When Somalia invaded the Ogaden in July 1977, Dire Dawa was the prize that mattered most. Wikipedia’s Ogaden War article gives three reasons: the country’s second-largest air base was there, the city was the crossroads into the Ogaden, and it sat on the railway to the Red Sea. Losing it would have cut the air force’s reach into the east and Ethiopia’s supply line to Djibouti at once.

The decisive assault came on 17 August 1977. A Somali tank battalion pushed through the Ethiopian defences to the airfield and, in the words of the Ogaden War article, temporarily made it non-operational, destroying the air traffic control and as many as nine aircraft on the ground. Wikipedia’s separate article on the battle, citing Tom Cooper, counts ten destroyed — one Northrop F-5E of the 9th squadron, hit by an RPG, eight Saab B 17s and a T-28 — and elsewhere gives nine destroyed and at least one damaged. The range here is therefore 9–10.

Yet the attack failed. The battle article says the attackers ran out of steam and fled, and that the city was never seriously at risk. Its casualty figures are internally inconsistent — 79 Ethiopian soldiers killed in the first attack in the text, 150 in the infobox — and give at least 700 Somali dead and 21 tanks lost; all are Wikipedia’s figures, drawn from Cooper and the historian Gebru Tareke. The sources reached do not say how many Ethiopian sorties flew from Dire Dawa itself during the war, or where the F-5Es that won the air battle were based.

Ethiopia bought 47 Saab B 17A dive-bombers and flew them from 1947 to 1977. Their last unit was the 3rd Squadron at Dire Dawa. According to Wikipedia’s Saab 17 article, by late summer 1977 the squadron had been deactivated and its remaining twelve aircraft stored at the base.

That made them targets. Eight of the stored bombers were destroyed by the Somali attack in August 1977, the same figure the battle article gives. Two former Ethiopian B 17As survived to be recovered in the 1990s; a South African collector bought them with a large batch of ex-Ethiopian aircraft and shipped them to Lithuania, where their fate is unknown since his business collapsed.

The Soviet airlift of 1977–78 brought 48 MiG-21MF and MiG-21UM fighters, and Dire Dawa became a MiG-21 base. A 2007 order of battle cited by Wikipedia lists the 3rd Air Regiment here and another regiment at Debre Zeyit, with 18 fighters and six trainers between them; by 2014 Flight International reported every Ethiopian MiG-21 retired.

In the intervention in Somalia that began in December 2006 the base had foreign tenants. Wikipedia’s article on the 2006–2009 war says American gunships, including helicopters and the AC-130, flew out of Dire Dawa and Diego Garcia to support Ethiopian troops, and that AC-130s flying covertly from Ethiopia struck retreating Islamic Courts Union convoys. After the American role became public, the Ethiopian government halted AC-130 attacks from its bases. The number of sorties and casualties from those strikes are not given in the sources reached and are not offered here.

What is at Dire Dawa now is harder to say. The airfield is shared with Dire Dawa International Airport, whose single asphalt runway, 15/33, is 2,679 metres long according to Wikipedia, citing DAFIF. The air force still uses it: the DHC-6 that crashed near Harar Meda on 30 August 2018 with 18 people on board had taken off from Dire Dawa. But the government publishes no order of battle, and none of the sources reached names a unit or an aircraft type based here after the MiG-21s left. Until one does, this page lists the base as active and its units as unknown.