Let me start this by saying the obvious: I am not on Senator McCain’s Christmas card list; he is not on mine; and we’re both no doubt very happy about that. But as the above quote in the title shows, he is sound on the self-evident absurdity of believing that the assassination of our Ambassador to Libya (and his staffers) was anything except a pre-planned assassination by terrorist groups:
Honestly, the outside world is not your Xbox. People do not wander around with heavy weapons, waiting for the right moment of social disorder to set them off. Doing so causes talk.
Moe Lane
PS: Every Republican politician and pundit knows this instinctively. Even those of us who never served in the military. That it took the Obama administration so long to work this out for themselves is profoundly… diagnostic.
Honey, did you remember the RPG’s?
We saw this during the 2008 campaign and the South Ossetia imbroglio. Obama took THREE statements in 4 days to come around to what McCain said within hours. But we were encouraged to ignore that.
Tailgatin’ just ain’t the same without a katyusha or two…
Mew
(from the people who brought you duck hunting with AK-47s…)
You know how you aim a mortar? You guess and then adjust fire. If you want to coordinate mortar fire with a building assault, everyone needs to know exactly what is going to happen and when it is going to happen. Accurate, indirect fire is very difficult with just one tube, never mind the six(?) I heard they used.
Such a coordinated assault take skill, planning, resources and you need to find places to fire your mortar from that won’t be seen by the enemy, so logically you can’t see your enemy either. Unless you want to kill your own forces or miss your target, you also need two-way communications and a hidden fire director. You need an overall commander to tell mortars when and where to fire and to direct the main assault force plus the heavy weapons.
I’m just skimming the surface of what this kind of operation would require to pull off. I almost forgot transportation and Intel on the target location and movement patterns. The assault force also needs to know what kind of resistance, in the form of guards and facilities, they should expect to face.
Nothing about this could possibly be “spontaneous”.