By:  Sal Palma

Lately, the media and pundits have set themselves up as judge and jury on the Benghazi incident. Unfortunately, much of their finger pointing is based on ignorance and misinformation. Particularly annoying are tragic discussions with former military and ex-intelligence officers that are so skewed and off base as to be ridiculous. So, what I hope to do with this post is shed some light on the intricacies of the situation.

Let’s accept the concept that our Benghazi mission had a clandestine component to it. We had folks on the ground conducting work to track down missing weapons from the Libyan caches. There was also work in progress to get a better feel for the Arab Spring, Arab Brotherhood and who the actors truly are. Now, unless the intelligence community has changed drastically over the years, the parties actively involved in this work would prefer to do so discretely. Therefore, having a platoon of Marines on site would accomplish two things: detract from the desired discretion and inflame tension with a noticeable military presence; possibly fomenting attacks through their presence.

The next point that I’d like to make is simply this. There was no way to effectively defend the Benghazi consulate compound. Let’s take a look at the picture below. It’s an aerial photo of the compound circa 2003.

The compound has a length of approximately 207 yards and a width of 100 yards. The blast radius for most of the munitions in the air to ground family is about 100 yards or more, with exception of the 25mm gatling  gun on AC130H. The F18’s are a similar story. Assuming absolute pinpoint accuracy, at night, any attempt to repel the attackers would have placed the consular office in jeopardy and the lives of those in the facility.

Setting AC130’s and F18’s aside, the only realistic way to defend the facility, which was overrun, was with boots on the ground. To accomplish that, you need to airlift** troops in. If you use an airport, you need to fight your way to the compound –a high potential for casualties in the scenario. You could chop troops in or fast rope them, in or around the compound. However, you would be chopping them into a hot LZ- an even higher casualty count; especially with very limited air cover.

The Benghazi attacks, distinguished members of the press, was a military operation; planned and executed as such by competent adversaries, not pissed off jihadists! Perhaps we should focus our attention on what lessons were learned and what actions will be taken to prevent these incidents, and what is being done to bring the perpetrators to justice. This was a complex situation that went bad and sometimes those are the risks we take. Give the State Department and DOD a break, and honor the fallen.

Enough is Enough!

**  As I understand it we did not have rotary wing assets in place, so I don’t know if it was even possible to chop the troops in.