Further, the officer who was supposedly told to “stand down” (though, again, he says he wasn’t) was in charge of a team of 4 men, based at the embassy in Tripoli. Another team from Tripoli was sent, and took mortar fire and suffered a KIA.
This 4-man team working out of an embassy isn’t going to be able to pull off Magiver’s dramatic air-dropped rescue narrative. Where would they get the gear? The vehicles? More men? The team that was sent had to charter a private plane.
And had no ground transport when it arrived. They waited at the airport from 1:15am until 4:30am. A result of a hasty departure lacking planning and coordination. Then arrived at the annex in time to experience – or perhaps to trigger – the mortar attack that killed one of their number. Meantime, an overwhelming local force was mobilizing, and arrived at 6:00am. Here I’ll take “mobilizing” to encompass all those preparations (recon, gather appropriate forces, prepare transport, brief the troops, etc, etc) that we’ve been explaining all thread. That effort had been underway all night, and took that long to effect. Locally. Without the arm’s-length across-international-borders problems thrown in.
Shit like this really does take a bit of time.
Dratted edit window!
Human Action, in case I wasn’t clear, my post was intended to support and amplify your point, not contradict it.
Duuude, they weren’t just four men, they were four SPECIAL FORCES OPERATORS, who had 24/7 oversight over the area (don’t ask me how), close air support (don’t ask me from whom), armed drones (which weren’t available) and were leveraging their advanced planning (done on a napkin, en route, once, for 30 minutes, in 1920). And as such could have EASILY controlled an entire foreign city to prevent any mortar strikes whatsoever using their high speed low drag tactical, air-dropped moped-activated force fields.
I mean come on, I do this every day and I’m not even in the military : all I have is a private Xbox !
Obama just wasn’t up to the task of letting these ultimate badasses go do their thang, man. Face the facts. Take your lumps. Everybody died down there, it was a massacre. How can you be so cavalier with the HARSH TRUTH ?!!
Magiver and Acewiza’s arguments here have no merit here because the best defense that could have saved Dougherty and Woods from the five round mortar attack was a structural safe-room that could accommodate thirty people, be defendable from direct assault and withstand mortar and rocket attack. The next best defense would have rapid evacuation armored vehicle kept on site and ready to depart immediately at all times.
The CIA are big boys and had to know there was some risk doing what they were doing in Benghazi
after the revolution.
So the calls made not to evacuate in light and sardine packed trucks that could be exposed to ambush or IEDs may have saved more lives than the two that were lost defending the Annex.
The decision to depart the Annex under heavy Libyan security was likely the best option in real time made by all leaders involved.
what’s dramatic about an air drop? Plane flies over, door opens and out they go. The gear comes form the same place they station at. This is what they train for.
The police responding to the Boston bombing had no idea what they were walking into. It didn’t take 6 hours to head toward the attack. They didn’t hide in a closet for 6 hours planning for contingencies. The contingencies are what are planned for in advance. Their training by default involves working through various contingencies. They have a playbook to work with because of this process. This isn’t happening the next block over to them. It’s a multi hour flight. There is your planning time. Gates pulled a generic number out of his ass without substantiating it. The situation was pretty straight forward. Nobody was kidnapped and spirited away requiring advanced intel. We knew where they were and where the assaults came from. They needed to land nearby and support the people on the ground militarily long enough to extract them.
You haven’t substantiated what they needed 6 hours for. All you’ve done is parrot a generic statement made without support.
Does this mean they would be successful? Unknown. Could the situation change while they’re en-route? Yes. Was it possible to deal with it if they didn’t launch. No. The attempt was not made.
What’s dramatic about D-Day? They get off the boats, they walk across the sand, they’re in France.
Going in without pants.
When you ask a question as part of your argument Magiver you should respect the answers that you have already received. An air drop anywhere is dangerous. I would not ask a fellow America who is serving in the military to risk their life on any mission if the action we expect them to take was not necessary. And in the case of Benghazi, dropping reinforcements from the sky was absolutely not necessary.
A risky and dramatic military reinforcement drop from the sky **was not necessary **in real time because:
(a) at around three hours after the beginnings of an attack on Americans that day the fighting had stopped or slowed very significantly. Thirty Americans were still alive at that point because (1) The CIA and Libyan security forces were staving off an ‘overwhelming’ attack and (2) surveillance Drones were patrolling over the CIA Annex area and did not see large numbers of militants gathering to prepare for a major attack.
(b) The threat from the enemy that killed 2 Americans about four hours into the lull that followed the first round of attacks was three of five mortar rounds that hit the roof of the CIA complex. As I told you long long ago the dramatic paratrooper scenario you espouse in hindsight would have done nothing to neutralize that threat.
In fact had the paratroopers arrived unscathed at the CIA complex by 5:00 am they would quite possibly been killed or wounded by those same rounds that killed Woods and Dougherty.
So under your argument for a sky-diving mission launch that is based more upon political bias than supportive facts you would ask those who serve this great country of ours to risk their lives when it is not determined to be necessary to save the lives of others already in harms way.
The best response was to get the Libyans in to escort the Americans out exactly in the way it was done.
What you owe us if you wish to continue with your argument is an explanation as to how the paratroopers drop in and immediately neutralize or remove the mortar positions that the enemy had set up.
And since you cannot produce that explanation it is obvious that you have no argument at all other than the fact that you can type it here again and again.
Sorry! Double post.
Magiver, your post #446 is pathetic in its divorce from reality. A paratroop insertion is nothing like the cartoon vision you seem to have fixed in your head, even if it involves some magical load of gear. Paratroop drops are problematic enough in daylight, onto a cleared landing zone. Dropping into a city with the expectation of then forming up into a fighting unit with gear in hand is ludicrous, as I discussed upthread.
As for your analogy to police actions against criminals, it is equally ridiculous. We’re talking about “heavily armed extremists” in a foreign country undergoing a violent civil war. The situation, to cite the proverbial understatement, was fluid. Domestic criminals in a law abiding society are by their very nature few in number and surrounded by a populace supportive of the authorities. They are armed with, at most, hand carried small arms limited in number and total firepower. Criminals are seeking to escape, not to press an attack against the authority. They will not be re-armed, reinforced, nor find a safe haven protected by others armed and sympathetic to their cause. Cops can be pretty certain “the perps” aren’t carrying RPGs or mortars. While an armed fugitive can be quite dangerous to individual police trying to capture him, the outcome is never in doubt. Terrorist incidents including the Boston bombing are no different.
There have been one or two famous incidents where a couple of criminals armed with semiautomatic weapons and body armor have rampaged against police for an extended time. The police were stymied until they brought up heavy weapons, and used recon and planning to outflank the criminals. Again, time, recon, and reflection were the critical elements. This in an environment composed totally of “friendlies” and wherein the authorities had virtually instant access to any conceivable escalation in weaponry and personnel.
Ruby Ridge and Waco are examples of police and/or paramilitary policing that didn’t go really well even after extensive recon and planning. So these certainly don’t guarantee success. But I think it is common knowledge that in endeavors throughout life, lack of intelligence (in the military sense) and planning almost always guarantees failure.
But you, in direct contradiction to actual military experts, cling to your magical fighting force carrying magical weapons that will somehow be mission appropriate even though nobody knew what the mission would be when they boarded the aircraft. They’re going to plan on board, use alchemy or teleportation to exchange the gear they brought for the gear they now think they need, then parachute out of magical aircraft. Maybe while sitting on magical motor scooters! Did you know that not every airplane is suitable for making a paratroop drop? You might be able to charter a 747, but you don’t just slow one down to 110 knots, descend to 3,000 feet, and “door opens and out they go”.
And your force is going to then magically form up on the ground, after extricating themselves from rooftops, spires, utility poles and lines, and all the other crap they’ll be landing on. Their gear will presumably then magically appear at their feet, somehow also spirited away from the multitudinous traps the city has for anything falling from the sky under giant sheets of cloth. Then they’ll hop on their magic motor scooters and ride off to a magical engagement with unknown forces occupying unknown locations and armed with unknown but assuredly heavy weapons! I guarantee the result will not be magical. Maybe their survivors will arrive in time to be themselves extricated by the 50 vehicle Libyan rescue force.
Lets see, D-Day involved hundreds of ships and planes, thousands and thousands of troops and was a massive logistical juggernaut of supplies that required a tremendous amount of coordination and planning.
Compare that to the insertion of a single plane full of specialized troops who train for missions requiring the expertise of snipers, intelligence gathering, extraction etc…
Again, the police in Boston didn’t require 6 hours to respond to a terrorist attack. They simply responded. They assessed the situation as it unfolded. They didn’t begin to have the expertise of a special ops group nor would they have the planning time available to the special ops group via the flight time. Not only did the special ops group have that time to prepare they had people sitting in offices providing technical support and intelligence skills.
This is just silly.
The Police in Boston did nothing more than drive or walk across streets that they knew by heart to cordon off an area that was already roped off for a race so as to let ambulances and their CSI units in to the area to handle the blast site.
Later, when the Tsarnaev brothers made their presence known by a carjacking, police from multiple departments were called in to search a twenty block area.
So you are trying to compare hundreds of police who are based within eight miles of a location, most of whom probably know the area pretty well, all of whom could arrive in their own cars within 15 minutes of an alert, looking for two untrained people with the wholehearted cooperation of the local citizenry against an air drop from hundreds of miles away by soldiers who have no knowledge of the local terrain to fight an unknown number of insurgents carrying military grade weapons amidst a populace that includes both friendly and hostile citizens.
You are really desperate to make your point. You are failing.
There is nothing remotely magical about an insertion. Even suggesting it needs daylight or a cleared landing zone is bizarre. I’ve already disproved the inaccurate statement about the difficulty of launching aircraft or crews quickly. It’s done all the time commercially and to suggest a fast response team from the United States military couldn’t do it is barking. There is nothing remotely difficult about it for an average crew who doesn’t train for it. Walk out on ramp, throw stuff in plane, leave.
The Boston police didn’t know what they were up against and didn’t begin to have the technical expertise or ground support that a military operation would have let alone a special operations group TRAINED for it.
Nobody suggested a case where recon and planning not be used. Just the opposite. This strawman was burned down a long time ago and you’re now flinging ashes.
They already knew what the mission was prior to boarding. They had a known location and number of people to extract. They knew the exact layout of the area and the buildings they were to extract them from. They had real time surveillance of the area. They had the ability to bring air support with them and to direct an explosive charge of their choosing to within inches of a target.
you keep throwing out childish wording such as “magic” and “teleportation” and then you go on to suggest a 747 needs to slow down to 110 knots. A 747? Why would you even suggest something that stupid? You can’t parachute out of a 747. They would use the planes they train in and are available for use. It could be a C-130 or an Ospry or a handful of other aircraft designed for such missions. And there’s nothing magic about motorcycles. I gave a cite showing they were part of the inventory of special ops groups. You keep posting as if special ops teams don’t exist and they have to invent the wheel.
This isn’t WW-II with non-directional parachutes. Surely you’ve been at an air show where they land on marks on the ground using para-glide chutes they can control. This is what they’re TRAINED to do. They’re landing with night vision systems so they can see and avoid obstacles. This is old technology.
Really? You have it on good authority they knew that all the bombs were detonated and there were no snipers? Cite?
…well, since you are insisting on non-sequiturs that have no basis in reality that bear absolutely no relation to the issue at hand:
You don’t seem to have a problem with US Troops parachuting into another sovereign nation to protect US citizens. Going back to the scenario I mentioned earlier: Chinese citizens were killed during the 9/11 attacks. What would be the reaction of the average New Yorker to the sight of Chinese Special Forces parachuting into New York streets, fully armed, with armoured personal carriers, who had inserted into the United States with the intention of protecting its citizens? Would they get the same reception as the police in Boston going door to door looking for a couple of suspects?
So now we are comparing New York to Benghazi? 9-11 to the Benhazi attack? Let’s compare my quarterbacking skills to Peyton Manning’s while we’re at it, shall we?
An inability to recognize the fundamental distinctions and nuances of the confabulated rescue scenarios is telling in terms of the equally sophomoric disregard of the basis for the disaster in the first place.
Some are easily distracted. Attention span issues?
…I’m not sure why you have an issue with my post. I clearly stated that, like Magiver’s post my post was a non-sequiturs that have no basis in reality that bear absolutely no relation to the issue at hand. Why are you questioning my post and not his? What does the actions of the Boston Police have to do with Benghazi?
It’s also worth noting that despite all the planning and other advantages, the Tsarnaevs did kill another police officer after the initial bombing.
Where does the airplane go after the special forces team has jumped out of it? Do they meet up later at the airport; which airport, where? Do they need to be refueled, does the pilot have his credit card? Once the team reaches the consulate, or the annex, or wherever it is they’re going, then what; do all of the American personnel just walk to the airport from there?
Throw WHAT stuff in plane? “Assault weapons”? (<sorry, couldn’t help myself>) There isn’t a generalized loadout, already waiting and packed (again- pallets, bags, hand carried, separate chutes, etc), appropriate for a specific mission.
The Boston police knew they weren’t going to encounter a group of unknown size of extremist fighters of unknown skill, experience or training but operating in a war zone where many highly experienced and highly motivated fighters existed. And Boston police knew they weren’t going to encounter regular or irregular troops heavily armed with unknown weapons (nobody knew they had mortars, for example, until that unfortunate moment). And, as tomndebb said, the local cops knew the area like the backs of their hands. Not gainsaying the courage of Boston’s finest, but the situations are not at all comparable.
No, the mission was totally unknown. The military would hardly know the regular and irregular personnel associated with a CIA base like “the annex”. They wouldn’t know who to extract and who to leave under cover if they encountered them. They might have known the buildings’ layout, but they couldn’t know where the attackers might be at any given time. The attackers weren’t being resisted, they could move around at will. “Real time surveillance” doesn’t help much when the attackers will know you’re coming long before you get close, and can move to ambush you anywhere along your route. Your drone can only be in one place at a time, but the bad guys could split up into several different ambush parties.
And air strikes? Are you kidding? The drone wasn’t armed. You think calling in a fighter to strafe people in a city of half a million is a workable idea not guaranteed to result in unacceptable civilian casualties? Or maybe a Hellfire missile “within inches” of attackers grouped outside an apartment house or the like? These would be exactly the kinds of acts of war we and our allies had been studiously avoiding throughout the Libyan civil war.
You’re the one who kept talking about getting a civilian airplane aloft in 30 minutes, not me.
They didn’t need to invent the wheel. They needed to know if they should bring a wheel. Or a mask and fins. Or skis. You know, as in “mission-appropriate equipment”.
I’m quite aware of the modern parachute. Are you aware of the landscape of a city? Ever been in one? Looked up? See all that shit? Buildings, poles, wires, balconies, antennas, and all the rest? Those are death traps for parachutists. Even if your force was able to avoid every entanglement and land safely, all six of them, on the equivalent of Main Street, their “gear” would be coming – or going – on unguided chutes and would become decorations scattered across the city, a spectacle for remark by the civilian population come morning. If it wasn’t appropriated and sold into the black market first, of course. And unless they were sitting on those scooters while parachuting down, they’ll never see them or ride them into battle.
(That’s actually a joke. Parachuting with any kind of “kit” becomes more and more complicated with increasing weight and bulk of said kit. Extra pouches of ammunition are one thing, but motorcycles, or shoulder-fired missiles, or similar gear beyond an M-16 pose serious problems if “carried” by a parachutist. Everything needs to be strapped on, hands cannot hold gear when the chute ‘pops’, and the hands are needed for that ‘control’. Meantime, all that junk hanging from the trooper constitutes an impediment – to him personally, and to his smooth controlled glide path. In practice, only minimal gear goes down with/on a parachutist. Your guys are gonna arrive with rifles, nothing more.)
Here, lemme hold your shovel for a while. You’ve dug yourself a deep enough hole already. Time to quit digging now.