‘Somalia Helped us to Better Understand the Importance of Civil-Military Relations’ - General David Hurley, Chief of Defence Force

Monday, 17 October 2011

Download PDF

Sergei DeSilva-Ranasinghe

FDI Senior Analyst

Summary

Nearly two decades have now passed since the ADF dispatched forces to the UN-mandated Unified Task Force in Somalia (UNITAF; 1992-1993), an operation that left its mark on the evolution of the Australian Army. According to General David Hurley, the ADF’s newly appointed Chief of Defence Force who at the time was 1^st Battalion Royal Australian Regiment’s (1RAR) Commanding Officer, the mission Operation Solace proved vitally important in building the ADF’s confidence for what was to follow in later years.

Commentary

Operation Solace

The 1RAR battalion group that was deployed to Somalia was the first such contingent to be deployed since 1971 when 4RAR/NZ (Anzac) was deployed to Vietnam. The contingent to Somalia comprised of 1,200 personnel, chiefly consisting of 930 troops from 1RAR, auxiliary support elements and personnel from the RAN support vessels HMA Ships Tobruk and Jervis Bay.

‘At the time’ said General Hurley, ‘Somalia was significant because it was the first time since Vietnam that a fully formed battalion was deployed overseas. As a multinational, UN mandated intervention, each troop contributing country was given a province to look after,’ he said.

‘To the north of the Australian sector were French forces, to the east were Canadians, to the west were US troops and to the south were the Moroccans,’ he added.

 ‘The landscape of the Baidoa region looked like areas of northern Queensland, fairly flat with a major ridge line that ran east-west, south west to north east through the southern half of the area. There were corn bushes everywhere but not many tall trees. There was no permanent water. What waterways existed only flowed when it rained. There were one or two significant features, like the hill which looked like a smaller version of Ayers Rock, but other than that there was very little else.’

The 17,000 sq km the Baidoa Humanitarian Relief Sector in south-western Somalia was previously cleared and secured by the 3^rd Battalion, 9^th US Marines, who handed control to 1RAR when the battalion arrived in strength by mid-January 1993.

‘Our mission was to provide a secure environment for the delivery of humanitarian support for the Baidoa region. The whole of the region probably contained about 200,000 people and Baidoa town [nicknamed the ‘city of death’] had between 30,000 to 40,000 inhabitants.

‘We divided up our tasks. One, was to secure the township of Baidoa. Two, was to provide security in the region through extensive rural patrolling. Three, was to secure our own base at the Baidoa airfield, and four, was to organise convoy escorts with NGOs [Non Government Organisations] to deliver aid to the outlying regions outside of Baidoa town,’ he said.

The Australians soon found themselves at the helm managing delicate civil-military issues with not only a war-weary and suspicious Somali population, but also numerous foreign NGOs that were active in the Baidoa region distributing aid.

‘Although, we had some previous experience working with NGOs, Somalia was the first time that our operation actually centred around that relationship.

‘When we arrived, there were detrimental perceptions about the military that we had to turn around. Most Somali people saw the military as a brutal force and many NGO organisations strongly believed that they did not receive support from the military.

‘While providing security was not a problem, the real issue came to working with the NGOs. There were about a dozen NGOs and about one hundred odd NGO staff, all representing different charities,’ the General explained. 

‘Even though we were not directly responsible for the provision of humanitarian support or aid, it could not have been delivered without us interacting with the NGOs who were entirely responsible for aid delivery. Any aid work by us was in terms of additional capacity, but not our core business.

‘Our problem really was to match their aspirations with our ability to provide sufficient resources to protect them while they delivered food aid.

‘We listened to their concerns rather than going in and telling them this is how it was going to be. We set up a fairly strong civil-military team and initiated daily meetings and planning conferences and gave them maps of the region so we could all work off the same piece of paper.  We did a lot of work to convince them that we were professional and competent. Over time we had the ability to get them to work effectively with us.’

‘There was a lot of poverty and Somalia was just coming out of famine. As a result there were many deaths when we first arrived, but that quickly changed with the provision of security and the rapid delivery of food aid.

General Hurley further explained: ‘When we first arrived, the NGOs were unco-ordinated and you would find that three agencies would be delivering food to the same three villages on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, but two kilometres along the track there were several villages that did not even see a grain of rice because they are not being covered by anyone. 

‘I really could not tell the NGOs how to do their business, but what I did say was: “I can only provide five or six convoy escorts per day. You all need to sit down between the twelve of you and work out how you are going to use 40 convoys on a weekly basis to cover the whole region so that everyone got fed,”said General Hurley.

In addition to the delivery of aid, priority attention was given to the restoration of security and stability throughout the Baidoa region, which saw practically the entire sector saturated with patrols. 

‘At that time radical Islam was not really an issue.  The view was really about warlords and the inability to disarm them and to bring them to talk about a future for Somalia.’

‘One of the most important things we did when we moved into Baidoa town was to actually deploy our patrol bases inside the respective NGO compounds.  I deployed an infantry company in Baidoa town. Every day nine infantry sections would all live in different compounds with the NGOs and their patrolling program would take them out of one compound and into another one.

‘The Somali bandits never knew where they were at any one time. A lot of money was held in the compounds and if bandits were planning to attack or rob them; they were never sure whether they were going to run into an Australian patrol,’ he said.

 ‘Nearly all the contacts we had with armed opposition were in the town of Baidoa. There were only a couple outside the town,’ affirmed General Hurley.

Although Operation Solace was a peacekeeping operation, Australian troops registered a dozen contacts with Somali bandits, killing seven and wounding another four. The encounters were Australia’s first combat incidents since Vietnam. Throughout the operation, only one Australian fatality occurred, 1RAR’s Lance Corporal Shannon McAliney, who was accidentally shot dead on while patrol in April 1993.

Part of the reason why the number of contacts remained low was due to the efficient management of relations with the local population.

‘To communicate with the Somali population we had to rely on interpreters. Some were local and some we sourced through the contract with the United States. Using local interpreters is a double-edged sword because you do not know who they really are and what they are saying. 

‘We did have counter intelligence people with us and we did the best we could under the circumstances to make sure we got people with the right background. But we were fundamentally reliant on interpreters and found it difficult to do the job without them. 

‘If we arrived at a place to deliver food without an interpreter, then really it was a matter of forming people into queues, put the babies at the front with the women and move them around quickly. We would communicate by acting out, walking them around and drawing pictures. Luckily, we were not in that sort of situation very often. 

‘In a cultural sense, again we were very much reliant on what interpreters were telling we and how we should behave, particularly to the clan chiefs who were the decision makers, given the lack of any form of government,’ he said.

‘In dealing with local leadership we were fortunate that the people of the Baidoa region all came from the one clan. We were lucky the clan chief in our area had been the leader for some forty years and had accumulated quite a degree of authority.

‘By letting them have their say, letting them control conversations they had a sense that they had some ownership of what happened, rather than just being pushed in a certain direction’ said General Hurley.

Upon completion of its mission objectives by May 14, 1993, 1RAR handed over the sector to incoming French forces which continued the mission.  Overall, 1RAR’s contribution to the mission proved valuable as seen by the provision of over 1,100 foot patrols, military escorts for over 400 aid convoys that delivered over 8,311 tons of relief supplies to 137 villages, the seizure of 935 small arms and the arrest of over 70 Somali bandits.

Somalia Lessons

Given the salience of 1RAR’s experience at the time, in the years that followed the key doctrinal lessons learnt from Somalia were studied and gradually absorbed into the ADF.

‘The ADF has been very fortunate in coming out of that post-Vietnam period where for about 15 years we did not deploy anywhere other than to Namibia, Cambodia, Somalia and Rwanda. 

‘It was a good building period to get us back into those deployment skills engaging with the international community at a greater level than we had before.  If you look at how things have gone on from there to East Timor, Iraq and Afghanistan, for my generation they were good building blocks for the Army to get us back into an operational frame of mind,’ stated general Hurley.

‘The other thing that really impressed upon us when we think about peacekeeping and peacekeeping theory was the need to maintain the neutrality of the peacekeeping force. That is how legitimacy is obtained and maintained.  If you cannot walk a straight line with all sides, you then end up taking sides and lose your ability to equalise the operation across the board. 

He added: ‘The experience in Somalia helped us to better understand the importance of civil-military relations, which has since evolved to the point where we have recently set-up the Asia Pacific Civil-Military Centre of Excellence.

‘Another major lesson that came out of Somalia was about conducting joint operations. This was very early in the ADF’s journey from single service operations to joint operations. We were essentially run by land command, General Blake as the headquarters appointed to run the operation, but we still had all the problems of having the HMAS Tobruk, which was really being run by a RAN commander, to the point that I could not access the ships helicopter to assist with any of our work. 

‘When we came home, they were the sort of lessons and difficulties that were part of the building blocks. Somalia was also early days in our Law of Armed Conflict and Rules of Engagement training; doing scenario based training and so forth.  Again the whole wealth of knowledge we have today has been built on the experience we gained from what we were actually doing at the time. 

Today’s Relevance

Although the Somalia mission is vastly different to the ADF experience in Iraq and Afghanistan, there are lessons that continue to resonate today.

‘Compared to Iraq and Afghanistan the operations in Somalia were dissimilar in that we went in as a Chapter Seven Force [UN Security Council Mandate], and our job was to create a secure environment. It is hard to draw real analogies but if you look at the tactical level, the Australian Army and the ADF as a whole; we are a patrolling organisation. We get out and we mix with people. 

‘We do not stay inside our bases and you can see that in the way we have operated across the last two decades. Those are key fundamentals in the way we train and think through operations.  They just play out through all those things from peace-keeping to Afghanistan.  Being out with the population, recognising who the stakeholders are out there and engaging them is critical to being successful. Without that we would be blind and have no avenue to adequately communicate

‘The threat levels in Iraq and Afghanistan were completely different. Now there is a much greater emphasis on a whole-of-government approach to operations, which again we could see some of the birth pains in Somalia;’ he said.