describe the propensity
for risky action is to use prospect theory. McDermott (1992)
uses the framework of prospect theory, developed by Tversky
and Kahneman, to explain why President Carter, usually of
a prudent and humanitarian bent and somewhat averse to exercising
military options in foreign policy, had agreed to launch
the rescue mission, a high-risk venture that was likely
to involve bloodshed. In McDermott's creative application
of prospect theory, Carter had been operating in the domain
of losses and was thus willing to take large risks in order
to restore or at least get closer to the status quo.
To sum up, a potent combination of groupthink-like
decision processes and risk-acceptance attitudes had pushed
the administration into a decision that was, retrospectively
at least, almost unthinkably dicey.
Part II: Problems with
the Planning Phase:
Operation Rice Bowl
This section addresses two ambiguous issues
that were related to the planning of the mission itself.
Firstly, the role of military judgement in high-level crisis
management is explored. Secondly, the trade-off between
flexibility and commitment is assessed.
The Soldier and the
State
In dealing with the crisis and approving
plans for a military rescue mission, Carter wanted to avoid
the pitfalls of Presidential micro-management of military
affairs, a shortcoming of Lyndon Johnson during the Vietnam
War and John F. Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis,
by deferring judgement to military experts. After all, "deferral
to experts was both a way to improve accuracy and also to
preserve accountability."14 On the other
hand, the military has been accused of having a biased "can-do"
spirit which understated the objective risks and limitations
of the missions.15 This is a serious dilemma
for a President who needed both military expertise and military
objectivity in evaluating decisions on the use of force.
There is no theoretical consensus on the
kinds of systematic biases which soldiers bring to the strategic
decision process. Posen (1984) posits that military organisations
are characterised by parochial interests such as power,
prestige and size.16 Hence, their influence may
systematically bias foreign policy toward offensive options.
Furthermore, being specialists in combat, military officers
possess an informational advantage over civilian leaders,
and can easily preserve their autonomy in the technical
aspects of military planning. However, Huntington asserts
that "the military man rarely favours war [as] he always
favours preparedness, but he never feels prepared He is
afraid of war. He wants to prepare for war. But he is never
ready to fight a war."17
The evidence from this case study is equally
mixed. While the generals on the President's advisory staff
have been attributed with an optimistic bias, commanders
on the ground were much less sanguine about the mission's
chances of success. Colonel Charlie Beckwith, who established
and commanded the Delta Force unit responsible for the embassy
assault and hostage rescue, was famous for the following
conversation with Task Force Commander Major General James
B. Vaught during the preliminary planning stage:18
"What's the risk, Colonel Beckwith?"
"Oh, about 99.9 percent."
"What's the probability of success?"
"Zero."
"Well, we can't do it."
"You're right, Boss."
"I've got to buy time from the JCS."
In his book Delta Force, Beckwith
details the immense difficulties associated with the rescue
mission. Intelligence was poor in Iran, and "it had
always been assumed that when Delta was needed overseas,
the country in which it would operate would be friendly
or at least neutral."19 As the Air Force
did not then have a special operations aircraft capability,
the pilots for the mission had been drawn from the Marine
Corps and trained in time for the aggressive flying style
which, though the mission demanded it, was unfamiliar to
them.
The contradiction between the optimism
of the flag-rank staff officers and the pessimism of field
commanders like Beckwith indicates that the feedback of
ground commanders had not been taken seriously by a civilian
administration which was determined to execute what it perceived
as a last resort.
Complexity and Commitment
Operation Eagle Claw had been conceived
as a highly complicated mission with many components and
links. The theory of normal accidents offers some suggestive
clues as to the nature and complexity of the operation involved.
Organisational tasks may be classified along two dimensions:
simple or complex, and loosely- or tightly-coupled. Given
the diversity of specific military tasks, an armed operation
could fall into any of the four possible categories. The
involvement of multiple units - Sea Stallion helicopters,
C-130 transport aircraft, Marine Corps pilots, Army Rangers
and Delta Force operators and stages in the mission
makes it highly complex. Furthermore, the need for the men
and aircraft to move under cover of darkness meant that
there was little room for error in maintaining tactical
concealment, making it a tightly-coupled task. Hence, Operation
Eagle Claw, as a complex and tightly-coupled task, was like
an accident waiting to happen.
|
| Loosely Coupled
| Tightly Coupled
|
| Simple
| Clerical tasks
| Factory assembly lines
Security guard systems
|
| Complex
| Public relations
School administration
| Nuclear plant management
Joint military operations
|
Fig 2: A typology
of tasks, in normal accident theory.20 A joint
military operation, like Eagle Claw, is both complex and
tightly-coupled.
Indeed, the mission was a complex chain
with multiple segments. According to Rosenzweig's organisational
perspective, a conjunctive probability bias
had prevented the leaders from seeing that overall mission
success would be considerably less than the success of any
single mission component.21 The conjunctive probability
bias had been allowed to operate only because there were
many conjunctures in the first place. Unfortunately, the
distances involved were so large and the embassy located
so deep in enemy territory that the mission could hardly
have been simplified further. Other infiltration/exfiltration
options, such as using trucks or airborne drops, had been
considered but overland infiltration took too long and merely
increased the time interval in which the plan could be discovered,
and airborne drops cause excessive casualties even before
any combat begins. Helicopter infiltration (with intermediate
refuel points) and the use of a special operations force
gave the mission at least an appearance of surgical precision.
Strangely, some accounts suggest that having
more stages gave the President the subsequent option of
aborting the option, which implies that Carter had been
less than totally committed to the rescue mission. After
all, the desire to maintain flexibility during the
mission itself indicates that starting the mission need
not imply a commitment to see it through. For example, Gary
Sick writes that "the need to be able to terminate
and withdraw at any point, together with the need for absolute
secrecy, added to the complexity and difficulty of both
planning and execution."22 Furthermore,
according to Sick, "the operation was designed as a
series of independent stages, capable of being terminated
at any point if the mission was compromised."23
In addition, Livingstone insists quite saliently that
"... the plan approved by the White
House had too many 'bail out' mechanisms and not enough
backup systems to overcome unexpected problems, thus confirming
a lack of commitment to the original plan... It would appear
that the White House tried to make the operation so free
of risk that it was doomed from the outset inasmuch as any
setback virtually guaranteed that the mission would not
proceed."24
Part III: Problems with
Execution:
Operation Eagle Claw
This section deals only with the failure
of the three helicopters which had led to the mission abortion,
and not with the aircraft collision and explosion which
occurred during mission withdrawal.
For Want of Six Helicopters
The first part of the mission had eight
Sea Stallion helicopters fly from the carrier USS
Nimitz, under way in the Arabian Sea, to rendezvous
with the Delta troopers at Desert One where the "helos"
would also refuel. Six had been deemed as the minimum number
of helicopters needed for the mission. Unfortunately, three
helicopters dropped out of the mission. Helo Number Six
suffered rotor blade failures and needed to be abandoned.
Helo Number Five entered a blinding dust-storm and, at less
than twenty-five minutes to clear conditions and less than
an hour from Desert One, reversed course and returned to
the mother ship. Helo Number Two had reached Desert One
but its hydraulic leaks rendered the craft crippled for
the rest of the mission.25 There was a tense
moment in the White House when the leaders considered going
ahead with the mission with just five helicopters but eventually
deferred to and accepted the ground commanders' decision
to abort.
These events revealed two issues. Firstly,
was there a lack of pilot resolve in the decision to reverse
the course of Helo Number Five? This was the most controversial
issue to come out of post-mortem analyses.26
Secondly, if it had been decided ex ante to proceed
with no less than six helicopters, why did the administration
later consider proceeding with five? Was there a breakdown
in decision-making discipline?
Beckwith was reputed to have blamed the
pilots for the failure of the mission. His account, admittedly
riddled with the fallible wisdom of perfect hindsight, describes
the mental shakiness he had observed in some of the pilots.
Furthermore, when a helicopter had collided with a C-130
fixed-wing plane and exploded during the withdrawal from
the scene (after the mission had been aborted), the helicopter
pilots had abandoned their helicopters and left the aircraft
there (containing money, maps, documents and so on) without
taking time to destroy their aircraft and hence maintain
security. Beckwith had called them "cowards".27
The craft of counterfactual thinking suggests
that the most mutable aspect of the military bungle leading
to the mission's termination was the withdrawal of Helicopter
Number Five. One good test of whether the lack of pilot
resolve, as opposed to a disciplined adherence to standard
operating procedure, was the motivation behind the pilot's
decision to turn back is the question: would he have turned
back if he knew that only five other helicopters besides
himself would later reach Desert One in fighting fit shape?
Proponents of the normal accident theory charge that, though
redundancy in systems should minimise hazards and improve
performance, redundancy can sometimes be an active cause
of accidents.28 In this instance, because two
more than the required number of helicopters had been procured
for the mission, an overall lack of complete pilot resolve
might lead each individual to compromise his performance
by thinking, "It wouldn't matter if I screwed this
up, there would be the other seven to carry on." This
accusation of inadequate pilot motivation is echoed by the
on-scene air commander Colonel James Kyle who blames the
pilot of Helo Number Five for the mission's abortion.29
The second issue is whether the mission
would or could proceed with just five helicopters. It should
have been a moot point since the finalised plan of the mission
impressed upon everyone that six was the absolute minimum.
It seems that everyone, from the troops on the ground to
the Commander-in-Chief, had been secure in the knowledge
that the worst could not occur. This was evident in the
way the key decision-makers, in a knee-jerk reaction, questioned
and re-considered the plan, contemplating the possibility
of going ahead with five helicopters after three had been
taken out. This point in time had been an immense source
of tension. General Vaught relayed a message to the ground
commanders to ask them to reconsider going ahead with five
helicopters, which had angered Colonel Beckwith because
it placed upon them a burden which Beckwith felt was undeserved
and unjustified, in view of the finalised plans. As Beckwith
describes the occasion, "How... can the boss ask me
that (to go ahead with five helicopters)? There isn't any
way. I'd have to leave behind twenty men. In a tight mission
no one is expendable before you begin!" Colonel
Kyle writes of the impossibility of carrying on with just
five helicopters: "The only options were to either
dump enough fuel from each Sea Stallion to allow for the
weight of the extra troopers or reduce the number of Delta
Force by some twenty shooters."30
Was it good decision-making practice for
the administration to even consider proceeding with five
helicopters? Beckwith certainly did not think so, since
he recognised that the mission was "tight" and
left little room for error or compromise. On the other hand,
Herek et al consider "failure to consider originally
rejected alternatives" to be a feature of pathological
decision-making.31 Which offers a more defensible
normative view of decision-making: discipline or flexibility?
For all the prima facie appeal of
decision-making flexibility, I would argue that discipline
is more valuable than the sort of "flexibility"
displayed during the crisis, especially since the latter
had occupied unnecessary time which could have endangered
troops as they remained longer in the desert. Beckwith was
right to expect the administration to stick to their game
plan: after all, the leaders should have been prepared to
make the right decisions and react instantly in any contingency.
If the worst happened, as it did, the administration should
be prepared to pull the plug on the mission immediately,
as intellectually if not emotionally rehearsed. Unnecessary
vacillation and delay would only be unnecessary evils in
a crisis situation where every minute counts. The soldiers
remained vulnerable as long as they remain in the desert.
As soon as the mission began, there would and should be
no time to return to the drawing-board the whole
drawing board ought to be figured out before the ball begins
rolling.
Conclusion
It has been said that "victory has
a hundred fathers but defeat is an orphan" but the
failure of the Iran hostage rescue mission appears to result
from an unfortunate combination of so many culpable elements,
from organisational malfunctions to tactical lapses. The
mission was a courageous endeavour, but its failure had
domestic-political repercussions, inching President Carter
out in the close 1981 election match against Ronald Reagan.
This paper has attempted to unite the various
theoretical strands which highlight organisational problems
with less abstract accounts of what actually took place,
and at the same time highlight issues which are at once
ambiguous yet important. At every level, it is evident that
the United States had been forced into a box which was difficult
to think and act outside of. A rescue mission was horribly
risky but there were no alternatives for securing hostage
safety decisively. A helicopter pilot appears to have failed
his duty but then he had been "flying in a bowl of
milk".32
It is difficult to guess whether the mission
would have succeeded if at least six helicopters had made
it to Desert One in shipshape condition. Then again, it
was such a complicated operation that anything could go
wrong subsequently. The Delta operators might be discovered
during their day hideout. Many hostages might have died
during the assault. The getaway would probably have been
a messy affair. The long arm of Murphy's Law appears to
have had an insidious presence in the spring of 1980.
It was indeed a sad moment in the military
and political history of the United States. Nonetheless,
it is an instructive episode that should prepare the country's
leadership to face its next foreign policy crisis with a
confidence tempered by prudence and experience. The next
crisis of a similar ilk would certainly put the government
to a stern test not just of astuteness, but of memory.
Endnotes
1 Colonel (Ret.) Charlie
Beckwith and Donald Knox, Delta Force (New York:
Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983), 218-219.
2 Official name: Special
Forces Operational Detachment Delta (SFOD-D).
3 Paul B. Ryan, The
Iranian Rescue Mission: Why It Failed (Annapolis: Naval
Institute Press, 1985), 2.
4 Gregory M. Herek, Irving
L. Janis and Paul Huth, "Decision-Making During International
Crises: Is Quality of Process Related to Outcome?",
Journal of Conflict Resolution, Vol. 31 No. 2, June
1987.
5 Philip M. Rosenzweig,
"Judgment in Organizational Decision-Making: The Iranian
Hostage Rescue Mission," 1993: 29.
6 Rosenzweig, 26.
7 In 1976, terrorists
had forced a French airliner to land in Entebbe, Uganda,
and seized its Israeli and Jewish passengers as hostages.
Israel launched a successful counter-terrorist rescue operation
in response. In 1977, German counter-terrorist troopers
had launched a successful similar effort with a seized Lufthansa
airliner which was forced to land in Mogadishu, Somalia.
8 Entebbe and Mogadishu
were airport locations which the Israeli and German assault
forces could access with relative ease and secrecy, unlike
Tehran which was deep in enemy country. Emphasis added.
9 Beckwith, 188.
10 Gary Sick, "Military
Constraints and Options" in American Hostages in
Iran: The Conduct Of A Crisis, ed. Paul H. Kreisberg
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 154.
11 Steve Smith, "Groupthink
and the Hostage Rescue Mission," British Journal
of Political Science, Vol. 15 No. 1 1984: 117.
12 Rosenzweig, 31.
13 Alexander George, "Some Possible (and
Possibly Dangerous) Malfunctions of the Advisory Process,"
122.
14 Rosenzweig, 35.
15 Rosenzweig, 15.
16 Barry Posen, The
Sources of Military Doctrine (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1984).
17 Samuel P. Huntington,
The Soldier and the State: The Theory and Politics of
Civil-Military Relations (Cambridge, Massachusetts:
Harvard University Press, 1957), 69.
18 Beckwith, 199.
19 Beckwith, 200.
20 Based on a lecture
by Prof Scott D. Sagan, Stanford University, for course
"International Security in a Changing World."
Winter Quarter, 1999.
21 See Rosenzweig, 22-24.
For instance, consider a military operation with five segments.
Even if each segment has a high chance of success, like
95%, the probability of success for the whole mission is
much lower at 77%. This suggests that if the mission had
been planned more in line with the KISS ("Keep it simple,
stupid") military maxim, with fewer conjunctures, it
might have had a higher chance of success.
22 Christopher, 154.
23 Charles G. Cogan, "Not
to Offend: Observations on Iran, the Hostages, and the Hostage
Rescue Mission Ten Years Later," Comparative
Strategy Vol. 9, 1990: 423.
24 Cogan, 426.
25 Ryan, 69-76.
26 With regards the importance
of tactical details on the ground in any ambitious military
strategy, we should be mindful of the verse:
For want of a nail, the
shoe was lost
For want of a shoe, the
horse was lost
For want of a horse,
the rider was lost
For want of a rider,
the battle was lost
For want of a battle,
the kingdom was lost!
27 Beckwith, 282.
28 From a course lecture
by Prof. Stephen Krasner, Stanford University, for course
titled "International Politics," Autumn 1999.
29 Col. (Ret.) James H.
Kyle with John Robert Eidson, The Guts to Try: The Untold
Story of the Iran Hostage Rescue Mission By the On-Scene
Desert Commander (New York: Orion Books, 1990), 335.
30 Kyle, 292.
31 Herek et al, 205.
32 Ryan, 70.
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LTA Chua Lu Fong is a naval combat officer
in the RSN. He has completed training tours as an Additional
Officer (AO) onboard a Missile Corvette (MC) and a Patrol
Vessel (PV), and is currently attending the 26th Naval Junior
Officer Course (NJOC). He graduated from Stanford University
(USA) in 2000, with a BA (with Distinction) in Economics;
and from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (USA)
in 2001, with an MS in Political Science (Security Studies).
