Even a readiness rate of one tenth of one percent would have allowed us to put a platoon of something in the air to reach the scene and a couple planes over Benghazi. If we couldn't do that, I don't want to hear anybody insist that our large military budget means nobody can challenge us anywhere in the world.
I reject the continuing defense of the Obama administration that we could not react with military force to the jihadi attacks on our people in Benghazi.
The problem isn't that we couldn't react. We chose not to react:
In a battle, you do what you can, when you can, with what you have available. Information and assets are never enough. But still, in battle, you must act. The basic problem is that the administration believes we've responsibly ended our war on terrorists and didn't even think that it was fighting a battle in Benghazi.
And we had troops available in Europe:
Light mechanized forces, helicopters, infantry, airborne, and military police were theoretically available to intervene.
If we wanted to run to the sound of the guns rather than accept the loss of those on the ground in Benghazi facing those guns and fighting on in the hope help would arrive in time.
If our government really believed we are at war rather than mopping up a defeated enemy back on their heels after their leader Osama bin Laden was killed.
The fact that military forces specifically tailored to cope with such attacks could not have reached Benghazi in time is not the same thing as saying we could not have reacted with military forces to the attack. We have nearly 80,000 troops in Europe and yet we could not rouse ourselves to dispatch even 80 troops to the scene just in case they could do some good.
I do not and never did argue that we could have intervened in time to save our ambassador and his colleague at the consulate. That was over too fast.
It is even possible--if not excusable--that we could not have reacted in time to reach the annex while they resisted attacks. But that assessment relies on the post-crisis knowledge of how much time we had to act.
At the time, at risk of belaboring the obvious, we didn't know how long the crisis would last. We could have done something in case we could make it in time. The retired general who testified on Thursday was right when he stated:
"We should have continued to move forward with whatever forces we had to move forward with," Lovell said.
But instead we essentially wrote off those Americans on the ground holding out at the annex as losses. We were lucky that they held out and escaped or the body count could have been 30 rather than 4.
In addition to not knowing how much time we had, we can't know what level of force deployed would have scared the jihadis off out of fear that we had too much military power available and coming for them.
But we do know that by failing to put our military on the ground, we gave our enemies a victory that we still haven't responded to. And we failed to teach jihadis that striking our embassy facilities is a game they can only lose.
Aside from not knowing how long the crisis would last, to me it is actually pretty damning if we couldn't have gotten somebody moving toward Benghazi from our entire force in Europe in time to have an effect on the annex fight. We're worried that 40,000 Russian troops could overrun large chunks of Ukraine but we couldn't pull even 80 troops out of our nearly 80,000 in Europe from their routines for a wartime emergency to their south? That's unacceptable.
We failed to act as if we are at war while our enemies were killing our people and trying to kill more.
UPDATE: Please note that a Congressman saying that the forces specifically tasked for responding to crises like Benghazi could not reach Benghazi in time to help at the annex before it was too late in no way refutes my argument that we did not try to send whatever we had in case we could do some good in time:
McKeon's statement disputed Lovell's assertions based on his committee's interviews with more than a dozen witnesses in the operational chain of command and its review of thousands of pages of transcripts, emails and other documents.
"We have no evidence that Department of State officials delayed the decision to deploy what few resources the Defense Department had available to respond," McKeon said.
The "few resources the Defense Department had available to respond" are a tiny subset of the 80,000 American forces in Europe.
And it does not take the existence of a "stand down" order to question whether our top civilian and military leaders had a wartime frame of mind that would have "gone to the sound of the guns" when we were attacked on September 11, 2012.
