WASHINGTON – The U.S. military is determined to position small, quick reaction forces closer to global crises after the rapid assault on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Libya last September kept its forces from responding in time to save four Americans.
Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and U.S. Army Gen. Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Congress on Thursday that they moved quickly to deploy commando teams from Spain and Central Europe last Sept. 11 — the chaotic day of the assault on the U.S. installation in Benghazi — but the first military unit did not arrive until 15 hours after the first of two attacks.
“Time, distance, the lack of an adequate warning, events that moved very quickly on the ground prevented a more immediate response,” Panetta said in likely his last appearance before Congress before stepping down as Pentagon chief.
Republicans have accused the Obama administration of an election year coverup of a terrorist attack in the nearly five months since the assault, and they kept up the politically charged onslaught Thursday. The military also found itself under attack, with at least one senator accusing Dempsey of peddling falsehoods.
Faced with repeated questions about where units were during the attack and what they were doing, Dempsey said the military is taking steps to deal with the next crisis.
“We’ve asked each of the services to examine their capability to build additional reaction-like forces — small, rapidly deployable forces,” he said. “A small MAGTF (Marine Air-Ground Task Force) for the Marine Corps, for example. And the army is looking at some options as well to increase the number of these resources across the globe, where the limiting factor, though, will always be basing.”
In more than four hours of testimony, Panetta and Dempsey described a military faced with not a single attack over several hours but two separate assaults six hours apart, little real-time intelligence data and units too far away to mobilize quickly. U.S. Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans were killed in the attacks.
Between midnight and 2 a.m. on the night of the attack, Panetta issued orders commanding two marine antiterrorism teams based in Rota, Spain, to prepare to deploy to Libya, and that a team of special operations forces in Central Europe and another team of special operations forces in the U.S. prepare to deploy to a European staging base.
The first of those U.S. military units did not actually arrive in the region until well after the attack was over and Americans had been flown out of Libya. Just before 8 p.m., the special operations contingent landed at Sigonella Naval Air Station in Sicily. An hour later, the marine team landed in Tripoli.
Defense Department officials have repeatedly said that even if the military had been able to get the units there a bit quicker, there was no way they could have arrived in time to make any difference in the deaths of the four Americans.
The Pentagon will bid farewell to Panetta, who has served as defense secretary since June 2011, in a ceremony Friday.
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