Buy Him A Map
Chairweasel Issa is at it again displaying his ignorance to the world.
The only commercial airliner that could have reached Benghazi in 7 hours was the Concorde SST, and it would need to stop once for fuel. Then there would have been the problem that it couldn’t land at the Benghazi airport.
Benghazi is 5,220 mile from Washington DC and a little over 400 miles from Tripoli. To be of any use you would need a C-17 with troops and equipment, and it cruises at 515 mph. It would also need to make two refueling stops to reach Benghazi, so it would be a minimum of 12 hours if there were no problems.
If there had been a Navy landing assault ship off the coast, then sending a military force would have made sense, but stripping the embassy in Tripoli of all of its security by sending it to Benghazi makes no sense. The terrorists may have been hoping for that, with Benghazi the feint to expose the real target, Tripoli.
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Issa may be remembering that we have a large concentration of troops in West Germany to counter the threat of a Soviet invasion.
Oh wait…
We once had the aircraft sitting at Rhein-Main ready to go, but no longer. It would have to be the Navy, and it doesn’t sound like they were close enough to get anything but attack aircraft there. Africa Command would have known what was available, and didn’t find anything suitable.
Rumsfeld really reduced our ability to respond with the assistance of the Base Re-Alignment Commissions. This is what happens when you reduce personnel so you can spend more money on over-priced weapons.
Shhh. Don’t tell Issa that Rhein-Main was closed in 2005. He still hasn’t quite come to grips with the fact that East Germany collapsed in 1990 and reunified with the West. If you tell him we don’t in fact have an air force base at Rhein-Main anymore, he might actually collapse from complete and total brain freeze as his entire world view is contradicted by, well, reality. Well, if he had a brain, rather than a set of partisan reflexes “ugh Republican good. Ugh Democrat bad” that is.
– Badtux the Snarky Penguin
We nearly had a full Army around Frankfurt watching the Fulda Gap. Not in Frankfurt, of course, because combat troops were not allowed to be stationed in that area of Germany. I had to remove my Combat Crew badge when I was stationed there, and our aircraft were assigned to an air transport wing, rather than to a tactical wing 😈
Of course, if there was a need, I feel confident that a company of paratroopers and their equipment could have appeared to board a C-17 for the trip, not that they were on alert or anything.