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Outline The Events Of Operation Eagle Claw

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Operation Eagle Claw
The purpose of this paper is to outline the events of Operation Eagle Claw, the mistakes made, lessons learned, and additional outcomes. Operation Eagle Claw was essentially doomed from the beginning. President Jimmy Carter hastily authorized a Joint forces operation which inevitably failed due to lack of understanding and training between the forces. There was no single point of failure for the mission; it was across the board, from training to planning, intelligence collection, and time.
Planning
November 4 1979 was the beginning of a disastrous mission for the United States. On this day 52 Americans were taken hostage in the United States embassy in Tehran. The United States spent months trying to negotiate the release …show more content…

Republic 4 (EC-130), already loaded with a portion of Delta Force Soldiers, had filled three of the helicopters on the ground and was in risk of not being able to make it to refuel itself. At the same time Bluebeard 4 needed to get fuel, and Bluebeard 3 had to move from behind the EC-130 to allow Bluebeard 4 access. While Blackbeard 3 tried to move out from behind the EC-130 the dust cloud created made it difficult to see anything to include the ground controller. Blackbeard felt as though he was drifting back so he gave forward stick toward his ground controller and ran into the EC-130 carrying fuel in front of him. The impact of the RH-53 helicopter into the EC-130 caused an explosion killing eight service men, injuring 2 other pilots. During the frantic evacuation the remaining RH-53 pilots recovered any classified documents from their helicopters and boarded the EC-130s leaving five RH-53s almost completely …show more content…

Jimmy Carter would have almost certainly been re-elected, seeing that the failed operation is the reason he believed he lost the election. Also pulling off the first operation would have resulted in no need for the follow on rescue missions, saving time, money and lives. although has helped create USSOCOM

References
"The Desert One Debacle" – The Atlantic, May 2006 (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2006/05/the-desert-one-debacle/304803/)

Modern Warfare: Special Operations, Operation Eagle Claw – The first part of a series of articles on Kuro5hin

Pictorial overview (http://www.helis.com/featured/eagle_claw.php)
Airman magazine – Archive of interviews with surviving participants (https://web.archive.org/web/20060308114952/http://www.af.mil/news/airman/0401/hostage.html)

The Holloway Report – The official DoD investigation into the incident (https://nsarchive2.gwu.edu//NSAEBB/NSAEBB63/doc8.pdf)

Charles Cogan, Desert One and Its Disorders, The Journal of Military History 67.1 (2003) 201-216 (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/40443)

Charles Tustin Kamps (2006). Operation Eagle Claw: The Iran Hostage Rescue

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