[QUOTE=CannyDan]
“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.
[/QUOTE]
Not to mention, drones aren’t “real time surveillance” for real. There’s a significant lag between the drone and its pilots sitting in a container three countries away, and another delay between those blokes and the people on the ground three countries away.
And that’s if they can establish direct communications, or communications at all, in the first place.
But they have night vision ! So they can, you know, *see *the cell tower before they impale on it :D. But not know how far it is because depth perception and NVGs don’t go well together. Does parachuting rely on depth perception in any way ? Eh, probably not.
I mean come on, these are special superhuman operators who’ve done like three jumps from a tower and one from an actual airplane way back when during their one week of parachute training, how hard can it be for them ?
Why are you inventing silly scenarios? (More bombs and snipers are not silly, but pretending that that changes the fact that hundreds of police who knew the terrain were not already on the site certainly is.)
Even if there were more bombs, they still had to close off the area and there were plenty of police already there to do it. Even if there had been snipers, they would have still had to close off the area, then respond to the snipers if any appeared–and, again, there were still lots of police who were very familiar with the terrain already in the location.
If I am asked to run down to the supermarket and pick up a package of morels, I can do that in about fifteen minutes. If I am asked to go into the woods and find 8 ounces of morels, I would have to spend a lot more time and effort to get a collection basket, go tromping into the woods looking for a good site, more time finding and picking them, and then still have to walk out of the woods. You are comparing a trip to the market against a field trip to harvest wild edibles and your insistence that they amount to the same thing is ludicrous.
So, Magiver, is it your plan to keep repeating nonsense until everyone else in the thread tires of correcting you, so that you can have the last word? Is that your win strategy for this debate?
Because pretty much everyone reading this thread can’t believe you’re serious.
In any case:
Picture the flight. Imagine it.
They team grab bags, pallets, vehicles and shove them onto a transport. Picturing it? Okay, say they take off in minutes, without even having a meeting about the plan. They don’t even know how many enemies they’ll face, what weapons they’ll have, or even if the plane they’re on will be shot down by SAMs. But the team boards the plane. They somehow gas up their vehicles, load their weapons, strap on grenades and body armor in less than the time it takes to get the preflight check done.
Now all experts think this is a bad idea, but we’re gonna risk all these men’s lives and ignore the experts to do it your way.
Okay, three hours into the fight, the team a dressed, kitted out and ready to land in the city. Picture it. Focus on this now.
They open the back of the plane, and they push the vehicles out one by one on the rollers, the parachutes deploy and the team follow quickly.
Picture this. Focus on it. The unguided parachutes carrying the vehicles float down. They land randomly in an area. That area has buildings, power lines, back yards, rooftops and perhaps swimming pools.
Do you think it’s a good idea to deploy an unguided parachute dropped vehicle as the means for the team to travel around the city? Also, motorcycles offer no protection from bullets. Or even thrown rocks. Also, how are you going to evacuate anyone on a a motorcycle?
Why is that not a profoundly stupid idea?
Okay, going on. The team land and are scattered because they are landing in a city with buildings, they perhaps aren’t in sight of one another. They have to avoid power lines on a night drop. Do you think parachuting into a city at night is a good idea, or a bad idea?
I could go on, but please think about this, just because you can’t imagine what could go wrong, doesn’t mean your ideas are good. It might mean your imagination isn’t.
The difference is that Boston is a city friendly to the police, and the terrorists are few in number and almost certainly poorly armed.
To suggest that operating in a city friendly to you, and dropping into a war zone where an active large scale battle is underway is desperate.
You are suggesting that recon and planning aren’t used, because you think recon and planning are things that happen instantly in real time and are trivial. There was one drone in the area. One. Do you expect it would somehow be able to magically see all the bad guys and count them?
They didn’t study the maps. They didn’t have any real-time intelligence as to the location of the attackers. They had no vehicles to do an extraction. They had no safe way to enter the city. They had nothing but your insistence that the GI Joe cartoons you watched as a youngster amount to a PhD in Military Bad-Assery.
And as for air support, you can’t just launch missiles into someone else’s city. With no idea of what is happening. The civilian loss of life would be epic.
You are suggesting magic because somehow, all the motorcycles are recoverable. See above, and picture how dropping 12 motorcycles on unguided parachutes into a city would work.
This isn’t dropping them into an open desert. It is a city with buildings, roads and walled compounds. To think that they’d have their bikes in any amount of short time is nonsense. It would take hours if it was possible at all. Picture it. Really imagine it. You just landed your parachute at night in this city: Google Maps
Picture it. Work it though in your mind. You’re on foot, in a town with armed militants and you’re gonna run around peeking over fences looking for where your motorcycle landed. Actually imagine it. Does it seem sane?
In a perfect, open area, they can land close together. But when landing in a city, with power lines, buildings and light poles, it is much harder to come in. Those parachutes come in at an angle, not straight down. Picture coming in at an angle in a built up city. Picture trying to navigate different height buildings, missing power lines, missing water towers as you swoop in at an angle under 45°. Actually imagine it, instead of just rattling off stuff.
[QUOTE=Lobohan]
You are suggesting magic because somehow, all the motorcycles are recoverable. See above, and picture how dropping 12 motorcycles on unguided parachutes into a city would work.
This isn’t dropping them into an open desert. It is a city with buildings, roads and walled compounds.
[/QUOTE]
Oh, fine. So they parachute a few miles from the city instead, big deal. Since the distance is greater, instead of bikes we’ll just fill a glider with jeeps and land it on the same DZ so they’ll get them instantly and be ready to roll in minutes. They’ll need good coms with the drone crew and of course the Consulate itself, but their equipment is top notch ! Besides, it’s not like they’re going to face crack troops, it’s just unwashed militias down there. And then… excuse me for a second, I’m having the weirdest déjà vu :).
I’m go to ask you to ground your scenarios in specifics.
Where are these troops coming from? Who are they?
How are they going to extract about 30 people?
Already well-covered; Boston and Benghazi are apples and oranges.
Well, even the mysterious Fox News anonymous “whistleblower” said that:
Now, this fellow is contradicted by many people, but even he says it was a matter of 4 to 6 house to get the team that was training in Croatia to Benghazi, and he only said they’d be able to “facilitate” an exfiltration, declining to get into specifics.
Please explain how your scenario gets around this.
Could they suffer massive losses parachuting into a city at night and trying to fight their way to the CIA annex? Yes. Could they somehow extract 30 people? Perhaps you can explain that.
It was “dealt with”. The forces already at the annex fought off the attempt to storm it. The attempt at getting more troops into place was made, and successfully (they came from Tripoli, remember?).
Yes, that is too bad. The same thing happened under Bush, and Clinton, and Reagan, and Carter. Is this incident uniquely bad, or do those not count for some reason, or what?
Please explain how these things you speak of are similar to the Benghazi attack. Cite the explicitly communicated security warnings just prior to a terrorist attack that would make your statement valid or true.
Do you have it on any authority at all that the Libyan terrorists didn’t have anti-aircraft missiles? Your magical airdrop would turn into a magic fireball.
You don’t think Magiver is the reincarnation of Montgomery, do you?
Read the thread. Any more explicit description of unrelated historic events would be, IMHO, a hijack.
You ask a lot of questions, but don’t pay any attention to the answers given. You keep making cryptic assertions that you fail to substantiate with either cogent argument or cites. I’m bored with you. When come back, note the name of this forum, and bring some.
HAH ! You’re dished, old boy. I’ll refer you to your own post :
That’s not just prior ! Gotcha ya !
Joke aside, there’s also the large-ish pachyderm in the room, namely the Bush admin filing Bin Laden related memoes in the circular cabinet during the run up to 9/11.
What you’ve got is further proof the State Department has demonstrated a pattern of negligence WRT security of its facilities - the basis of my premise for Benghazi for dummies.
Well, on top of your fact finding apparatus, I regret to inform you your sarcasm meter is on the fritz. Have you tried turning it off, then back on again ?
Because if one side sends in Steve Austin, then the other side will send in the Rock, then the first side sends in the Undertaker, and so on and so forth and pretty soon we have a battle royal on our hands.
