The article is devoted to the first period of the interstate military conflict in the Horn of Africa. The events of 1960-1977 are revealed. In two conflict zones. On the one hand, the buildup and manifestation of an interstate military-political confrontation between Ethiopia and the Republic of Somalia, and on the other hand, aspects of the emergence of an intrastate military conflict in Ethiopia itself related to the Eritrean issue are analyzed. Moreover, it is noted that the province of the Ethiopian Empire, and since 1974 the Republic of Eritrea, de facto was not so much an internal structure of the indicated state as a semi-legal state, fought for its independence. This process was provoked in 1945-1959. Great Britain, Italy and the UN. These world players created a situation of the unification of British and Italian Somalia into a single state - the Republic of Somalia, depriving it after the creation of those territories that were inhabited by related tribes. Thus, Western countries pushed Somalia to search for ways to unite with the territories of Ogaden and Kenya exclusively by military means. And Somalia, which was experiencing the shortcomings of all Somalia, was forced to seek a partner who would provide official Mogadishu with the means of warfare, against the background of constant help not to her, but exclusively to neighboring Ethiopia. That is why the Republic of Somalia has become an exclusively Soviet ally since the late 1960s. An example of the creation of a single Republic of Somalia and an attempt to have Western countries as an ally, and after 1974 the countries of socialism, the maritime power of Ethiopia, actually created a complex of double interstate conflict in this region of East Africa. It was in him that the status of Somalia as a country without related territories and Eritrea as the usual province of Ethiopia was fixed, which did not suit their peoples and leaders.