Guess we should never have bothered even attempting to plan those missions then, since so many things could have gone wrong? 
That is after all, the nutshell reason Benghazi apologists give for the confabulated rescue mission scenario refutes.
The analogy runs contrary to your intended use.
I respond only in terms of the fallacious argument angle, not any veracity or lack thereof regarding military missions of any kind.
Yes, because you’ve demonstrated that you know nothing about military missions of any kind.
Planning is our only assurance that things have even a snowball’s chance of going right. We don’t (luckily) know how adequate the planning was for a strategic nuclear strike on the USSR. We can though be pretty certain that a totally unprepared force, thrown into Benghazi without definition of realistic goals and lacking knowledge of the situation on the ground, has an extremely high probability of failure. Including additional casualties.
NUMBER plus ONE!!
That’s a strawman argument (as CannyDan never said the missions shouldn’t have been planned), and a false dilemma (by excluding all distinctions beyond whether anything could have possibly gone wrong, thus reducing it to a binary risk/no risk decision).
Excellent analysis - touche!
But many others including yourself have argued emphatically against it. Fact is, special operators get alot of downtime after they get qualified and posted, spending a great deal of it planning and practicing all sorts of scenarios just as Dan suggests.
That would be begging the question. Nobody ever got into any of the real details, because they have no clue what they actually are in the first place.
Have you figured it out yet?
You soured on my analysis quickly, eh? Are you actually several people posting under one name? That would explain a lot.
Nope. I was referring to the bombing missions, as were you ("…we should never have bothered even attempting to plan those missions then, since so many things could have gone wrong?), not a Benghazi mission.
Who’s argued against planning a Benghazi mission? The arguments are a) that there was not sufficient time to create a plan, gather the team and equipment and put it into action, and/or b) the threat the annex was facing didn’t justify putting more lives at risk.
Nope. Begging the question is assuming the truth of one’s conclusion as part of the argument for it being true. What did I assume the truth of? Nothing. I pointed out your false dilemma: we don’t need to know the exact levels of risk inherent in different sorts of military action to know that the levels vary, and that the level of risk can inform the decision as to whether or not to undertake a mission.
That you don’t know the meanings of the terms you’re using? Yes, some time ago.
Apparently not or else he wouldn’t have asked the question. Are you able to answer his question? Being coy serves no purpose in Great Debates. And only leads us to believe that that you have no legitimate response.
I am also still awaiting your explanation of all of the other misused logical fallacies in my other thread.
OK, let’s get that under control. That’s getting towards attacking the poster and not the post.
No warning issued.
There was no deviation in nuclear bombing plans.
Each flight of B-52s (and each boomer sub as well) had their lists of strike packages, possible routes, probable threats along the way and so on set in stone and trained for them specifically, every fricking day. Permanent rehearsal for the end of the world.
The point was two-fold : first, if the crews knew exactly where they must go, what landmarks they were supposed to look for and so on and had all that data not just committed to memory but trained into the core of their being, they wouldn’t get lost so much even if instruments failed (remember, this was back before ubiquitous GPS and sat nav. Or Google Maps :D). Second, of course, was to cut on response time and confusion about who should do what and go where when 5 minutes from now their airfields, along with most of the nation’s CC&C, are pencilled to become slightly glowing dust.
Point is, the SAC wasn’t very flexible in what they did. They planned and trained and focused 100% on “what if the Reds launched their nuclear arsenal at us out of the blue ?”, which itself had quite a few configurations but is still a whole lot more focused than “doing some high speed spec ops shit somewhere, I 'unno”.
[QUOTE=Magiver]
If the United States was attacked do you think the response time is 6 hrs? Every military base would be ashes before a plane got off the ground. The response time is measured in minutes, not hours.
[/QUOTE]
One surmises a ground assault on the United States would be made somewhat predictable by, e.g. huge fleets of troop transports crossing the Pacific ;). But since I remember being reminded a lot that America Was Under Attack !!! a couple years back, what was the response time on 9/11 ? Wiki sez :
So that’s 20 minutes for the very first 2 planes, one hour for additional birds, and two whole hours before they had any definite orders. The last hijacked liner had crashed about 20 minutes before Cheney’s decision. Oh, and
Now that’s one well thought out mission plan :).
And that’s what you get “in minutes”, stateside, when confronted with events people haven’t been preparing for : unarmed Air Force jets. But you expect better than that, much better than that in fact since you expect results on par with the Bin Laden raid, from soldiers stranded out there in Red Tape Foreign Land, everywhere on the planet ? In less than 30 minutes ? Get real.
Just a reminder. We were not told (the deaths of four Americans) was a result of a YouTube video. We were told that the deaths of four Americans was the results of heavily armed extremists and that was very clear. And as this thread has unfolded we see that the last two Americans who were killed and who’s deaths were never said to be the ‘result’ of a YouTube video or a demonstration or anything else. And the latter two Americans killed seems to be driving what all the armchair general-ing is mostly about. The Administration did not send in US Military Special Forces to whisk Woods and Dougherty away to safety. The claim is that Obama left them to die. That is a political attack and nothing more.
We need to knock that down as well as the one about blaming the attack and deaths on the YouTube video.
No one has provided a direct quote to back up that accusation.
I am still waiting.
You have already received one Warning in this thread for this type of behavior, followed by a Mod Note to stop it.
This is a Warning that if you continue to flout the rules, you will be banned.
[ /Moderating ]
For historical comparison – how long did it take Israel to plan and prep for the raid on Entebbe to rescue hostages? This is often held up as one of the best planned and best executed raids ever: how long between the time it was assigned to the planners – “Plan this; we’ll execute it” – and the planes leaving the ground?
Wiki sez :
(emphasis mine)
Furthermore :
So that’s a *bit *more intel and prep-work than what the US had on the sitch in Benghazi 
Benghazi was not a hostage situation. It was a terrorist attack.
Soooo, that would be another bad analogy.
I do appreciate you taking time to bestow such wisdom upon us.
You might note that complex military action takes time to plan and prepare for. This undercuts Magellan’s weirdly unsophisticated version of military planning.
You might further note, that a hostage situation, has fewer variables than a battle where you have no information as to the number, location, and capabilities of your foes.
If you take a moment to examine your position, I think you’ll see the error of blindly siding with everything that RW media whispers in your ear.
Can you provide a better one? That is, is there an incident similar to the Benghazi attack that you can point to as an exemplar of how things should have been handled? I’m seeing you gainsaying every suggestion, but not offering any of your own.
The OP author asked for facts and deserves to see the facts.
I’d like to know why John Mace is arguing that the CIA is not responsible for the work product it put out to Congress and the White House on September 14, 2012.
The CIA produced the word ‘demonstrations’ that were ‘inspired’ by the protests. Nowhere does the CIA or did Susan Rice or anyone else ‘blame’ the deaths of four Americans or the attack on the youTube video.
A demonstration did not kill anyone.
The CIA mistakenly reported ‘demonstrations’ took place in Benghazi where it was presumed to be ‘inspired’ by the events earlier in the day in Cairo. The CIA accurately ‘blamed’ the ‘attack’ on ‘extremists’. That is exactly what Rice repeated from the CIA talking points on the Sunday Morning News shows.
Nothing like reading the actual documents: Scroll down to page 14 an 15 to see the actual document.
Page 15 (4:42 p.m) CIA sends out a new draft for review before sending to the White House.
“We believe based on currently available information that the **demonstrations in Benghazi **were spontaneously **inspired by the protests at the U.S. Embassy in Cairo **and evolved into a direct assault against the U.S. Consulate and subsequently its annex. This assessment may change as additional information is collected and analyzed and currently available information continues to be evaluated.”
If the OP is still interested it is important to know that the CIA originated the idea that there was a demonstration that preceded the attack at Benghazi. It was not the White House that made it up to cover up the truth that it was a terrorist attack for political reasons.
Wins the thread.
True, I was actually coming back to specify that (although a more nitpicky soul than mine might make light of you anyway - what is a politically motivated hostage taking, if not a terrorist attack ?). The Benghazi attack was not an ongoing situation - first some dudes attacked and over the course of their 20 minutes or so of fighting and rocket throwing managed to set the building on fire, then the next day someone or someones rained a handful of mortar shells before disappearing back into the crowd. And that, as they say, was that.
So, given that, I’m not sure what you expect **should **have been done against that above what was done. Do feel free to elaborate.