Australian troops arrived in Somalia one month into the operation, just as UNITAF was reaching its peak strength of 38,000 in mid-January 1993. An opportunity for peace seemed to present itself as the warlords’ military capacity was temporarily neutralized. By this point, however, the intervention process stalled, as there was no plan on how to proceed. Complex issues such as disarmament and restoration of government and services continued to be outside Washington's scope, but the United States continued to treat the two most powerful warlords, Aideed and Ali Mahdi, as legitimate political players. Washington's ability to provide strategic direction was temporarily paralyzed by the handover of government from Bush to Clinton, while Colin Powell and the US military elite – already wary of the new administration's interventionist foreign policy ambitions – were effectively opposing the possibility of using the US military in anything resembling a ‘nation building’ role. In the meantime, the United Nations provided little direction on the policy level and proved unable to assume operational control of the mission – leaving the US-led military forces to play the role of reluctant and often ineffective vacuum fillers. Boutros-Ghali continued to seek national reconciliation through the warlords, while his Secretariat failed to raise an adequate civil administrative or civilian police capacity necessary to engage in institution building from the bottom up.

In the meantime, at the tactical level a wide variety of approaches to the vacuum resulted from the ill-defined parameters of UNITAF's mission and the relative autonomy for the commanders in the field. The Australians soon found themselves taking the mission beyond anything attempted by other contingents. In the aftermath of the failed intervention, the idea emerged that the Australians had arrived with ‘a fullfledged civil affairs plan’ for the reconstruction of the police and judiciary in the Bay region. This view was echoed by Walter Clarke, and also picked up by Robert Oakley and those defending American actions, or inaction, in the first months of 1993. The idea that the Australians came fully prepared for this specific mission apparently served as an explanation for the opportunities missed by the Americans in Somalia. This is a myth, however, that obscures the more fundamental sources of their relative success.