Marines surrender weapons

[ELB]

...This new info, that the personal weapons were destroyed in place, common and completely normal.

Oh, I know about destruction procedures (every place I went it was for emergency, enemy coming over the wall situations), but jeepers I hope it we don't have to do this so frequently it is "common!"

It's not like we didn't know we had Marines armed with various weapons in an embassy in a country that was going down the toilet aided by our "smart diplomacy." But we still couldn't come up with a ride that the Marines could tote along their weapons? After Benghazi there's still no plan and resources in place in that theater to cover situations like this, we have to hope the civil airlines are still flying?

[E.Marquez]

...This new info, that the personal weapons were destroyed in place, common and completely normal.

Oh, I know about destruction procedures (every place I went it was for emergency, enemy coming over the wall situations), but jeepers I hope it we don't have to do this so frequently it is "common!"

It's not like we didn't know we had Marines armed with various weapons in an embassy in a country that was going down the toilet aided by our "smart diplomacy." But we still couldn't come up with a ride that the Marines could tote along their weapons? After Benghazi there's still no plan and resources in place in that theater to cover situations like this, we have to hope the civil airlines are still flying?

What I mean is the planning for.. is common, not that we commonly have to execute the plan.

As I was not on the planning team or there for the mission so I can't say why they chose a civilian flight out. I can say, you can bet it was not the ONLY plan, just the one that made most sense, ease of mission execution that met the commanders intent.

If that was the safest method of egress for the state department employees and Marines on the ground the loss of a few thousand dollars of equipment is a small price to pay.

Say they decided to make do a in your face military extraction,, go to the airport with all vehicles and equipment, wat on C-130 or a few C5 to land...
1: no longer on sovereign US soil, so now you play by the host nations rules and laws.
2: a few thousand mad unarmed local civilians walk on to the flight line in protest...do you kill them all and bulldozer the bodies off the flight line so you can land AC?? just to be able to extract a few common weapons and vehicles?

Or do you make personnel extraction safely the priority and take the path of least resistance that meets that commander's intent?

While I worked with some state department folks, to include a Senior civilian.. i do not claim to know a lot about diplomacy, state department national actions.. ect I just know the task/ planning/solution and execution part of morning people from place A to place B

[C-dub]

Great, so (maybe) the destroyed them. I still don't understand why they didn't bring all their weapons home.

Likely they flew on a non contracted civilian populated Aircraft. There are mandatory fill rates units must meet in order to request and contract flights on commercial AC.. And I doubt the Marines had those numbers at that embassies.. so they bought tickets on a normally scheduled flight.
Destruction in place procedures are common, there are specific guidelines and manuals that describe what, when and how it is to be done.

The original story was not factual and really out in left field.. This new info, that the personal weapons were destroyed in place, common and completely normal.

It wasn't accurate, but that was all anyone had early on and it was all over the place. The correction didn't come out for several hours or almost a day.

[howdy]

As recently as last week, Im POSITIVE US service members are allowed to take military issued weapons on board both international and US flights. So that part of the story is bogus. Some of the contracted airlines do require the weapons to be inop , when that rare request is made, the bolts are removed, tagged and often placed in an ammo can and stored as baggage.

I don't think so. As far as I know the guns would have to secured in checked bags. The only people I know of that are allowed to carry a weapon on a civilian aircraft are DHS and Air Marshals.

I am a retired Delta Pilot and was in the second Federal Flight Deck Officer class in July of 2003. FFDO's carry weapons, all Federal Officers (DOE, DOT, EPA, FBI, DEA, DOJ, you get the idea) can carry weapons with no restrictions. Local and State LEO's can carry if they have a need for the weapon "from the time they could have checked it to the time they could retrieve it from checked baggage". An example of this is prisoner escort. There are rules for this that the LEO must follow and the local/state LEO must attend a course and have proof of that course. It was always strange to have an armed Department of Education LEO board the aircraft. After attending FFDO school I learned what that person had gone through to get that weapon. Back before 911 Local LEO's would carry guns on board all the time. The crew of the aircraft knows who is carrying and the LEO's also know who else on the aircraft is carrying. I was departing somewhere and a brand new class of Secret Service agents got on board. We had around 40 guys with gun. They all knew each other very well.

[powerboatr]

if it was a chartered flight by the state department,
a few things could drive the demilitarizing of our marines
1. state was full of crap
2. some weak kneed state employee screwed the pooch

i traveled many times on "chartered" flights
only passengers were my fellow service men. we were armed, at least we had our sidearms and at the captains bequest we all had them unloaded during the flight.

someone at state just wanted the world to see the marines leave in a disgraceful way

but it may have been a ticketed flight...
my big question is...if the aircraft carriers were just 100 miles away, why didnt they send a cod to pick them up,
or a helicopter/s