As long as we’re playing 100% hindsight, let’s say a platoon of Deltas arrive on scene within an hour of the start of the attack, rappelling in off helicopters or whatever. What do they do when the mortar attack starts, or do we assume their arrival is so awesomely awesome that the mortar team runs away?
Well, that’s easy. By this point, the joker has probably gotten killed, and the tough-as-nails latina probably also got it too. But there will be one person on the team - maybe the bookish kid who wasn’t supposed to be there or the reject guy who was a salvage project for the cap’n - someone will have had some kind of object that the others were raggjng on him about. Maybe a laptop or a lucky baseball… doesn’t really matter what. But they’ll hear the whistle of the incoming mortar shell, and they will fling their talisman object up into the path of the incoming shell, detonating it harmlessly in the air above them. Easy. As easy as a night jump fire fight extraction rescue planned faster than a pizza delivery.
I meant Col. Steve Austin, USAF.
I didn’t invent the scenario. It was created earlier in this thread. We couldn’t go in because something might go wrong up to and including a traffic jam.
Picture this. Focus on it. Remember, it’s not 1942 it’s 2013. We use GPADS (Guided Precision Aerial Delivery Systems). Here’s a video of them dropped from 12,000 feet and landing in a tight grouping.
What’s stupid is making statements without researching them. I’ve explained to you that I’ve been in the logistics business all my life. We have a lot of ex-military people in this field. Damn if we don’t talk shop from time to time. We naturally send each other cool videos related to our jobs.
you continue to go on without a clue about anything you’ve discussed. Picture yourself researching something for a change before posting because you seem to be using WW-II documentaries as a reference for current technology.
We live in a technological age where the average person can pull up a satellite view of anywhere on the planet down to level of a car. This is what the public has access to. Not the military, the public. Anybody. We have the ability to navigate to any point on the planet down to that level. I can fly my plane with an old non-WAAS enabled GPS down to a runway and be plus or minus the width of the plane which is enough to fly it blind if needed. This is OLD civilian technology. OLD. Pilots can fly with a FLIR optic system that lets them see through clouds or blinding sunlight and haze. Again, this is old technology available to civilians.
You need to pull your head out of 1942 and research what you say before you hit enter. Loading a plane with trained personnel is not a problem. . Loading basic military gear is not a problem. Stocking the gear at the bases ops groups are assigned to is not a problem. Planning landing sites (plural) with real time surveillance is not a problem. Navigating from one location to another is not a problem. All of this uses old technology. This was not a complicated mission. Special ops groups bring better equipment, training and intel to the fight.
[QUOTE=Magiver]
Remember, it’s not 1942 it’s 2013. We use GPADS (Guided Precision Aerial Delivery Systems). Here’s a video of them dropped from 12,000 feet and landing in a tight grouping.
[/QUOTE]
Ah. More snazzy gear that’s naturally supposed to be lying around in Spain à propos of nothing, right ?
You do realize Google Maps is not a real time thing (you can tell because the people are not moving, you see, and it’s not a global flash mob event), and that StreetView is done using *cars *rather than satellites ?
In grainy, low-def black-and-gray, and quite infamously fuzzily enough to confuse a camera with an RPG and a sports bag with an AK-47, yes. But that was from an helicopter flying close, I’m sure those magical FLIRs of yours are much better from above cloud cover.
But it takes time. But it takes time, even assuming the gear happens to already be on base. But it is if we expect SF squads all across the globe to be anywhere close to your expected G.I. Joe levels of mission readiness and gear-queerdom. But it is considering the real time surveillance isn’t. But it is if you’re going to cross the air spaces of various nations, friendly as they might be, with a plane filled with troops and weapons without taking a moment of your busy schedule to warn them, give them your flight plan, give them the time to relay it to the people of theirs who’re tasked with shooting down “rogue” planes who just might be in the process of pulling 9/11 2 : Continental Edition and all that stuff.
And Special Forces don’t magically come with better intel 'cause they’re such outstanding badasses, either. As for their training, they’re not and not expected to be über experts at everything they do, and saying “they train for it” is rather meaningless. SF do have some basic training covering a whole lot of bases in case they need to pull some of that shit at some point, true enough, but mostly they spend their time just being in very good shape and good at working together as a tightknit group.
To give you an example, your average ultimate badass might get a few months of SERE survival training as part of their initial formation in case they have to get dropped in Columbia for some gnarly shit and munch on moss and snakes for a while. Then they get deployed somewhere, and they don’t do jungle survival in Spain for one reason or another. Guys who are deployed in South Korea might brush up more on their jungle shit, but they won’t be doing much Alpine recon work. And so on.
Similarly, while I expect most spec ops team know their way around SCUBA gear, I wouldn’t expect them to be better at it than Marine divers who do this shit all of the time. Same thing for parachuting, which as I mentioned early in the thread is not exactly a common thing for the military any more. Maybe because it was such a chaotic clusterfuck in practice.
That is the ultimate question that both Magiver and Acewiza are at present avoiding at all costs. I have observed often that if you wish to determine which side is wrong on a particular issue then look for the points or arguments that one side avoids with a great deal of regularity in the discussion.
Woods and Dougherty were killed by three of a total of five mortar rounds that were fired during an eleven minute barrage after about a three hour lull in the fighting.
The proper and safest evacuation of thirty Americans from the CIA compound was performed by the CIA and US Military Security personnel on the scene accompanied by a large Libyan security force escort out of an area that had weapons such as he mortars.
I would be that shoulder fired rocket launchers and IED’s in the roads they would have had to travel were a major concern.
Magiver’s Rambo drop was absolutely unnecessary and it would be risking more American lives for a mission that did not need to be…
Because of the mortars.
Magiver refuses to acknowledge or address the point about the eleven minute mortar barrage that killed Dougherty and Woods.
Huh. I didn’t know the John Jay dining hall had gone so “organic”.
BAH ! Columbia, Colombia, is it my fault you colonists named everything after the same dude and confuse everyone ? Why can’t you use sensible and unique names like Georgia or Alexandria ?
Having sufficiently belabored the fictional scenarios for carnage and/or salvation, allow me to return to the point.
No one here dismisses the fact that American military capabilities are awesome. (“Damn right! ‘Mericuh! Booya.”) I and several others simply contend that, on that specific night, there were no additional measures that could be effectively employed with high assurance of success and low probability of failure within the time window that obtained. Recall, there was already a rescue mission underway. It went through all the planning, outfitting, mobilizing, and transporting steps needed to provide high probability of success. It arrived at 6:00am with an overwhelming force that relieved, rescued, and extracted the embattled personnel. And it did so without additional loss of life, and without “collateral damage”. Both foresight and hindsight confirm that no other forces capable of performing the extraction were available, equipped, or transportable to the annex any sooner than that. The small force that did arrive was incapable of performing an extraction. Nor could it deter the mortar attack that killed one of its number and one of the standing garrison. Any additional forces that could have been thrown in (whether by parachute, rappel, or Mister Scott’s transporter) could only have reinforced the defensive position, and provided additional targets for mortar fire.
Any contention that the White House “did nothing” or “left Americans to die” is total bullshit, contradicted by the facts.
Thank you CannyDan. Well put.
Yes, they probably do.
Yes, yes they do. They spend most of their time making sure their gear works, and they know how to use it. When my brother was the Intel Officer for SEAL Team 4, and he was OOD, I went to see his ‘office’ on a slow holiday weekend. We went into his intel shop to watch movies on the big screen. Twice, he had to go do OOD type duties. He had to hand me off to the TED (Typical Enlisted Dude) who happened to be there. Once I got handed off to the PO1 who was manning the desk, the other time I got handed off to a PO2 who was calibrating his satellite radio. With the desk dude, we didn’t have much to talk about. The PO2 dude was happy to describe for me what he was doing. Until I hit on how it works. Then he shut up. Just like they all do.
What does that tell you? It tells you that you guessed right.
No, mostly they don’t. I’ve never seen a SEAL working out. Ever.
You have a rather bizarre idea of the training, and the job they do. My brother was in Columbia, except he never set foot in the country. Nor did any of the rest of the team, while he was with it. He only flew over it, taking pictures, and got combat pay for doing that.
And your ideas don’t remotely resemble it, either.
This, for example. It’s just so incredibly wrong, it’s pathetic. Try learning about what you’re talking about before spouting, OK?
no it’s not snazzy gear, it’s what the military uses. Not that you had a clue before I showed you. And Where do you think they keep the equipment they train with? Chicago? Anchorage? or the place they’re stationed and train at? I’m going with the last one.
Yes, Kobal2, I know Google Maps is not a real time thing. You’re questions are as inane as your knowledge of current military equipment. I referenced it and the other types of technology to show you what is available to the public from satellites. That’s the crappy resolution we as the public get for free.
again, I’m showing you the crappy stuff used commercially. Theses are passive systems that don’t require infrared illumination.
this is what is so mind boggling. I haven’t posted anything high tech. All of this is off-the-shelf technology.
this is the most mind boggling thing you’ve said yet. How can you not be aware of the current level of surveillance technology we’ve achieved. We have satellites, cameras, drones of every imaginable size, sat-phones, and the ever popular NSA. This mission had drones and people on the ground who could provide live intel on top of all the other layers of information. Every inch of the city has been photographed. They would have pee’d their pants in WW-II to have this kind of information.
you’re done giving examples. You’re completely clueless about logistics, communications, the military or anything else related to this topic.
You keep talking about planning as if they have to sit down and think everything through from scratch. That’s what their training consists of. Planning. They create and research different scenarios to overcome. They learn different methods of insertion, setting up defensive and offensive positions. etc… All their scenarios would come with alternate plans if the situation changes. You act like their day consists of folding parachutes and shooting up beer cans.
The Google Maps images you’re talking about do not necessarily come from satellites.
They don’t fudge up the resolution before handing over the shots. Military satellites are also not watching everywhere, all the time. In fact, during the Cold War the Soviets became somewhat adept at planning the things they wanted to keep secret to coincide with times where there we no sats around, which is why the US needed to get with such thing as, um, drones.
I was referring to “Collateral Murder”, the Wikileak of an AH-64s FLIR recording. Unless your contention is that Apaches use the “crappy commercial stuff” ?
But they still need to specifically have it on hand. Or do you expect every spec ops squad out there to have, at all times, paradropping equipment for bikes, and GPS-guided paradropping tanks, even though they don’t exactly use that stuff on the regular basis ?
Yes. And it’s vastly over-stated in popular media.
Drone, singular. Again, just because “the military has this stuff !” is true in a general sense, doesn’t mean it’s true in the specific one. And just because you can find an article about air-dropped mopeds, doesn’t mean they are common or available on every US base.
Same thing for drone surveillance : there’s a finite amount of drones to cover the planet with. There was one, singular, unarmed one available to fly over Benghazi in that time frame. That’s just how it is.
That’s cool. But if the photographs updated in real time to show where heavily armed people are setting up mortars, that would be better.
That’s rich.
I’m actually not sure what you mean, or what the anecdote is supposed to illustrate. But um, thanks ? I guess ?
I know, right ? Bunch of slobs 
I’m not saying that’s what they do (outside of that one Clancy book, anyway), I’m saying that’s what a large part of the SERE course is about : survival and orientation in the wilds when cut off from all support, living off the land.
Friendly tip in passing, BTW : don’t bet money on a guy who’s been through SERE not daring to ingest something particularly gross, be it a hairy caterpillar or a quart of piss. According to my Marine buddy they *always *will :).
That’s not something I, or apparently anyone in the thread, said. Reported for fake quote.
Any thoughts on post #481, Magiver? I’m willing to stipulate a platoon-sized special forces units gets on site within an hour of the start of the attack, without incident. What’s their defense against mortars?
No fucking shit. Really?
I believe I mentioned the idea of extracting them as their objective. That would be the logical goal. Why would you think their arrival is suppose to be awesome? get in and get out.
It sounds to me like a number of people think the operation has to be approved before launching it. It needs to be launched so a decision can be made down the road. That’s not 20/20 hindsight. This is a basic logistical problem that doesn’t require a great deal of planning to get in the air. They have a clear rescue objective and a location to navigate to. Deciding on the best route to take and where to take up positions is something that can be done en-route. They can look at the layout of the area and decide which allows the greatest access and which ones to avoid.
This was not done. The 20/20 hindsight here is that they were never launched. There was never an option on the table.
Pardon me but this doesn’t seem to have a lot of credibility.
Ex-Corporal Duality, USMC
So… they rappel or parachute in within an hour, in armored vehicles? Sounds like a basic logistical contradiction to me. Unless you’re suggesting they don’t evacuate in armored vehicles, which invites attack from street-level ambushes and IEDs. We the parachuting-in special forces members going to walk the embassy staff out? To where?
Or were they going to land in larger helicopters and evacuate by air? Are there suitable landing sites in the area? Ones the escorted staff can get to without exposure to sniper fire?
Can we just assume 100% hindsight in which the U.S. government knew exactly what was going to happen and chose not to act accordingly, because that seems to be the standard you’re demanding, that a rescue team be instantly scrambled with all the right gear and vehicles.