Quote:
Originally Posted by LChoy
Captain Crunch can probably expand on this in much more detail than I can, but a couple of modern military failures:
- Munich Olympic Massacre - Poorly trained police response and communication challenges led to the death of a large portion of Israeli athletes. Silver lining though is that this led to the creation of the German GSG9, one of the world's most elite counter terrorism units
- Aborted Iranian embassy rescue - This was the US attempt and not the famous SAS rescue. Poor equipment, desert sandstorms, and pretty much anything that could go wrong did, as the US were forced to abort the mission when over half of the raiding force was lost before even entering the environment. Led to the creation of SOAR, the US special operations air regiment
- Black Hawk Down, the Somali incident. Poor communications, delayed top down coordination, and intelligence failure led to a company of US forces trapped overnight in Mogadishu surrounded by a hostile city
LChoy
|
I think that while these were absolute blunders, they don't fit into the epic blunder category.
The type of terrorism at the munich Olympics herald a new age of high profile, and the feeling was that the terrorists were going to kill those athletes anyways so the decision was made to go, and we hadn't seen the advent of the truly dedicated anti terror forces yet.
The whole Iranian thing was a string of unfortunate events more then anything else, and a president that relied on old school recommendations. The intelligence and the equipment was overwhelmingly poor though.
If your looking at historic military blunders.
The Battle of Midway while it didn't break the Japanese Navy it gave the American's the time they needed. Poor command decisions at the sub unit, unit and fleet levels. Poor design decisions and worse damage control decisions in the Japanese Navy , and indecision in terms of rearming and refueling planes all combined to cost the Japanese carriers and allowed American's industrial might to assert itself.
I'd say the Bay of Pigs invasion was a historical world churning blunder as well as the American's failed to provide promised support to the Cuban exiles, and the CIA came across as incompetent.