The real scandal of Benghazi is the plodding caution of U.S. military leaders

By Bing West

Best Defense guest commenter

Re Benghazi and the
military (a matter of much lesser import than the deceptive talking points): On
ABC on 12 May, George Will and retired General Cartwright excused the military
by saying 10 hours was not enough time to react. The general said it takes up
to "a day or two" to arm an F-16, file flight plans, arrange for refueling,
etc.

Therefore the solution
is to pre-stage the right kinds of forces, which requires a much larger
military and a knowledge beforehand about the location and severity of the
threat. By this reasoning, we do not have general purpose forces;
we have special purpose forces.

Benghazi thus raises the
question: Do we need more forces staged around the world or do we need senior
officers who can respond to emergencies outside their normal checklists?

Last week's congressional
testimony included two new revelations. First, four Special Forces soldiers en
route to Benghazi to help our wounded were ordered not to go by a Special
Operations officer in Stuttgart. Not only did that manifest being afraid to
take a risk for your beleaguered comrades, it also raised the question of
authority in the chain of command during battle. What is the authority that
permits an officer thousands of miles away to override the commander on the
ground?

Second, Mr. Hicks
testified that Secretary Clinton approved, at about 8 p.m. Washington time, the
evacuation of the embassy in Tripoli, due to terrorist threats. That was a
dramatic, escalatory decision. It is unknown whether the president or the secretary
of defense was notified.

In the event, the U.S.
military took no new, immediate action, even though the embassy was being
evacuated in addition to the chaos at Benghazi. The military has justified
itself by saying the battle was over by the next morning. But no human being
could predict the night before when the battle would end. That the embassy in
Tripoli was not overrun was a matter of fate/luck/enemy decisions that had
nothing to do with the prescience or actions of the Pentagon staff. The
tardiness of U.S. forces was a failure to improvise, which in turn is a basic
test of leadership in battle. 

One question illustrates
the inertia: Had it been President Obama who was missing in Benghazi, would the
military have taken only the same actions and later offered the same rationale;
to wit, "we knew the battle would be over in 10 hours, (inside our OODA loop)"?

The military at the
highest level must examine its ability to improvise, and not rely on the enemy
to give us "a day or two" to prepare.

Bing West , a former assistant secretary of defense and combat Marine, has
written seven books about ground combat.