My level of respect for Gates just dropped. A lot:
Another suggestion posed by some critics of the administration, to, as Gates said, "send some small number of special forces or other troops in without knowing what the environment is, without knowing what the threat is, without having any intelligence in terms of what is actually going on on the ground, would have been very dangerous."
"It's sort of a cartoonish impression of military capabilities and military forces," he said. "The one thing that our forces are noted for is planning and preparation before we send people in harm's way, and there just wasn't time to do that."
I'm no war college graduate, but the idea that we don't rush in without a week of planning and full intelligence is belied by history and the events of the September 11, 2012 attacks.
Rushing to the sound of the guns is a time-honored tradition of war and we failed to do that at Benghazi with our military. I don't understand the defense of planning over action:
Remember, we sent para-military security forces very quickly despite how few were available and despite the lack of information on what was happening. Why didn't our military respond the same way? With tens of thousands of troops in Europe, we really couldn't scrape up a platoon or a company to fly out to Benghazi without preparing them with a week of rehearsals and a PowerPoint briefing about what to expect?
What happened to going to the sounds of the guns with whatever you have, right now? What happened to a sense of wartime urgency?
Gates is really saying that our military couldn't do what the CIA and State Department (and a couple of Army troops who volunteered to go) did with fewer than a dozen shooters who actually did rush to the sound of the guns without new planning and preparation?
And these pitifully few, while unable to hold the annex, made a difference in keeping the assault from being a massacre or hostage crisis. How many more could have made this a jihadi defeat, too, by holding our ground and killing more of the jihadis and sending them running?
Oh, and as for Gates' dismissal of the effectiveness of high speed passes in scaring our enemies?
Nonsense on steroids.
UPDATE: Thanks to Stones Cry Out for the link. For God freaking almighty, Patton didn't insist he needed a week to turn 3rd Army north when the Germans launched the Battle of the Bulge. If you've got a week, by all means take a week to plan. But when you have an hour, by God you make your plan in an hour. Sometimes you just move to the sound of the guns.
UPDATE: Oh, and the title of this post refers to this Calvin and Hobbes comic strip. As long as we're talking cartoonish.
