Corrected entry: While Ben has a well constructed plan to get the Declaration moved from the Display Case into the vault, including faking the thermal sensor reading so that the Declaration would be moved into the Preservation Room where he can access it with little or no resistance, Ian and his crew have no such plan. How does Ian expect to gain access to the document when to the best of his knowledge it still sits in the Display Case? Was he planning on breaking into the empty vault and then crawling up the vault shaft to the Display area? And BTW, the limited amount of C4 explosive that they did show would not be enough to breach the 4 foot thick, steel plate vault, which still doesn't matter because the document isn't in there anyway.
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Correction: A movie does not have to explain every single detail of what its characters are thinking and doing. Suffice to say Ian did have some kind of plan, it is jut never explained on screen. For instance, it is, as you yourself say, entirely possible that Ian did plan to climb up the vault shaft and break out the Declaration of Independence from below. And just because the amount of C4 shown would be insufficient for this, it does not mean that Ian's gang didn't bring any more with them. For that matter, we don't even know that the C4 would be used on the case, as this is purely an assumption. There could be other uses for the C4, all depending on what Ian's plan really was.
Twotall