tomahawk6 said:
I participated in Grenada, Panama and then Desert Storm. None of those ops were even close to being a failure. Somalia ? That was a matter of strategy and tactics. Logistics was a success.
No offence, of course, but I attended an excellent presentation, given by a US officer in the 1980s, that walked us through some of the problems from the Grenada invasion. It just underscores how really, really tricky these kinds of operations are if we don't plan thoroughly and exercise regularly. And even then ....
Grenada Invasion Plagued by Mistakes, 2 Reports Say
By DOYLE McMANUS
March 13, 1985 |12 AM
WASHINGTON — The U.S. invasion of Grenada in October, 1983, once trumpeted by the Reagan Administration as a triumph of military planning, was actually plagued with foul-ups that required commanders on the ground to improvise in order to avert disaster, two Pentagon reports disclose.
https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1985-03-13-mn-22111-story.html
OPERATION URGENT FURY
The Planning and Execution of Joint Operations in Grenada
12 October - 2 November 1983
During an appearance on “Meet the Press” on 6 November l983, General Vessey
candidly summarized URGENT FURY in these words:
“We planned the operation in a very short
period of time--in about 48 hours. We planned it
with insufficient intelligence for the type of
operation we wanted to conduct. As a result we
probably used more force than we needed to do the
job, but the operation went reasonably well.
...Things did go wrong, but generally the operation
was a success. The troops did very well...”151
To improve the planning and execution of future joint contingency
operations, the Joint Staff studied the operation to learn how a “very
short period of time” for planning and “insufficient intelligence”
caused some “things [to] go wrong.”
https://www.jcs.mil/Portals/36/Documents/History/Monographs/Urgent_Fury.pdf