US Secretly Deployed Troops to Somalia in October

Troops First Boots on the Ground Since 1993

The Obama Administration secretly deployed an unknown number of troops to Somalia in October, officials are now confirming, and those troops remain there to this day as “military advisers.”

They are the first US boots on the ground in Somalia since the calamitous 1993 deployment Operation Gothic Serpent, which was couched as a humanitarian deployment but ended with the Black Hawk Down incident and the deaths of massive numbers of civilians.

The new troops are coming under no such pretense, or indeed any pretense at all since the administration chose to keep the deployment secret from the American public for months on end.

Though the number of “military advisers” is believed to be fewer than two dozen at the moment, such deployments have often served as the vanguard for massive escalations, and protracted conflicts like the Vietnam War similarly began with the deployment of a handful of advisers.

Author: Jason Ditz

Jason Ditz is Senior Editor for Antiwar.com. He has 20 years of experience in foreign policy research and his work has appeared in The American Conservative, Responsible Statecraft, Forbes, Toronto Star, Minneapolis Star-Tribune, Providence Journal, Washington Times, and the Detroit Free Press.