Military Review English Edition July-August 2016 | Page 65

CBRNE

I

n April 1980, a U.S. military operation of utmost
strategic importance spectacularly failed before
the entire world, bringing embarrassment to the
United States, unease to our allies, and celebration to
our adversaries. Eight Americans died without having
ever been engaged by enemy forces in the operation
that was aborted long before it was close to its objective.
In the aftermath, Iranian television jubilantly showed
the charred remains of the eight blackened American
corpses during ensuing press conferences.
Operation Eagle Claw had aimed to rescue fifty-three
Americans in two locations in the heart of Tehran who
were taken hostage in the 1979 Iranian Revolution. This
complex operation integrated operators from the Army,
Marine Corps, Navy, Air Force, and different intelligence
agencies; forty-four aircraft from the different services;
thousands of gallons of fuel; and a convoy of vehicles for
insertion into a hostile city of over four million people.
Forward reconnaissance had marked two locations in the
desert, known as Desert One and Desert Two, for aircraft
to land. C-130 aircraft from the Air Force, loaded with
the rescue force and fuel bladders, would rendezvous with
Navy helicopters piloted by marines at Desert One, where
they would conduct refuel operations without illumination.
From Desert One, the eight helicopters would ferry the rescue force to Desert Two on the outskirts of the city, where
vehicles would be covertly staged to begin the infiltration
early in the morning to the locations harboring the hostages.
Expecting a firefight once the Iranians became aware of the
rescue attempt, helicopters would arrive at a nearby soccer
stadium to exfiltrate the hostages and rescue force to a nearby airport seized by Army Rangers so that a second fleet of
fixed-wing transports could fly everyone to freedom.1
Leading up to Operation Eagle Claw, the teams involved from the different services and agencies had never
operated together or conducted a full mission rehearsal.
Mission command confusion and mission complexity
contributed to the crash between a transport plane and
helicopter resulting in American deaths, abandonment of
equipment and sensitive information in the Iranian desert,
and ultimately, the cancellation of the overall mission.
Analysis of the operation in its aftermath concluded
that failure could largely be attributed to the services
having brought together specialized, functional, stovepiped organizations on an ad hoc basis. Gen. Stanley
McChrystal would later comment that, “At best, the
plan was a series of difficult missions, each a variable
MILITARY REVIEW  July-August 2016

in a complex equation. At worst, with an ad hoc team,
it called for a string of miracles.”2 The needed miracles
did not happen, and the resulting failure would forever
change the way the United States approached organizing, training, and resourcing special operations.

Applying Lessons of the Past to
Better Prepare for the Realities of
the Operational Environment
This article examines the Army 20th Chemical,
Biological, Radiological, Nuclear, and Explosives (CBRNE)
Command’s efforts in 2014 to 2015 to organize, train,
and resource for CBRNE operations in order to achieve
the Nation’s weapons of mass destruction (WMD) and
CBRNE objectives. These initiatives are a conscious effort
to avoid ad hoc organizational solutions that could lead to
mission failures similar to Operation Eagle Claw.
Given the nexus of ideology, technology, and
CBRNE materials employed by state and nonstate actors, the authors offer that WMD may be better viewed
as a subset of the more encompassing term CBRNE,
which more accurately reflects anticipated mission sets
and serves as a broader lens for force employment. We
suggest that dealing with future operational environments in accordance with recently published strategic
guidance would best be accomplished by reorganizing
Army CBRNE forces and regionally aligning them in
preparation to execute their critical mission sets.

Multifunctional CBRNE Task Force
In order to evaluate the possibility of effective
multifunctional CBRNE formation employment, the
20th CBRNE Command developed and implemented
a multifunctional CBRNE task force (TF) concept to
synchronize the synergistic capabilities of our chemical,
biological, radiological, and nuclear (CBRN) forces
with those of our explosive ordnance disposal (EOD)
forces and nuclear disablement teams. The CBRNE
TF concept underwent continual evaluation at the
Army’s combat training centers (CTCs) and during an
Army-wide Network Integration Evaluation to identify
critical capability gaps and challenges.3
To increase our understanding of those gaps, and to
aid in the development of solutions for them, the CTCs
provide an optimal tactical environment for assembling
the CBRNE enterprise’s senior leadership as part of the
20th CBRNE Command’s “Scientists in the Foxhole”
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