Read up on signal/noise ratio. How many persons or vehicles are there in Benghazi, even if it’s “just those areas” that include eleventy blocks ? How many of them were terrorists and/or sympathizers and/or informants ? Bonus question : can a drone tell the difference ?
They don’t know how many people in the city are hostile. They don’t know where they are. They don’t know where they have support, if they have support, what kind of support they might have. They don’t know how much of an arsenal they squirreled away during the civil war - AKs & RPGs only ? Mortars ? MANPADS ? Flak guns ? APCs ? Technicals ? How many, and where ? IEDs : any already set up ?
That shit is sort of important to know.
When you don’t fucking know, you send out troops in force, carefully and with full support. You don’t half-ass it, you don’t rush it and you don’t improvise. Especially when there’s no immediate need to (remember : the initial attack lasted a whole 30 minutes. The people in the embassy were still under threat, but no *immediate *threat).
I’m professing that the information has not been forthcoming from the WH. What is so hard to understand about that? You’re arguing it WAS done right and I’m arguing the WH won’t divulge what took place and it might not have been done right.
Is the President of the United States accountable for his actions or not?
…this is an incredibly inefficient and wasteful strategy: typical of the private sector and its want for profit. This strategy, as shown by the cites above, would not have saved any lives. It wouldn’t have gotten anyone home faster. It wouldn’t have stopped the mortar attack. The only result would have been the potential for more US casualties.
And in the real world your business dealings count for nothing. You aren’t the only person in this thread who has had to deal with logistics, managing contracts, managing customers, and dealing with life and death situations. You are no more an expert on what happened here than anyone else in this thread. You are not an authority. You need to stop citing yourself and start citing other people.
The thing is, if all the resources you wanted to be put into Benghazi were thrown at Benghazi, the absolute best result would have been virtually identical to what actually happened. At worst: more Americans would have died. This really looks like outrage for the sake of outrage. I really don’t get it. There is plenty of things you could legitimately find to criticize in the lead up to the attacks. I didn’t know much about Benghazi at all before reading this thread. After reading this thread: it looks like the Americans on the ground acted heroically and that the best decisions to save American lives were made by those with the power to do so. Nothing you have said convinces me that a different approach would have had either had better outcomes or saved lives.
(Oh, and BTW, it’s “actually getting a little scary” how much faith you have in the information processing power of a handful of dudes sitting in a RO-RO container somewhere. That’s drone warfare for you, in the Real World)
Which is why they came in in an armoured convoy, supported by the Lybian military, and only two people got killed in an unpreventable spite mortar attack. All my what if’s : vindicated.
First, there is no inefficency in saving someone’s life. We launch helicopters all day long in my city at the hint of bad auto accident.
Secondly, the mortar attack was just a real danger for the group who arrived 8 hrs later so your argument is false on that account. And what makes a mortar attack fatal is time. Discounting a lucky shot they require dialing in using a spotter. The longer people remain in one location the greater the likelihood they will be hit. If they had been extracted they would cease to be targets for mortars.
…but your approach wouldn’t have saved any lives: hence it would have been inefficient.
Your government launches helicopters all day long in your city at the hint of a bad auto accident? That doesn’t happen here. This sounds wasteful and ineffiicent. You should lobby to get it stopped.
Which argument did I make that is false? Please be specific.
Incorrect. What makes a mortar attack fatal is getting hit by a mortar round.
It now appears you are just stringing together random words and hoping they make a sentence. What you have said bear no relation to anything I said. Nothing you have said convinces me that taking your approach would have had either a better outcome or saved more lives. What part of your response to me is supposed to convince me that your approach would have saved more lives?
It’s hard to understand because that’s plainly not what you’ve been doing. You’re not just complaining about a lack of information, you are making specific claims and accusations, e.g.:
…and on and on. Either there’s not enough information to judge the decision-making process, and that’s the problem, or there is enough information, but the wrong decision was made. You can’t have it both ways: state what should have been done (to a comical level of detail, at that), and deflect criticism of your plans on the grounds that not enough information is available.
The first part of your first sentence as a basic part of your argument is false. One of the two killed had been at the Annex the entire time. You need to rewrite your point to reflect what actually happened.
We’re not interested in letting people die efficiently. If it looks like a bad accident where minutes count then everything possible is done to save the person. Best of luck if you get in an accident.
…where I live we have socialized medicine. If I get into an accident or if were to fall ill, not only am I likely to survive if it is survivable, I also wouldn’t end up bankrupt. If you want to live more efficiently, then adopt socialized medicine.
You claim that “We launch helicopters all day long in my city at the hint of bad auto accident.” This is an extraordinary waste of resources. I can’t imagine any emergency service relying on “hints” before sending into the air expensive resources. Do you have a hint line set up, where people can call up and leave hints that there might be a bad auto accident? “PSSST! There might be a bad auto accident in an hour, better send up the helicopters!” Do you have pre-cogs there as well?
He’s told you : he’s spoken with people who’ve been in the military at some point. Once, in 1960, for about 20 minutes. If that doesn’t make him a qualified expert on everything, I’d like to know what does.
So if this redundancy might lead to losing far more contracts, would you go ahead with it? That’s the thing your analogy is missing here. The purpose was to save lives, so sending people in essentially blind to hostile territory is probably a bad idea. That might be why they waited.
Oh wait, I don’t have to offer blind, pointless conjecture, that’s exactly what the head honchos in the military said their reasoning was.