As Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton delivered emotional testimony Wednesday to Congress about the September attack in Benghazi, Libya, a Marine general said the military is also to blame because it lacked the resources to respond and prevent the deaths of four Americans.



The answer is complicated and involves changes in the type of threats America faces and its ability to respond, according to military leaders and security analysts.

Military cutbacks dating to the 1990s led to the loss of a Marine Expeditionary Unit assigned to the Mediterranean Sea, which could have easily landed troops in Benghazi using the MV-22 Osprey, Toolan told the San Diego Military Advisory Council Wednesday morning.

The past 12 years at war raised competition for resources, increasing constraints in shipbuilding and the use of special operations teams for “middleweight” missions once handled by the Corps, he added.

The Arab Spring that led to the toppling of dictators in Egypt and Libya and a civil war in Syria also unleashed militants and weapons. And the decline of al-Qaeda and the killing of Osama bin Laden failed to stop the terrorist movement, which lives on in autonomous franchises across North Africa and the Middle East.



The CIA’s drone program targeting suspected terrorists in other countries such as Pakistan and Yemen is also highly controversial because of international sovereignty, the lack of due process for accused terrorists, civilian casualties and the inability to interrogate and glean intelligence from those who are assassinated.


After the Benghazi attack and the more recent hostage crisis in Algeria where 37 people were killed, including three Americans, some have argued for a reassessment of the U.S. government’s light footprint in North Africa and so-called “lead from behind” strategy of relying on foreign militaries.

Dipak Gupta, a terrorism expert and professor at San Diego State University, disagrees. “We cannot be heavy-handed, guns ablaze, jumping off the ship at every conflict,” he said.



Retired Vice Adm. Peter Daly, chief executive of the U.S. Naval Institute, said “clearly in Libya it looked like the administration became very taken with the idea we can do this on a shoestring. In some cases, a shoestring is OK. It clearly wasn’t here.”

The heart of the bigger long-term question is, “If you get less, you have to do less,” Daly said. Otherwise, “you will endanger people. You will have mission failure and killed in action, like we did in Benghazi.”