5 Lessons from Operation Eagle Claw (#117)

41 years ago this weekend (April 24-25, 1980), the United States launched Operation Eagle Claw, a Special Forces operation that attempted to end the Iranian hostage crisis by rescuing 52 American embassy staff held captive at the United States Embassy in Tehran, Iran. The plan was bold and audacious (see below). Unfortunately, the raid failed. On April 24, 1980, one of the helicopters and a C-130 transport plane bumped into one another at a rendezvous site known as Desert One, about 200 miles south of Tehran. The explosion and fire killed eight US service members. Without enough aircraft to continue the mission, the leaders aborted the raid and left Iran. Out of the disaster of Desert One rose the creation of the four-star US Special Operations Command.

My friend, Keith Nightingale, was serving in the Pentagon as a junior officer assigned to work on the operation. Last year, he published a book, Phoenix Rising: From the Ashes of Desert One to the Rebirth of U.S. Special Operations, about his perspective on the raid. It’s a great book and adds another piece to the perspective on the operation. Go to Amazon and check it out here.

Here are five things I learned from Keith’s book about Operation Eagle Claw:

  • The Plan was bold and audacious. As Keith defines the mission — Fly 15,000 miles around the world, the last 850 miles in hostile airspace, and arrive undetected. Enter a sprawling city of 2,000,000 people in the throes of revolutionary fervor. Close with and breach the walls of a heavily guarded, 27-acre compound without alerting the neighborhood. Free, without injury, 60+ American citizens from their guards without injuring any civilians. Do not permit any adversarial forces to react to your presence. Extract the entire force and hostages through 850 miles of hostile airspace.

  • Nightingale asserts that “Military planners bring reality to a concept and cause hard decisions to be made.” I would add that it applies to ALL planners.

  • The MH-53 helicopters never flew a dress rehearsal of the entire mission. Nightingale believes that the Navy’s failure to do this didn’t stress the aircraft enough and that is why the MH-53 helicopters failed en route to Desert One.

  • Three bureaucratic truths became evident during the creation of the US Special Operations Command in the 1980s: the services dislike special operations, significant changes must come from outside the bureaucracy, and bureaucracies are good at fighting what they don’t want to do.

  • Pivotal to the creation of the US Special Operations Command (the four-star headquarters) was ensuring that they had a separate budget, called Major Force Program-11 (MFP-11). Interestingly, the US Space Force received its first separate budget for operations and maintenance, procurement and research, development, testing and evaluation in the FY 2021 budget.

The men of Operation Eagle Claw had “the guts to try” a bold and audacious operation 41 years ago. Go on the offense in 2021, demonstrate grit, and work to accomplish bold and audacious goals.

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Strategic Corporals in 2021 (#116)