Posted on 10/31/2012 2:51:31 AM PDT by markomalley
Between e-mail revelations and whistle-blower testimony, the Band-Aid is very painfully being pulled off the Obama administration's Benghazi disaster. And as in any management failure, we have two ways to look at the issue -- long-term and short. In the short-term view, we learn something about the quality of our actions -- i.e., was the right or most proper decision or sequence of decisions made based on the facts known at the time? But the benefit of the long-term view is that it may reveal failings in the way we organize ourselves for these occasions and, by extension, the likelihood of such a thing happening again.
It's this long-term view of Benghazi which is so disheartening because it so obviously illustrates how we're set up to produce ever more situations similar to this one, wherein our people not only die expecting help, but die several hours after they had fixed a targeting laser on the mortar position which would eventually kill them. More tragedies wherein we have to listen to a political operative like Leon Panetta reference some completely fictitious military maxim that you never send a force in without knowing exactly what's happening on the ground. More calamities where what we don't hear is that someone like General Petraeus, who is supposed to be a soldier, ended his career by refusing to abandon his men -- indeed, wherein not even one man in the White House Situation Room, in uniform or not -- not one diplomat in the loop at State, not one senior CIA official, not one Naval officer offshore, not one serving general in the multitude of American commands in Europe would sacrifice his career in order to save them.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
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This link is also on my profile page.
Benghazi is the tip,of the iceberg of a foreign policy mess Her Heinousness Hillary presided over, in ignorance, of the international blackmail of the president by foreign interests. You heard it here.
Romney and Issa et al will spend the first 1/2 of his presidency trying to paper it over.
This is an excellent piece. I have never thought of it this way - why IS the white house involved in these military activities at such a tactical level?
snip
“All this comes about because we have established — indeed, raised to the order of religious dogma — Max Weber’s fanciful notion that in a bureaucracy, decisions should proceed as high as they can up the chain of command before being made. Indeed, apparently, doing this somehow improves the quality of the decision. In consequence, the head honcho, Barack Obama, for however long he remains in office, and his successors get to decide everything — whether or not Navy snipers can pull their triggers and rescue Captain Richard Phillips from pirates in the Indian Ocean, whether to launch Osama bin Laden’s elimination inside Pakistan, or even whether or not a soldier shot down in front of a U.S. Army recruiting station by a jihadist trained in Yemen gets awarded the Purple Heart. Everything and anything of any consequence.
This is a very un-American idea which doesn’t, over the long term, provide political cover, doesn’t enable a fluid situation to be managed, but only breeds pusillanimity in the ranks. It fosters the caveat that “it’s not my decision to make, not my responsibility — it’s the guy farther up the food chain. So whatever happens, it’s not my fault.”
It also entails delay, which is all by itself often fatal in these instances. Of course, we claim that delay is overcome with technology, by, for instance, streaming live video feed right into the White House. But can Barack Obama make a better tactical decision than the man on the ground? Usually he cannot. The argument that he can is often couched in terms of intelligence, the concept that he has a superior strategic vision because he has access to more information. Fine — but what that means, especially in a president who skips his intelligence briefings, is that he has to gather that information. That is, call a meeting or let his national security chief do so, and so there is that delay again. In fact, these meetings in the midst of a crisis always entail delay, because these well-fed types in thousand-dollar suits ordering coffee from the hovering White House steward are often lawyers, and lawyers typically counsel delay. But mostly they aren’t the ones being shot at.
And so you get the phenomenon where the entire chain of command begins to focus on passing on only the information they believe will shorten the delay. For example, the debacle in Somalia (Black Hawk Down) during the Clinton years can be laid at the door of the command having to submit their operational plan to Washington for approval. Why? You’ve got professional soldiers educated and trained and obviously thought worthy of promotion from second lieutenant during those careers up through the Army’s many rank levels of increasing responsibility, and they’re on the spot. Can’t they be trusted to plan and then execute a company-level operation?
The answer was no, and what they were forced to do was submit a detailed operational plan to Washington identical to one that had been nitpicked, adjusted, and agreed to before in the hope of having it approved in some timely fashion.”
Funny... I now think if they had just jumped in, even into another Blackhawk Down nightmare, their polls would be pegging sky high right now for Obama, Commander in Chief. They are just clueless.
I predict an immediate review of ROE.
How long can even as great a country as ours survive, if we don't have any men (including the female versions) leading?
Romney and Issa et al will spend the first 1/2 of his presidency trying to paper it over.
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That is right....R’s have no sense of ‘fight’.
The R’s will come out with all kinds of “that was then, this is now - Lets move forward” and the flock will ‘go along with them’ - for the most part.
Got to give the D’s credit, when Wee Willie Clinton was impeached, the D’s spent every waking hour trying to impeach W and just ‘held his feet to the fire’.
Much like they continually went after Newt mostly because of his outing of ‘Fort Worthless Jim Wright’ who Newt almost singly handedly ran out of Congress. (Not that he didn’t deserve it, but ‘they’ sure made Newt pay for it in the long run).
as in any management failure>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>>
Management failure? A CIA agent ex-US Navy seal is illuminating the destructive jihadist mortar team
with a laser designator,at the Benghazi consulate and Obama is watching in real time but refused to give the go to shoot?
The same thing happened involving the kidnapping of a US Citizen captain by Somali pirates. Obama would not give the shoot order , so Seal snipers on board a US Navy vessel alongside exercised their judgement to shoot the kidnappers.
We have a president who refuses to give the order to shoot to protect American lives AT HIS WHIM.Is it because those at risk in Benghazi were not black men? Was it because those at risk were not Muslims? The so called president we have is unAmerican, beliving instead that the USA is a colonial power that must be curbed, even in the defence of its own staff and citizenry? A pox on Obama and all of his running dogs without exception.
THAT IS NOT A MANAGEMENT CRISIS........ITS TREASON.
What we have is an organizational structural defect where the men willing to put their men before their careers, do so at the lower ranks and get weeded out.
Where the only ones LEFT to make it into the upper ranks are the ones who have demonstrated, over and over, that they put their careers first, ahead of everything else. The ones who have demonstrated that they are willing to sacrifice those below them in order to not embarrass those above them, are the ones who get promoted to senior ranks.
This is the nanny state taken to the extreme.
No life or death decisions because it involves risk.
No saving of American lives because it involves risk.
No deploying of military assets because it involves risk.
Delay vital decisions because they involve risk.
This is not how Americans behave. True Americans will take action in the face of danger, because to not do so is wrong. It does not matter the outcome. A decision is made and action carried forward.
not one senior CIA official, not one Naval officer offshore, not one serving general in the multitude of American commands in Europe would sacrifice his career in order to save them-
One Admiral and one General tried.
They were both relieved of their duties and sent home.
Do not say no one tried.
What? Who writes a sentence like this? IS the author trying to win a prize or something?
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