Benghazi Attack for Dummies.

Great Debates
1041

No.
A gunship can mean either a helicopter like the Apache (able to hover, accurate short-range telemetry, helmet-targeted chain gun with multiple thousand rounds as a main weapon, some rocket pods to taste) or, in this particular case, an AC-130 Spectre.

An AC-130 is, basically, a large 4-prop supply plane repurposed with as many fuck-off guns as it can carry and fire without tearing itself apart. Miniguns, howitzers, artillery cannons, the works. Lots of specialized optics too. Its job is to draw lazy, SLOW circles around a target and pound it to smithereens. Since it’s a prop plane originally designed for long range cargo lift, it can do this for a long, long time and pack enough ammunition to take over Paris.

OK, bad example ;).

So no, an F-16 forced to zip by at a couple hundred knots just to prevent stalling, guzzling gas like it’s cool and pissing away all its 20mm cannon rounds within 3 seconds can not serve in the same fucking capacity.

sigh Remember how we’ve already discussed this ? And there weren’t any tankers available in the timeframe ? How you had no clue what “ferry range” meant, and so on ? Scroll up, it’s still there.

I also reckon Lybia might have been a mite peeved had the US elected to drop a handful of Mk. 82s on one of their major population centres on the grounds that “this truck might have been terrists !!1”. But that’s just me.

Oh, and dropping JDAM that way requires a specific targetting pod, else the bomb’s target has to be keyed in by hand (typically before the mission, since buildings don’t move), or at the very least designated by ground troops. Which there weren’t any. So provided the training F-16s even had those pods available and could mount them instantly (sure, why not ? Fuck it) that’s one more hardpoint that’s not lugging a fuel tank, on top of the bombs themselves.

But don’t let logistics get in the way of your war porn.

First of all, NATO is a tremendous clusterfuck at the very best of times. You honestly wouldn’t believe the red tape, even by military standards. They don’t do unexpected, fast response well, to say the least. Even in active warzones, with central planning out the wazoo and readiness up to here, achieving successful combined arms endeavours between assets from different countries is a small miracle.

Second, It’s not about having the odd tanker on hand in Italy. It’s about having one ON SITE, ideally parked halfway to Benghazi before the F-16s even take off. Tankers are slow. They’re fat and filled with … something. Possibly candy floss ? I forget. Not to mention that they don’t keep tankers filled with their tasty candy floss cargo at all times and ready to go, for obvious reasons. And fueling the refueler takes time. If you think about it for about half a microsecond, you’ll understand why you can’t launch F-16s at the same time as the tankers supposed to refuel them.

The point is : you simply can’t have your F-16s chock full of standoff guided bombs without a lot of preparation and ready refueling, which you can’t get in any relevant timeframe, much less in your proposed mad scramble to get ANYTHING SOMEWHERE TO DO SOMETHING !!1
That’s not how the military works.

And you certainly can’t keep those F-16s coming from 4.000 miles away zooming around over Benghazi for hours on end (because they *really *don’t get that kind of MPG) just in case there’s a mortar squad somewhere… that they couldn’t even find anyway. You expect one (1) drone to cover an entire, sprawling city ? In real time ? They’re not magic. It’s 2 guys in a cargo container with a laggy, grainy camera.

But of course, we’ve already been over this a thousand times. You can lead a horse to water, but you can’t make him reconsider politically motivated, entrenched cognitive bias.

An F-16 is not a loitering weapons platform.

1042

No, it’s launching all available assets and utilizing what you can when it’s available. They didn’t know how this was going to play out. It’s simply not possible to guess at what is needed because time limitations prevent going back and starting over. The best way to ensure success is to bring all the tools available to the task. You don’t send a repair truck with one fitting and wrench and hope it’s what you needed.

If you read through the report you’ll see all kinds of mistakes that were made by the state department and the various agencies involved. The embassy security was understaffed, the embassies were poorly laid out, there was confusion in communication, and the regional assets were badly planned. The only bright spot was what appeared to be the President’s blank check approval to rescue them.

If they don’t honestly go back and rethink what went wrong it’s going to happen again.

1043

These are exactly the same thing in practice.

Unless elucidator is talking about sending a troupe of mimes, in which case that’s probably against the Geneva convention.

1044

I don’t think you grasp how a gunship works but yes, it’s designed to rain down led in a confined space.

It can lay down enough fire to kill off a small attack which is what was involved. Again, looking at the report it was rejected because of time yet they had no idea what time frame they were working with.

Libya approved a team coming in. It was in the report. They asked that they change to civilian clothes so as not to be seen as a military operation. They approved our military intervention in the matter.

they’re based in Rome Italy.

they were 1000 miles away. It’s truly not rocket science to hang something on a rack and get it airborne. There’s really no point in planning for… anything if it takes all day to put something in the air. It doesn’t make any sense at all to launch something out of the United States and then claim they didn’t have the time to get something close by in the air. One statement shows planning for the unknown and the other is a “dog ate my homework” excuse.

what party does the military belong to? They were given a green light by the President. How’s that political? And I’ve cited Hilary’s statement of regret so you can’t hand wave that off. The security of the embassies fall under the Secretary of State and they reduced staffing in a very unstable location. Nobody is claiming she walked out of a meeting and decided she needed 8 people from Benghazi to clean her pool. But the security failures are hers to own. That’s where the buck stops. I am accusing her of trying to gloss it over with a story about protests.

Anything that has a rack is a weapons platform. It’s why we’re able to take a B-52 and use it in place of an A-10 to kill tanks. Our whole strategy of weapons has been to make them “dialable” and cross-platform compatible. The days of building a plane around something like a Phoenix Missile are gone. We’ve also continued toward standoff and deliver technology and now we’re combining that with drone technology.

Looking at the report the F-16 was rejected because of time. What part of “they didn’t know what the timeline was” do you not understand? The correct decision was to launch the planes so there were options available. It doesn’t matter if in 20/20 hindsight it would have been a waste of money.

1045

In Magiver’s scenario, you wouldn’t actually need a tanker for the F-16’s at all. All you have to do is press up, down, up, down, left, right, square and you get infinite fuel. Easy!

1046

Magiver for Michigan governor! Next time Michigan State students start burning couches in the street to celebrate a football win, he could disperse the crowd by having the National Guard fly fighter jets over the rioters.

1047

The report contradicts you, in the very section you quoted:

“Begin to prepare fighters”, is not “launch fighters with only their 20mm cannons in case that turns out to be useful”. The report does not state that the aircraft should have been sent, but rather that they should have been readied for a support mission if one was needed, which would entail getting tankers airborne, and loading the F-16s for close air support.

That’s what you’re advocating. You’re saying it’s better to send the truck with one wrench (a 20mm cannon) in case that turns out to be the one you need, than to wait a bit and load all your wrenches.

1048

You know Magiver’s position is weak when even he is arguing against it.

1049

Rabbit season

1050

Let’s take a look at some of the representatives who are responsible for this report:

Buck McKeon - A military hawk who said he would rather see tax increases than any cuts to the defense budget. An 11-term Republican from California who gets a 96% approval rating from the American Conservative Union.

Mac Thornberry - Most likely the next Chairman of the House Armed Services Committee. He’s criticized Obama for not supporting the use of US nuclear weapons against non-nuclear countries. Also has a 95% ACU rating.

Joe Wilson - “You lie.” 'Nuff said.

Doug Lamborn - Signed a letter urging a government shutdown unless Obamacare was defunded. Refused to attend the 2012 State of the Union because he doesn’t “even want to be associated with [Obama]; it’s like touching a tar baby.”

Duncan Hunter - Accused the DoD leadership of “theatrics” in proposing radical and unnecessary defense cuts in order to argue against sequestration.

Clearly, these are no friends of the Administration. And yet they put out a report that pretty much concludes that the Administration has told the truth when it has said that there was no way to rush military aid to Benghazi any quicker than it did. Why do you suppose that they are, on this one part of the subject, agreeing with Obama and his DoD leadership, when you contend that much more could have been done? Are they stupid? Are they being blackmailed? Are they part of a cover up?

1051

So Magiver, asking military personnel to change into non-military clothes before responding very locally to a very local situation in order to disguise the presence of US military is the same thing as approving the bombing and strafing of a major population center? A population center that wasn’t, in point of fact, actively hostile to the USA (beyond that problematic very local group)? Were they gonna spray paint FedEX on the sides of the F-16 to make it too look civilian?

Yes, let us rush to employ possibly the worst blunt instrument for urban terrorism --that being an F-16 that is low on fuel, flying at 200-plus knots, armed with 2.5 seconds of cannon rounds that are aimed by pointing the plane at the target (an interesting trick in the urban environment while flying close to the deck, no?) and maybe some air-to-ground missiles that likely didn’t get programmed with the new, super-secret firmware that assures they target only trucks or cars occupied by actual ‘bad guys’ and not just random residents of the neighborhood. Or just drop some dumb bombs around the annex, what the heck! Somebody will die, and we can call them attackers. Who’s to know? They’ll all be confused by the sound of afterburners.

Yeah, more of a great plan there.

1052

Magiver isnt gonna submit to facts. The facts have been overwhelmingly against him for months. This is a matter of faith.

1053

Yes, in the same way that when I accept an offer to have a beer with a coworker after work, I implicitly approve of them crashing on my couch for the foreseeable future and fucking my hypothetical underage daughter in the ass.

Yes. That’s still some distance away from Benghazi. I know the Med. looks small on Google Maps, but it’s not Delaware.

Oh, so only 3 times the combat radius, then. No big.

There’s not much point in scrambling fighters that can’t reach their target provided the laws of physics remain the same for the duration of the flight, either. Which is as safe an assumption one can still make in these troubled times.

I totally can. Watch me.

So which is it ? Did she admit critical failure with her regret line, or did she gloss over it ? You can’t have it both ways.

Loitering. Focus on that word. It’s not a silent letter.

With the distances involved, you’ve either got an F-16 with 500 rounds of 20mm cannon and nothing else, with enough fuel left for *maybe *a couple of passes if the pilot makes them quick ; or you’ve got for real A/G ordinance (that can’t be dropped, not really), a fuel reserve and a long string of tankers all the way to Italy, which all need to get to their spots first (or the F-16s have to crawl at their pace on the way in, which is the same thing practically speaking).
Again, you can’t have it both ways.

They knew that the ~4 hours needed to get fighters out there was much too long to be of any use in addressing the initial mob attack. Within that kind of timeframe, either the attack was repulsed by the personnel on site and the Lybians (which it was), or only rubble would have remained.

And it kinda does matter because if you expect the military to immediately SEND EVERYONE at every mote on the radar, including stuff that cannot possibly reach the mote or conceivably have much, if any, effect on the mote’s status, your tax burden is going to have to increase 90.000%.

1054

Oh great Og, now you’ve done it! Given them a mechanism! All that is required is to suspend the laws of physics!! We know they’re capable of believing this, they already use it for evolution, anthropogenic global climate change, “teh gey is a choice”, and other matters. Now you’ve let the cat out of the bag and they’re going to apply it to military matters too. We are all lost! Lost, I tell you!

1055

Sorry if this has already been covered somewhere in the previous 1000 posts, but why would Hillary think it makes her look better to say that they couldn’t defend against a spontaneous protest by civilians, rather than a preplanned attack by hardcore terrorists?

1056

Because we would be attacking a mob of innocent protestors with a couple of ner-do-wells mixed in. This was election fodder material which reflects back on the President even though he’s the one person who made the right decision. Look at what follows after this. Hillary is replaced by John Kerry. There isn’t even the need to publicly throw her under the bus. She leaves because it was fun but she’s moving on. The cover story is to get through the 30 day gap before elections. And that would have worked except for the storyline which was acted upon by arresting the movie producer who supposedly caused the protests.

If they had just backpeddled after the election they could have avoided all the fallout. Fess up to your sins and you will be forgiving. Or put another way, you got elected to your last term so there’s no point holding up an investigation. These are the problems that occurred at Benghazi and we learned from it (cough, State Department not me).

1057

it’s exactly where you suggested they be located. Halfway between the F-16 base and Benghazi.

It’s half the ferry range. This was not a fighter role. They’re not engaging other aircraft or maneuvering. It’s 2 hrs at mach .8. And as I pointed out, there were tankers in the area that could have supported them. Do understand what support means? What’s the alternative if there isn’t a tanker? They refuel locally as needed.

I expect the same competence I see in commercial aviation and at military bases. I haven’t suggested anything beyond what is normally done every day. I’ve either worked at or kept a private plane at dual use airports for most of my adult life. It’s not rocket science to get a plane off the ground.

They were given a blank check by the POTUS and they didn’t exercise those options consistently. Again, they launch a team from the United States which is exponentially farther away but decide against closer options.

1058

Pull the other one.

1059

I meant halfway across the Med. The combat range of an F-16 is 300 nm. Rome to Benghazi is ~700. So you need at least two pit stops still, with probably one over Rome as well.

And if you want continuous loitering F-16s over Benghazi for… I don’t know how long, actually, since you harp on how they didn’t know the timeline in advance - in your parallel universe are the F-16s still doing donuts over Benghazi just in case ? - then you also need a constant stream of F-16s flowing in to relieve the first wave and so on, which means even more tankers… Look, let’s just say organizing that kind of mission from 1000 nm away is not trivial.

You specified stand-off munitions, smart missiles, what have you. Do you still not get that ferry range implies none of this shit whatsoever ? It’s fuel, and fuel, and more fuel. That’s it. Drop tanks on every hard point. Which is why it’s over 3 times longer than the combat range, which involves hanging a few weapons here and there instead.

You also expect them to loiter over Benghazi. That means more fuel still. Especially if you expect them to prevent a mortar attack 8 hours down the line.

Rome, Italy is not “in the area” of Benghazi.

Locally. In Benghazi International Airport ? Tripoli ? Now you want US jets to *land *somewhere in Lybia for a little fuel snack, with no maintenance crews, no security, not to mention no compatible weapons stores, possibly no fuel either (not sure commercial liners, Piper Cubs and pointies feed from the same trough. Kinda doubt it) ?
And the Lybians just go “what’s mine is yours, effendim”, of course ?

Yeah, one really wonders why they didn’t go with this obvious, solid plan.

I would assume they knew a thing or two you don’t. Or possibly a few encyclopedias, three codices and a Powerpoint presentation worth of things.

1060

Magiver, is there some reason that you keep Sideshow Bobbing into these rakes? Do you think you can win, when all, not most, all of the evidence shows you to be wrong?

What’s the endgame here? Just hoping to get the last word?