CONTINGENCY PLANNING. John Hinderaker at PowerLine wonders why the Obama administration appears to be caught flat-footed with respect to the Egyptian crisis:

The U.S. military does not wait for a crisis to appear before it starts to develop contingency plans. On the contrary, such plans are continuously evaluated and updated: if we had to invade Iran, how would we do it? What response options would we have if North Korea started firing missiles toward Alaska? And so on.

It is hard to believe that the State Department doesn't prepare similar contingency plans for diplomatic crises.

The simple reason is that the State Department has a deep-seated and long-held antipathy toward all things military. The fact that the military does anything - like contingency planning - is prima facie evidence of wrongheadedness. So if the military does it, it must be bad, and therefore we the State Department must do the exact opposite.

All the more reason to give diplomatic duties back to the Navy, where it resided before air travel, transatlantic cable, satellite communication, and the internet.