The Fog of Are-We-Still-at-War?

It is heartening to suddenly hear the question over Benghazi of why we didn't move to the sound of the guns when the attacks began, I've been asking that since the attack. If we were at war on September 11, 2012, we would have reacted differently than the way we did. I haven't gotten an answer yet.

I await the transcript for today's testimony on the failure to order military assets to "move to the sound of the guns." For all the talk of what we could have and could not have done in the hours between the consulate and annex attacks as an excuse for doing nothing, nobody is asking the basic question of why our military failed to move, which in practice gave the jihadis a battlefield victory over us:

By marching to the sound of the guns, the small CIA reaction force may have been the margin that allowed the annex to hold until a later-arriving (from Tripoli) CIA force could help move 30 Americans holed up in the annex to the airport to get out of Dodge.

By marching to the sound of the guns, those men prevented a much higher body count or even a hostage situation if the jihadis could have grabbed our people and retreated into the interior of Libya where government authority is nominal.

Our military could have done more. It would not have been enough to save the consulate. It might not even have been enough to prevent further loss of life at the annex. Shoot, this is war, so we might have lost more. But we had no reason to know that after the consulate was overrun that the same wouldn't happen to the annex once it came under heavy fire.

The CIA is taking a lot of heat, but they went into harm's way by marching to the sound of the guns at the consulate, rescued our people who survived that attack, held the annex and our people sheltered there until help could come (from the CIA) to evacuate those people, and then stayed in the annex to scrub it of sensitive information before abandoning the annex. They prevented a bigger loss both in blood and national security.

But we were shown to be uninterested in marching to the sounds of the guns to actually win a fight against al Qaeda and give them a bloody nose for attacking and killing Americans on the anniversary of September 11, 2001, of all days.

Lacking the ability to see into the future to know that the crisis would be over in 7 hours, or so, why didn't we begin to move whatever we had available in Europe toward Benghazi in case we had the time to intervene?

I'm at least glad that the questions I want asked are finally being broached. Why didn't we react that day as if we were at war?