Operation Eagle Claw: bang, not a whimper

The War Nerd has gone way downhill from his prime, but I still read him anyway, because even so-so War Nerd is still pretty good. And sometimes he still throws out something thought-provoking:

"So, would the Osprey have helped? Hell yes. If we'd had something like it in service, the rescue mission might not have ended so disgustingly...

"Replay that raid with the Osprey as basic transport and you get a very different result. The Osprey carries 32 troops at a cruising speed of 250 mph; there'd be no need to land in the middle of the desert, because it can be refueled air-to-air. The flight would have landed directly at the staging area near Tehran, without any need to touch down in the desert during a sandstorm. A fleet of Ospreys instead of CH-53s would probably have ferried Beckwith's guys safely to their staging base outside Tehran.

"To be honest, I don't think the mission, at least from that point on, ever had a chance; it was James Bond crap that required this big American force to infiltrate Tehran in trucks and rescue the hostages, then fight its way back to the planes. It was like some mid- 80s screenplay that would've starred Patrick Swayze.

"Nobody would have made it home alive, but at least they would have died killing Revolutionary Guards at a nice, satisfying 20:1 ratio, with our air cover turning Tehran into a toasty lesson on why you should be nice to American diplomats. There's failure and there's failure, and with better transport this could've been a glorious failure instead of a painful (really painful, I remember!) joke."

Okay, obviously the Osprey wouldn't be on the table in 1980. But (handwave) let's say everything goes much better than iOTL -- all the helicopters arrive on time, the tanker truck isn't noticed, yadda yadda.

Now, Eagle Claw succeeding has been done. But what about a more spectacular failure?

The War Nerd is correct to call the rest of the plan "James Bond crap": it involved smuggling Delta Force into downtown Teheran in trucks, knocking out the Embassy's electrical power, cover fire from circling helicopters, storming the building, and then a fighting retreat (with hostages in tow) to a nearby sports arena for pickup from the air. The helicopters would fly to an Iranian Air Force base that was supposed to be captured by Rangers, so that pickup planes could fly in. It was an ugly kludge of a plan, always more likely to fail than to succeed.

But let's say it's a big, explosive, bloody failure: Delta Force makes it to the Embassy, gets the hostages out (losing some), fights its way to the stadium (losing some more), then gets trapped in the stadium. (Say one chopper gets shot down and the rest chicken out.) At the end of the day most of the hostages are dead and so is most of Delta Force. They do manage to take several hundred Iranians with them, mind.

Now what?


Doug M.
 
That would be a rather interesting thing wouldn't it?

So American Special Forces would have just shot up downtown Tehran, and done something that we're imagining as Somalia in Tehran? Thousands of Revolutionary Guards flooding downtown Tehran, hundreds killed, dragging dead hostages and special ops through the streets?

Would this force more military action from the United States, with several dozen Americans now have been killed in the streets of Tehran? What were the options that the Americans had for more military action? Perhaps much more open support for Saddam Hussein, American military advisers actually in country in Iraq?
 
Now what?

First off, for pundits it would confirm the fact that USA is incompetent in military affairs, compared to smoothly running Soviet war machine. This was, after all, kind of accepted wisdom in editor pages of European newspapers until Operation Desert Storm which did not feature crappy US tanks manned by a bunch of losers being decimated by an army with eight years of combat experience manning Soviet hardware meant for an actual war. So, in this respect, things won't be different.
 
IIRC the Ch-53s were so unreliable that they had actually exceeded their Mean Time Between Failure by the time they got to Desert One. So the question in my mind is 'What's the Osprey's MTBF?

I wonder how many people realise that there was also a Desert Two closer to Tehran. There can't have been that much chance of flying into two different spots in a hostile country without anyone noticing can there?

Similarly, if the Ospreys fly straight to the compound where the hostages are being held, I know they can probably avoid radar, but what's the chance of no-one seeing or hearing them on the way? They can only be in Iran for one reason and the telephones were working. IMO the US force would quite likely arrive to find an alerted Iranian infantry company barricaded in and they can't level the building cos of the hostages.

And IIRC the official report blamed inter service lack of cooperation as the cause of failure. Ospreys wouldn't change that.

And IIRC the Soviets had compromised the mission via the Walker Spy Ring. Ospreys wouldn't change that either.

So all in all, odds are still against it IMO.
 
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