The Pentagon has known of fundamental flaws with U.S. military operations in the Horn of Africa for nearly 20 years but has nonetheless forged ahead, failing to address glaring problems, according to a 2007 study obtained exclusively by The Intercept.
“There is no useful, shared conception of the conflict,” says the Pentagon study, which was obtained via the Freedom of Information Act and has not previously been made public. “The instruments of national power are not balanced, which results in excessive reliance on the military instrument. There is imbalance within the military instrument as well.”
The 50-page analysis, conducted by the Institute for Defense Analyses, a private think tank that works solely for the U.S. government, is based on anonymized interviews with key U.S. government officials from across various departments and agencies. It found America’s nascent war in the Horn of Africa was plagued by a failure to define the parameters of the conflict or its aims; an overemphasis on military measures without a clear definition of the optimal military strategy; and barriers to coordination between the military and other government agencies like the State Department and local allies like the Somali government.
“Damn, this almost could have been written yesterday.”After more than 20 years of U.S. efforts, the Pentagon’s own metrics show that America’s war in the region was never effectively prosecuted, remains in a stalemate or worse, and has been especially ruinous for Somalis.
“Damn, this almost could have been written yesterday,” said Elizabeth Shackelford, a former State Department Foreign Service officer who served in Somalia, after The Intercept shared the full IDA analysis with her. “I’ve known these problems have persisted throughout my career with the U.S. government, but I didn’t quite expect this has been thoroughly studied, by DoD, with these issues conclusively identified and yet not addressed for two decades now.”
From the Vietnam War of the 1960s and ’70s to the U.S. war in Afghanistan from the 2000s to the 2020s, the Pentagon — and the Office of the Secretary of Defense in particular — has taken an active interest in investigating its failures, even as it has publicly claimed progress. Like the Pentagon........