Own the night or die, John Spencer says:
In three major conflicts involving forces that range from professional to semiprofessional—the 2020 war between Azerbaijan and Armenia, the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, and Israel’s campaign against Hamas after October 7, 2021—large-scale night operations have been notably rare. Outside of highly specialized units conducting limited raids, most decisive fighting has occurred during daylight. At night, both sides tend to pause, reorganize, and recover. In effect, the night is ceded rather than dominated.
That reality stands in sharp contrast to what the US military demonstrated in Operation Absolute Resolve. US forces executed a complex, high-risk mission deep inside a dense capital city at night. The operation required joint and interagency integration across air, land, sea, and cyber domains and fusing intelligence, special operations forces, and other capabilities. Power was cut. Targets were overwhelmed. The mission concluded with zero American casualties and zero loss of equipment. It was a near-flawless demonstration of a capability that takes decades to build and years to sustain.
That success is even more striking when viewed against earlier US experience. Operation Eagle Claw remains a cautionary case of what happens when night operations exceed institutional readiness. The 1980 hostage rescue attempt in Iran required unprecedented joint coordination and depended on a complex, multiphase plan involving long-range infiltration, helicopters, and clandestine ground movement deep inside hostile territory, much of it planned for execution under conditions of limited illumination and degraded visibility. Mechanical failures, severe dust storms, and navigation challenges reduced the assault force below the minimum required to continue the mission. During the withdrawal from Desert One—a staging area where the mission was aborted—a helicopter operating in degraded visibility collided with a transport aircraft, killing eight US servicemembers. Eagle Claw exposed serious deficiencies in joint planning, rehearsal, and integration. Strategically, it revealed the limits of American power projection in denied environments and directly drove sweeping reforms, including the creation of US Special Operations Command.
A decade later, Operation Just Cause marked significant progress but also underscored how darkness magnifies the challenges of identification, control, and coordination. The 1989 invasion of Panama involved approximately twenty-seven thousand US troops and successfully dismantled the Panamanian Defense Forces within days. The operation deliberately began at night, with major assaults initiated around midnight and continuing through hours of darkness, requiring near-simultaneous airborne and ground attacks against multiple objectives across Panama. During the opening night of the operation, including the seizure of Torrijos-Tocumen International Airport and other key sites, fratricide occurred amid limited visibility, compressed timelines, and the rapid convergence of aircraft and ground forces. The Joint Chiefs of Staff history of the operation highlights the extraordinary command-and-control demands created by this nighttime tempo, illustrating how darkness, density of friendly forces, and speed of execution strained identification and coordination even within an increasingly capable joint force. Just Cause demonstrated growing US proficiency in large-scale night operations, but it also showed that darkness punishes even small lapses in control, communication, and situational awareness.
The difference between those operations and more recent successes was not technology alone. It was mastery earned through relentless training, professionalization, and a force-wide expectation that fighting at night is not exceptional. It is preferred.
The Venezuela operation had 7 American casualties.
Col. Macgregor refers to SOCOM as boutique forces, and rightly so. They can only be used for small actions that have a high probability of success, and low casualties, and under conditions of full spectrum US supremacy. They are tiny, and usually deploy as squad size units. They are on the ground only momentarily, and any actual fighting is at least a partial mission failure.
As soon as you want to seize and hold land, you start at the battalion level, and move on up to the army group level.
P.S. The Venezuelan operation failed. The Maduro regime is still in power, Maduro is a national hero, and US oil companies want nothing to do with Venezuela oil. There may be some behind the scene payoffs and agreements, but that possibility remains to be seen. The naval blockade is already past its use-by date, and random piracy of oil tankers will achieve nothing other than a world wide tanker war, all against all.
Night actions are great for raids, but they are not sustainable in a prolonged war, except for specialized troops. Everybody has to sleep sometime.
So, sneaking works well at night, especially when one is allowed to ride in and ride out? Sure. Why would it not be different?
Indeed.
Suvorov, when on the subject of Tukhachevsky’s style of “strategical prowess” and covering flanks in Shadow of Victory (his book on Zhukov), mentioned a little incident on 23-31 Dec 1940, at the Red Army command conference. It went like this:
[Translated from transcript.]
Perhaps this one gets different when there are actually some solid enemy forces ahead, too.
Bob Sykes says:
Well, the operation is successful, on its objectives. But of course it was inherently counterproductive. Venezuela had faction tensions, but now those were allowed to play out. Also, the locals (and others) got a fresh and clear-cut object lesson that submitting to the demands from US does not improve the situation, as they simply won’t take “yes” for an answer and continue doing whatever they did.
Is he using “Joint Chiefs of Staff” as an adjective here?