National Defense Briefs – November 18, 2013

By W. Thomas Smith Jr.
November 18, 2013

Part-five of the series, NATIONAL DEFENSE BRIEFS. Each week we are bringing to readers of LowcountryBizSC.com updates aimed at informing all with timely military and homeland-security news briefs, trends, definitions, and short commentaries. Defense issues are inextricably connected to business. In that, we present the “National Defense Briefs” that matter.

• Most Americans’ perception of DELTA Force is that it is the U.S. Army’s super-secret, highly selective counterterrorism team; comparable to the U.S. Navy’s SEAL Team Six (officially DEVGRU). And it is. But interestingly, two DELTA Force commandos – one Army and one Marine – were recently awarded the nation’s second-highest award for battlefield heroism: The Distinguished Service Cross for the soldier, and the Navy Cross for the Marine (the nation’s highest award for battlefield heroism is the Medal of Honor). According to the Washington Times, “[DELTA] has been thought of as a strictly Army outfit. But it does take on qualified commandos from other services.” In this case, a U.S. Marine. For obvious security reasons neither name has been released, but the men “were among a seven-person rescue team sent from the U.S. Embassy in Tripoli [Libya] to Benghazi on the night of Sept. 11, 2012. Their mission: rescue diplomats, security personnel and CIA employees pinned down by terrorists about a mile from the U.S. diplomatic mission where Ambassador J. Christopher Stevens and aide Sean Smith were killed by al Qaeda-directed militants.”
• The Times also reported, “The Tripoli embassy’s rescue team faced a daunting task. First, the embassy had to find an airplane because the plane assigned to it had been taken away by the State Department. The State Department also pulled a military site security team and civilian diplomatic security officers despite warnings from U.S. personnel in Washington that Benghazi was becoming a war-zone and increasingly unsafe.”
• As we reported last week, the “Citizens’ Commission on Benghazi” – composed of military and intelligence experts – has been established “to investigate and shed light on the truth of what happened in Benghazi.”
• Speaking of Libya – as of Nov. 18 (11:20 a.m., Eastern) – Libyan Army forces are converging on the capital, Tripoli, in an effort to drive out rogue militia forces. This, as Reuters (and other news agencies) are reporting; “The U.S. military is working on plans to train 5,000 to 7,000 members of the Libyan security forces and also special operations forces who can carry out counter-terrorism missions, a senior U.S. military official said.”
• Undersecretary of Defense Frank Kendall says – according to the American Forces Press Service – “Budget cuts imposed by sequestration will leave the Defense Department with a hollow force and debilitating shortfalls.”
• Kendall, who serves as undersecretary for acquisition, technology and logistics (essentially “the Pentagon’s top acquisitions chief”) says, “This is probably the worst time I’ve seen … in terms of our ability to do a sound plan and execute it with any kind of confidence at all. It is one of the worst environments I’ve ever seen to try to manage in, in the Pentagon.”
• According to the American Forces Press Service, the U.S. Dept. of Defense (DoD) news service, “Sequestration’s across-the-board cuts, mandated by the Budget Control Act of 2011, require DoD to make $500 billion in cuts over 10 years in addition to a previously planned $470 billion cut.”
• Adm. William H. McRaven, the commander of U.S. Special Operations Command, said Saturday, “[In the 1990s] the international special operations community had a lot of great [special operations] forces. And frankly, there were many that were as good, if not better, than we were. [Today] I can tell you, there is nobody in the world who can compare to U.S. special operations forces and U.S. counterterrorism forces.” McRaven’s remarks were part of a panel-discussion at the first Reagan National Security Forum at the Reagan Library in Simi Valley, Calif. The forum was “examining what will be required to effectively fight terrorism in 2025,” according to DoD.

– W. Thomas Smith Jr. is a military analyst and partner with
NATIONAL DEFENSE CONSULTANTS, LLC. Visit him at http://uswriter.com.