A handful of military losses could lose a war through public opinion after Mogadishu.

Evidence

As General Wesley Clark, who was in charge of the allied forces’ operation, later explained, the prime concern had been “not to lose equipment and minimize the loss of airships”: “I was motivated by a larger political-military rationale: If we wanted to keep this campaign going indefinitely, we had to protect our air fleet. Nothing would hurt us more with public opinion than headlines that screamed, ‘NATO LOSES TEN AIRPLANES IN TWO DAYS.’ ” Eighteen dead could well be enough to lose a war: the lesson had been learned in Mogadishu. And in the mind of the Clinton administration, the “Black Hawk Down” syndrome had revived the lesson learned in Vietnam. — Grégoire Chamayou, A Theory of the Drone, 432

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s thread on the drone operative moving between killing fields and coffee breaks, and the political aversion to risk that primes remote warfare. — connects to: A militarily victorious counterinsurgency can still lose due to non-battlefield factors; Televised images of dead soldiers dragged through Mogadishu forced US withdrawal. — I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali_ Nation…, 638; the MOC “The Fracture Engine: How Colonial Partition Manufactured the Somali Collapse”

Related

• Televised images of dead soldiers dragged through Mogadishu forced US withdrawal. (similarity 0.84)

Broader Connections

• Televised images of dead soldiers dragged through Mogadishu forced US withdrawal. #corroborates (0.90) — I.M. Lewis, I. M. Lewis, A Modern History of the Somali_ Nation…, 638
• A militarily victorious counterinsurgency can still lose due to non-battlefield factors #corroborates (0.85)