The admiral told me not to raise the question. But in the second-year PDTCs, I asked the chaplains during the discussion of humanitarian intervention missions to identify the mission in Iraq. The answer that came back at San Diego, Kitsap, and Naples was “There is no mission” or “It keeps changing. Who knows?” At NSA Capodichino, a voice piped up, “Mission creep,” and many of those in the room nodded or repeated “Mission creep” followed by a disgusted grunt.

Mission creep is mission expansion or alteration when the original goals change or when, as the chaplains liked to say under their breaths, “somebody in Washington moved the goal post.” Mission creeps have a history of failure, not infrequently leading to disastrous outcomes. The relatively recent example that stuck in the minds of the chaplains in Iraq was the one portrayed, if somewhat inaccurately, in the movie Blackhawk Down: the debacle in the so-called Battle of Mogadishu in 1993 that cost the lives of eighteen American soldiers and left another seventy-three wounded. The Somali mission was originally humanitarian, called Operation Provide Relief. It then became Operation Restore Hope when the Marines, with support from the Army's 10th Mountain Division, were sent in to provide protection for the humanitarian efforts. The mission morphed into trying to disarm and arrest Somali clan leaders, particularly those of the Habr Gidr clan, and create a stable democratic state. The U.S. attack on a compound where the clan elders were meeting killed sixty-three elders and is generally regarded as having provoked the deadly battle in the streets of Mogadishu in October 1993. After the Somali missions, the Clinton administration was reluctant to enter into internal conflicts in Africa. Consequently, the United States did not become involved in the United Nations’ missions during the civil war and genocide in Rwanda that we used in the PDTC to provide vivid focal incidents for the discussion of humanitarian intervention issues.