Grenada

Today is the 26th anniversary of the invasion of Grenada.

The story itself is both mundane and, in a sense, not all that relevant:

Problems between the US and the Caribbean nation began in 1979 (while the Cold War was still in effect) when a bloodless coup placed the pro-Marxist Maurice Bishop as the Prime Minister, which led to strengthened ties between Grenada and communist nations like Cuba and the Soviet Union.
Bishop was eventually murdered in October of 1983 during a power struggle with hard-liners in his own movement, creating a breakdown in civil order that threatened the lives of American medical students who were living on the island.

Of course, the real issue was with the new landlords; with the Marxists came Cuban and Soviet money, equipment and help, much of which went into expanding Grenada’s main airport – which, according to the intelligence of the day, were intended for Soviet patrol planes.

Which brought up quite a few sensitive issues. Jimmy Carter had lost a fair amount of political capital with his fairly impotent reponse to the revelation that a Soviet infantry brigade had gotten stationed in Cuba.

The Reagan Administration was also aware that international law and custom – for example, the “Monroe Doctrine” – was a lot like copyright and trademark law; if you didn’t defend your brand, the courts’d assume you had let the whole thing lapse.

And in the wake of the Bishop murder and the overthrow of the sitting government, anarchy reigned on the island; the government instituted a “shoot on sight” curfew which was an obvious threat to the 800 American medical students attending school on the island.

Between the violence, the anarchy, the communists and their long-standing record of expansionism in the region brought not a few Caribbean governments to consult with Reagan.

Those were the motivations. The media and Reagan’s critics later claimed that the bombing of the US Marine barracks in Beirut, two days earlier, was a motivation too. However, all the relevant decisions had been made, and some of the troops and ships were already underway for the invasion when the news of the bombing impacted.

And so on October 25, the invasion went ahead. Marines landed along the beaches; the Rangers parachuted in to seize the airfields. SEALs and Deltas attempted surgical strikes against key Grenadian leaders.

It would seem to have been Goliath versus David, in many ways; over 7,000 US ground troops, backed by thousands and thousands more in the air and at sea, went ashore to tackle about 1,500 Grenadian militia and 700 Cuban military engineers.

But the fog of war, and some grave deficiencies in the US military, caused all sorts of problems. Boats carrying SEALs flipped in rough seas, killing several commandos even before they got into action.  Airborne Rangers dropped on the airfield got pinned down and had to fight a vicious pitched battle.  Delta commandos ran into stiff resistance.  It took US troops – Marines and a big chunk of the 82nd Airborne Division – weeks to finally mop up the island.

Since then, the left and many of Reagan’s critics have sought to portray Grenada as a trivial sideshow at best, a joke at worst.  But the battle led to three epochal changes.

The most trivial was the sense that the US was starting to shed the legacy of Vietnam and Desert One – that the US had the nerve to do what it needed to to safeguard its interests.  Along with the stiff (but largely unpublicized) reaction to Iran’s provocations in the Gulf that happened at about the same time, and the Gulf of Sidra incident and the bombing of Libya that happened three years later, the US got the sense that we were no longer a bunch of beaten dogs.  America got its confidence back.

But there were many effects that ran much deeper.  It had long-lasting, near-immediate (in bureaucratic terms) effects on the US military.  Grenada, its operational success notwithstanding, was not an especially successful operation.  It was marred by faulty intelligence on the one hand, and entrenched interservice rivalries on the other.  Coming hot on the heels of several other US military failures – Beirut, Desert One, the Mayaguez incident and Vietnam – Grenada was the tipping point that led to sweeping, comprehensive reforms of the US military.  These reforms led eventually to the Goldwater-Nichols legislation, which led to a major reorganization of the US military, whose major effect was to force the armed forces to operate more as a joint entity rather than four competing sets of interests.

Most important of all?  Notwithstanding the various critics who tried to paint the operation as a trifling diversion, the USSR got the message.  Soviet foreign minister Anatolii Dobrynin, as related in Dinesh D’Souza’s biography of Reagan, recounted after the fall of the USSR that the Grenada set the Politburo back on its heels.  Accustomed to nearly a decade of post-Vietnam demoralization and Carter-era dithering, Grenada served notice to the Soviets that the day of America the facile pushover had ended.

Anyway – kudos to all you Grenada veterans in the audience.