Evidence Hillary Answered the 3:00 a.m. Call While Obama Hung Up
http://aclj.org/war-on-terror/evidence-answered-call-obama-hung-up
This weekend, while pondering the recent revelations that explicit calls for
military help may have been rejected, I realized the media has been
misunderstanding the basic lines of authority that were likely in place in
Benghazi on September 11, 2012. If those lines of authority were
conventional, then on that night it is highly likely that Hillary Clinton
did all she could while Barack Obama - who controlled vastly more
resources - did nothing effective.
Now, I'm not at all excusing State Department decision-making that left the
Benghazi compound ridiculously vulnerable or the State Department's spin
after the attack. Instead, I'm focusing on the events of that night - the
subject of the most recent revelations that someone rejected urgent calls
for military help.
To fully understand the various accounts of the battle, one has to
understand the concept of "assets," "responsibility," and "command
authority." For example, a military commander may be responsible for a
particular battle space, but only has command authority over very specific
military assets. In Iraq, my squadron commander was responsible for a 17,000
square kilometer section of Diyala Province, but only had command authority
over a specific set of assets - a "squadron minus" of armored cavalry (we
left a tank company up in Mosul) plus various attached soldiers and teams.
If these assets were insufficient, he had to specifically appeal to higher
headquarters for help, and higher headquarters would approve or reject the
request.
In a mixed civilian/military environment, the situation becomes more
complex. For example, at various points in our deployment, U.N. negotiating
teams would arrive to try to broker peace agreements between competing
tribes. They had their own security, and the head of that security team was
responsible for the safety of the U.N. negotiators, but if his team was
overmatched, he'd appeal for help to my commander - as the on-scene military
commander responsible for the battle space and with command authority over
necessary assets to respond to a crisis.
Clear as mud? Thankfully, in our case the U.N. never had to make the call
for help - in large part because we escorted the negotiators with heavy
armor. The insurgents never launched an attack.
With that framework in place, let's go back to Benghazi. While the State
Department Bureau of Diplomatic Security assumes responsibility for
"providing a safe and secure environment for the conduct of U.S. foreign
policy," that does not mean that it necessarily has command authority over
the necessary assets to accomplish its mission. In other words, if an
embassy is under attack, the State Department doesn't suddenly command
aircraft carriers, fighter groups, or infantry battalions. The military
chain of command doesn't suddenly become a State Department chain of
command. Instead, if an embassy or diplomatic compound is under attack, and
State Department forces are insufficient to repel the attack or secure
embassy personnel, then the State Department has to appeal to a separate
command structure and ask that it deploy those assets under its command
authority to assist - such as the host country's military or our own.
International law assigns primary responsibility for diplomatic security to
the host country, but Libya was not capable of meeting that responsibility.
So - if current reports can be believed - we appealed to our own military
for help. Here's the critical point: The decision to proactively use
military force in a sovereign country that we are not at war with or in is
typically a decision reserved to the National Command Authority alone. (The
National Command Authority is the president acting in concert with - but in
command of - the Secretary of Defense). Unless this decision has been
delegated to a lower command, this is the president's call to make. Period.
So far we have been provided with a fairly precise accounting of how the
State Department deployed its very limited assets to respond to the Benghazi
attack, and that account makes for harrowing reading. In short, while there
were too few assets in place to help, the State Department threw everyone
into the breach - even sending small teams to engage the terrorists without
air cover and without heavy weapons. Those men - American and Libyan - by
all accounts exhibited bravery most Americans can scarcely comprehend. It
wasn't quite the Alamo or Little Big Horn (thankfully), but they exhibited
bravery against overwhelming odds in keeping with the best of American
martial traditions. The call came, and the State Department answered with
what little it had. It was not enough.
But where is the Department of Defense's corresponding account of that
night? There is little doubt it has already compiled an account at least as
comprehensive as the State Department's - and this account details (a) when
the military learned of the attack; (b) the military's state of situational
awareness hour by hour; (c) whether it received any requests for help; (d)
what assets - if any - were available to render aid in time; (e) what
recommendations were made; (f) whether any definitive orders were given; and
(g) who gave them. Make no mistake:That information is currently available,
already compiled, and can be released (even if in heavily redacted form to
protect classified assets).
Yet here's our Secretary of Defense's incomplete and unsatisfactory
response:
"(The) basic principle is that you don't deploy forces into harm's way
without knowing what's going on; without having some real-time information
about what's taking place," Panetta told Pentagon reporters. "And as a
result of not having that kind of information, the commander who was on the
ground in that area, Gen. Ham, Gen. Dempsey and I felt very strongly that we
could not put forces at risk in that situation."
His "basic principle" is simply false. We deploy forces all the time in our
theaters of war without good real-time information. All. The. Time. If we
didn't, far more men would die. The fog of war never fully clears, and our
solution has been to typically go in with sufficient force to deal with
virtually any reasonable contingency. But the truly revealing part of the
response is here: "General Ham, General Dempsey and I felt very strongly
that we could not put forces at risk in that situation." To military ears
those are not the words of a man who made a decision; those are the words of
a man who made a recommendation. A decision-maker follows his strong feeling
with an order: to stand down or decline the request for help. A recommender
passes his feeling up the chain of command - in this case, to the president
of the United States.
The State Department answered the call with what force it had. The military
did not. Either we did not have assets to answer (and that would be a
different kind of scandal) or someone made the decision to - in effect -
hang up on the 3:00 a.m.caller. Who made that call and why? The military
already knows. So should the American people.
This article is crossposted at National Review Online.