well.. if its 10,000 whats the plan?
We could fit that many on 2-3 amphib carriers.
There's always a plan on file for a NEO of every nation. The plan will have been dusted off. Lebanon is in the US Central Command AOR, which element has other things going on also. In this case the plan may have depended on assets that are not available with the carrier surge in Asia. Understand that making these plans and updating them requires an extensive committment of staff time, and changing events always require some parts of the plan to be "fragged," or altered by fragmentary order (FRAGO). The plan is usually done by the theater combatant command or its subordinate special operations command.
Normally, the NEO is conducted while the environment is still permissive. All US Citizens are identified and are given assembly points, which might be something like a soccer field. Military forces, usually Marines because of their deployability and expeditionary orientation, meet them there and organise them for ground or air transport.
The State Department urges all Americans to register with the embassy on arrival in the sort of foreign countries where a NEO may be required -- it's in the state travel advisory. Most don't bother until things get ugly, and then they cop an entitlement attitude, which is exactly what we're seeing here.
I guarantee you most of the people tying up the State Department lines right now are trying to do the registration they should have done on landing, asking dumb questions, or insisting that the US has a duty to evacuate not just them but their Lebanese extended family, pets, houehold china, and Land Rover. One thing you always see at NEOs are old expatriate men trying to bring their bar girls. (If you love her that much you should have married her and given her legal status, Jack. But you don't love her that much).
A moment's thought should tell anyone that a limited number of phone lines and a limited number of consular officers at the Embassy mean that you wait your turn among your 25,000 countrymen, and that hanging on the line to argue minutiae or demand answers to questions the junior officer on the phone can't answer (cause even the Ambassador doesn't know yet) is just screwing your buddy -- but Americans definitely do that. Some 60,000 seat stadiums only have two people selling tickets on the phone, and they get by.
They can't simply add fifty lines and fifty operators (how? Outsource to India? How long does it take to get a phone turned on in Beirut anyway?) every time a crisis breaks out.
If the environment goes non-permissive, the NEO has specific plans for that as well, about which I will say less for obvious reasons, but the focus is finding and securing all Americans (and sometimes foreign nationals, by diplomatic arrangement; for instance we often pull British and French nationals and they often pull ours) and bringing them to safety.
Where they will complain bitterly about the lodgings and food... they deserve better... they're entitled.
d.o.l.
Criminal Number 18F