What we can really learn from the Benghazi committee reports

Given the political polarization of the entire Benghazi tragedy in general, and of the House Select Committee on Benghazi in particular, commentary on the committee’s findings might be a “fools rush in” mission. But the issues are too important — not only to the lives of those public servants, civilian and uniformed, we place in danger, but to our overall foreign policy and national security — to ignore anything that might help the next time our country is in trouble.

{mosads}Moreover, apart from the lives involved, diplomatic security disasters have a huge impact on foreign perceptions of our policy competence, and on our own political system. This was seen in the 1980 presidential elections in the shadow of the Tehran hostage situation; in the Iran-Contra scandal, which started in part with failure to protect Americans in Lebanon; and with Benghazi’s impact on several top officials. Thus, any insights that can help us respond to future such tragedies are worth reviewing.

Both the committee’s majority findings, “Report of the Select Committee on the Events Surrounding the 2012 Terrorist Attack in Benghazi,” and the minority members’ alternative, “Honoring Courage, Improving Security, and Fighting the Exploitation of a Tragedy” provide such material. Both mainly cover ground already reviewed in other congressional and State Department studies related to the incident. However, for whatever reasons, these two reports dug deeply into the internal Washington, and Washington-field, interplay during the Benghazi situation, and thereby provided insight particularly in the following areas.

Diplomatic operations and military actions, generally speaking, operate most routinely on two levels: the tactical and the strategic or “policy” level. For each, there are “rules of the road,” and a fair amount of experience. At the tactical level, professionals deal in dangerous and uncertain circumstances with a mix of judgment, gut instinct, and agreed procedures or standard operating procedures, while disasters happen through bad luck, erroneous judgment, and either inadequate or badly implemented procedures. Most of the reviews of Benghazi focus on that level.

At the policy level, broadly understood procedures apply, usually through presidential-Cabinet level National Security Council deliberations. At that level, politics, as well as “policy,” is necessarily at play, and the actors are experienced at bringing both into decision formulation. Usually the policymakers do not get into the tactical decisions (the decision whether to target Osama bin Laden by bombing or a ground raid was a rare exception), and when they do, as with bin Laden, they typically have time to deliberate.

But such focus on the tactical decisions by senior officials in the midst of a raging crisis is exactly what happened with Benghazi; this is no surprise. It has happened in crises in other administrations and likely will happen again. At such an “operational” level, during the Benghazi crisis and in similar emergencies, top levels of government were thrust into immediate tactical decision-making and execution. Given the stakes, that is a good thing, and both the majority and minority reports highlight the extreme focus and engagement of the president and secretaries of State and Defense.

Nevertheless, when senior levels engage, the inherent inadequacies of the procedures, communications and, most of all, coordination between field diplomatic and military entities and Washington agencies are exacerbated, as documented in these reports. Information overload on the one hand (floods of emails, telegrams and calls, many repetitive or irrelevant, over numerous classified and unclassified systems, bedevil officials), and absence of critical specific information on the other, clearly hampered operations. (The Pentagon was not aware of the attack on the Benghazi compound until almost an hour after the State Department Operations Center was alerted; the Benghazi CIA Annex was not known to military planners.) Second, once government “principals” at the top level engage, much of the supporting operations is run not by the usual professionals, but by those leaders’ staffers, typically political appointees with only passing acquaintance with the tactical procedures with which they suddenly are involved.

The testimony of professionals, who usually make the tactical decisions, on the amount of contact they had with top level staffers during this crisis is striking. (A National Security Council meeting of sub-Cabinet representatives to pave the way for military deployments appears to have tried to rejudicate details of orders already given by the secretary of Defense. This is not an Obama administration peculiarity; this author has had similar experiences over three administrations.)

The military deals effectively with this “operational” level. Its top leadership are experienced professionals, and the senior staffers usually are as well. In addition, the military routinely conducts exercises testing all levels of the chain of command. But this is not the case throughout the civilian bureaucracy.

As the Benghazi Select Committee clarifies, none of this impacted the lives lost, all before Washington could reasonably have been expected to respond even under perfect conditions. But other incidents playing out over a longer period are conceivable, and there, better preparations, training and exercises could help.

The committee’s most important recommendation, an executive branch “coordination mechanism” to deal with crises, is commendable. In fact, the key agencies — the National Security Council (NSC), the Department of Defense (DOD), the Director of National Intelligence (DNI), the CIA and especially the State Department — most affected by Benghazi have all focused on better crisis operations and increased training. But more could be done, if pushed by the National Security Council.

First, the ubiquitous liaison officers exchanged among Defense, State and the intelligence agencies should be given specific, standardized coordination responsibilities for any crisis. Second, training and exercises should be conducted jointly among agencies, and include not just professionals but the political level. Obviously, Cabinet-level officials are not going to some crisis management boot camp, but their key political staffers — chiefs of staff, executive officers, special assistants — could be compelled to attend such training. Third, State and the DOD should finally align their overseas geographic units: State’s geographic bureaus and the DOD’s regional commands. Currently, most have two counterparts in the other agency, inhibiting personal relations and coordination. Finally, any government official likely to be involved in such crises should be aware of and learn from the heroism, superb judgment, creativity and professionalism of the State, CIA, and DoD teams that repeatedly made the right decisions during the Benghazi crisis.

Jeffrey is distinguished fellow at the Washington Institute for Near East Policy. He served as ambassador to Iraq and Turkey in the Obama administration and deputy national security adviser in the Bush Administration.