Desert One and the 1980 Disaster That Built Special Operations Command

Imagine you are planning the most delicate military operation in a generation. You need helicopters, so you ask the Navy. You need transport planes, so you ask the Air Force. You need ground troops, so you go to the Army. You need a Marine presence, so you call the Marines. Then you notice that nobody is actually in charge of the whole thing, the units have never trained together, and the helicopter crews were told only a few hours earlier what the target was. Congratulations. You have just invented the plan for Operation Eagle Claw.

I say that with respect for the men who flew and fought, because the failure at Desert One in April 1980 was not a failure of courage. It was a failure of organization, and organization is something conservatives ought to care about, because it is the difference between spending the taxpayer's defense dollar and wasting it. Let me tell you what happened, why it happened, and why the best thing to come out of that burned-out patch of Iranian desert was the most capable special operations force in the world.

Fifty-two Americans and 444 days

On November 4, 1979, a mob of Iranian militants overran the American embassy in Tehran and took the staff hostage. This came in the first year of the Islamic republic that Ayatollah Khomeini established after the Shah left the country. The seizure was an act of war under any reading of international law: the inviolability of diplomatic missions is among the oldest rules of the civilized world, and Iran's new government endorsed the seizure rather than ending it. In the end fifty-two Americans were held for 444 days, until January 20, 1981, the day Ronald Reagan was sworn in.

The Carter administration tried diplomacy, sanctions and the freezing of Iranian assets. Nothing moved the regime. As the months passed, the pressure for some kind of military option grew, and the president ordered planning for a rescue. It was, in its way, a reasonable decision. A rescue was the only course that would free the hostages without bargaining with their captors, and the president, whatever his faults, had a duty to try.

The plan

The plan was ambitious and, in retrospect, brittle. It called for eight RH-53D Sea Stallion helicopters, flown off the carrier USS Nimitz in the Arabian Sea, to fly low across the Iranian coast to a remote site in the desert, several hundred miles southeast of Tehran, designated Desert One. There they would meet C-130 transport planes carrying the assault force, the new Army unit known as Delta Force, commanded by Colonel Charles Beckwith, along with fuel for the helicopters. Refueled, the helicopters would carry the men to a hiding place near Tehran. The next night the force would storm the embassy, free the hostages, and fly them to a captured airfield, from which transport aircraft would take them out of the country.

Every step depended on the one before it. The planners required at least six working helicopters at Desert One. They had sent eight, on the theory that some would fail. In a risky mission, you would want a margin. You would want rehearsals. And you would want somebody who could say, with authority, who was in charge. The operation had none of the three in sufficient quantity.

The task force was assembled from pieces of different services. The helicopter pilots were Marines, flying Navy aircraft, with Air Force crews on the transport planes and Army troops on the ground. The units had not trained together as a single formation. For security reasons, the full plan was shared on a strictly limited basis, which meant the people executing it had not been able to rehearse every piece. The result was a plan that looked good on a table and had never been run as a whole.

The night of April 24

The operation began on April 24, 1980. The helicopters lifted off the Nimitz and flew toward the coast. Almost immediately they ran into something nobody had briefed them on: a haboob, a fine-dust storm of the kind that rises in the Iranian desert, which reduced visibility and forced the crews to fly on instruments or by hand in conditions they had not expected. One helicopter was forced down by a warning light that showed a cracked rotor blade, and its crew abandoned the aircraft. Another got lost in the dust and turned back to the carrier. The remaining helicopters arrived at Desert One late, and a third had a failure of its hydraulic system.

That left five flyable helicopters. The plan required six. Beckwith recommended aborting, and the president, after consulting his advisors, agreed. It was a sound decision. The mission could not succeed with five helicopters, and pressing on would have risked a much worse disaster.

Then came the part that turned a failure into a tragedy. As the force prepared to leave, one of the remaining helicopters, maneuvering in the dust and dark to reposition, drifted into an EC-130 tanker loaded with fuel. The two aircraft collided and exploded. Eight servicemen died in the fire, five Air Force men and three Marines. Several others were wounded. The force left behind the burning aircraft and some of the bodies and several of the intact helicopters. The remaining men flew out on the surviving planes.

I want you to take in the end of that: the survivors boarded the remaining planes and left the burning wreckage behind, and the Iranians found it in the morning. Not one American was lost to hostile fire, and the national humiliation was complete.

The price, and the resignation

The consequence was immediate. Secretary of State Cyrus Vance, who had opposed the rescue attempt, resigned in protest. Carter went on television in the early morning of April 25 and took responsibility. That sentence deserves credit: whatever one thinks of his presidency, he did not hide behind subordinates. The country, for its part, was shaken. A superpower had tried to rescue its own citizens from a government it could crush in a conventional war, and it could not get its helicopters to a desert and back.

The aftermath of Desert One is partly a story about political leadership and partly a story about the military as an institution. On the first point, historians will continue to argue, and conservatives will note the contrast with the way the incoming Reagan administration approached the hostage question: the hostages were freed within minutes of the inauguration in January 1981, a coincidence of timing that did not result from any use of force. On the second point there is a clearer verdict, and it is worth looking at carefully.

The Holloway report

The Joint Chiefs of Staff appointed a Special Operations Review Group, headed by retired Admiral James L. Holloway III, a former Chief of Naval Operations, to investigate. The group's report, submitted to the Joint Chiefs in July 1980 and released in an unclassified version in August, did not blame the soldiers or the aircrews. It identified the institutional failures: the task force had been put together on an ad hoc basis; the chain of command was unclear; the units had not trained together; the planners had not provided adequate backup for the helicopters; and the operation had been kept so secret that some of its own participants did not have the information they needed.

The report's central recommendation was a standing counterterrorism joint task force, with a permanent staff and a continuing training program, so that the next crisis would not require the military to improvise. That was the beginning of a very long reform, in which Congress and the services proceeded in three stages.

Stage one: the services start to build

The first change was inside the Army. In the aftermath of Desert One the Army built a dedicated special operations aviation unit, which became the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment, known for its night flying and for the quality of its crews. The Joint Special Operations Command was set up to take over the counterterrorism mission and to put the various units under one headquarters.

Those steps were necessary, and they were insufficient. The services still pursued their own priorities, and special operations remained a poor relation in a defense establishment that rewarded big conventional units. The Grenada operation of 1983 showed that coordination problems persisted: the story of Grenada in 1983 Was Small, and It Mattered More Than the Critics Admit includes communications that did not work between services and units that had trouble reaching one another. Congress noticed.

Stage two: Goldwater-Nichols

The second change was legislative. In October 1986 President Reagan signed the Goldwater-Nichols Department of Defense Reorganization Act, named for Senator Barry Goldwater and Representative Bill Nichols. Its aim was to cure the problem Desert One had exposed, which was that the military services, each with its own culture and its own budget, did not work together by default. The Act strengthened the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as the principal military advisor to the president, put the chain of command for operations through the Secretary of Defense to the combatant commanders in the field, and gave those commanders real authority over the forces assigned to them. It required officers to serve in joint assignments if they wished to be promoted to the top ranks. In short, it made "joint" something you had to do, not something the services might agree to when it suited them.

It was not an easy fight. The services resisted. Some senior officers thought civilian lawmakers had no business telling them how to organize. But the evidence of the failures of Desert One and Grenada and the bombing of the Beirut barracks was too strong to ignore. The reform passed with the support of both parties.

Stage three: a command of its own

The third change came from a pair of senators, Sam Nunn, a Democrat, and William Cohen, a Republican, who concluded that the services would never give special operations the attention and money it needed on their own. Their amendment to the fiscal 1987 defense authorization required the president to create a unified combatant command for special operations and a new civilian post, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Special Operations and Low-Intensity Conflict. It also gave the new command its own budget line, a power few commands have. A commander who controls his own money does not have to ask the services for permission to buy what his people need.

The Pentagon did not welcome it. The Department of Defense resisted the amendment, and it took persistent work from Congress to get it implemented. But the United States Special Operations Command was activated on April 16, 1987, at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, bringing together Army, Navy and Air Force special operations units under one commander.

That is a rare thing in Washington: a failure recognized, a reform designed, a reform passed, and the result working. Special Operations Command in the following decades carried out missions that the 1980 task force could not have attempted, from the Gulf War to Afghanistan and beyond. I will not recount the particular operations here, because the point is not any single raid. The point is that the nation had built an institution that could plan, train, and act as one.

The argument

Here is the numbered case, because there is a real argument to be made about what Desert One teaches.

One. Bold plans without unified command fail. The courage of the individuals involved was not in doubt. The structure was the problem. A conservative who believes in clear lines of authority in business and government should recognize the point immediately.

Two. Rehearsal matters. A mission that is planned in compartments and never run as a whole will fail in the gaps between the compartments. The Delta Force and the helicopter crews had never practiced together on a full scale.

Three. Redundancy is not waste. The planners knew they needed six helicopters and sent eight, and the margin was too thin. A thicker margin would have cost money and would have saved the mission. When critics of defense spending call a backup "waste," Desert One is the answer.

Four. Reform comes when failure is faced honestly. The services could have buried the Holloway report and blamed bad luck. Instead the review group named the institutional causes, Congress listened, and the system changed. That is what accountable government is supposed to do, and it is a standing reproach to the many cases in which it does not. The record of the Pentagon's books, described in The Pentagon Has Never Passed an Audit, and Conservatives Should Mind, suggests that the honest accounting that followed Desert One is not the habit it should be.

The strongest objection

The best objection to the rosy version is this: the reforms centralize power in Washington and in a few commanders, and a centralized military is a tempting instrument for an ambitious president. Goldwater-Nichols concentrated authority in the Chairman and the Secretary of Defense, and special operations forces, which can be used quietly and with few people, are exactly the kind of tool a commander in chief might prefer to use without asking Congress.

I take that seriously. It is the kind of concern Americans from the Founding on have had about a standing army and about executive war-making. The Framers knew that a unified force is a double-edged instrument, which is why they gave Congress the power to raise armies and to make rules for their government and regulation, and why the Constitution forbids appropriations for the army for more than two years at a time. See Article I, Section 8, Clauses 12 through 14. The answer is not to leave the military disorganized so that it cannot be misused. A disorganized force is a dangerous one, for its own members first. The answer is to keep Congress and its power of the purse in the loop, which is why Nunn and Cohen gave the new command a line in the budget that Congress can examine. See also The Weinberger Doctrine Set Six Tests Before Sending Troops to Fight for one set of tests a president should meet before using that force.

What it means for families

The families who send sons and daughters into the military have the right to expect two things: that the missions are worth the risk, and that the organization sending them has done everything reasonable to make them succeed. The men who died at Desert One, Air Force and Marine, deserve a better monument than a burned-out helicopter. They have one. It is a force that trains together, plans together and is led by one commander, and that force has since saved lives that would not have been saved if the lessons of that April night had been forgotten.

There is also a lesson here for the taxpayer. Defense dollars are not all equal, and a billion dollars spent on integration, training and spare parts may do more for the safety of the country than a billion spent on another piece of hardware. See Defense Spending as a Share of the Economy, From Korea to the 2010s for the larger picture of what America has spent and when.

The case in brief

1. The 1980 attempt to rescue the fifty-two hostages in Tehran, Operation Eagle Claw, failed at Desert One when too few helicopters were available and a collision killed eight servicemen.
2. The cause was institutional, with an improvised task force, no single commander and too little joint training, as the Holloway review group found.
3. Congress responded with the Goldwater-Nichols Act of 1986 and the Nunn-Cohen amendment, which produced United States Special Operations Command in April 1987.
4. The reforms worked because they were honest about failure, bipartisan and tied to the budget, and the principle that Congress should keep its power over the purse is the right check on the powerful force they created.

What you can do: Read the Armed Forces-related sections of the next defense authorization bill on Congress.gov, and ask your member of Congress which provisions fund training and readiness for joint and special operations forces.