By Tom Curry, National Affairs Writer, NBC News
As Republicans continue their long-running effort to find out more about the security failures that led to the Sept. 11, 2012 attack on the U.S. diplomatic mission in Benghazi, Defense Secretary Leon Panetta and Gen. Martin Dempsey, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, began testifying Thursday morning before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
The two men will discuss how the Pentagon might have prepared for such an attack and why U.S. forces weren?t positioned closely enough to Benghazi to deter the attack and rescue US personnel.
In the Sept. 11 assault on the facility, Ambassador Chris Stevens and three other Americans, Glen Doherty, Tyrone Woods and Sean Smith, were killed.
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Panetta said the Department of Defense and U.S. armed forces ?did all that we could do in response to the attacks in Benghazi.?
He explained that ?unfortunately there were no specific indications of an imminent attack on U.S. facilities in Benghazi. Without adequate warning, there was not enough time given the speed of the attack for armed military assets to respond.?
He said there were two short-duration attacks that occurred six hours apart. ?This was not a prolonged assault which could have been brought to an end by a U.S. military response,? Panetta said.
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He explained that ?armed UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles, or drones), AC-130 gunships, or fixed-wing fighters with the associated tanking, armaments, targeting and support capabilities were not in the vicinity of Libya.? He said, ?because of the distance, would have taken at least 9 to 12 hours if not more to deploy. This was, pure and simple, a problem of distance and time.?
In its report on the attack, the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee said last December that the Defense Department and the State Department hadn't jointly studied the availability of U.S. military forces to defend or rescue the U.S. diplomats in Benghazi in the event of a crisis.
The Pentagon?s Africa Command didn?t have planes, helicopters, or other forces within reach if Benghazi on the day of the attack. ?The Djibouti base was several thousand miles away. There was no Marine expeditionary unit, carrier group or a smaller group of U.S. ships closely located in the Mediterranean Sea that could have provided aerial or ground support or helped evacuate personnel from Benghazi,? the report said.
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Panetta also warned about the effects of the automatic spend cuts ? called sequestration - that are mandated by the 2011 Budget Control Act and are set to begin on March 1.
?If Congress fails to act and sequestration is triggered, and if we also must operate under a year-long continuing resolution (keeping spending at last year?s levels), we would be faced with a significant shortfall in operating funds for our active forces with only seven months remaining in the fiscal year,? he told the committee. ?This will damage our national defense and compromise our ability to respond to crises in a dangerous world.??
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