Trump Team’s Offhand Approval Leads to First Military Blunder

"On January 6th there was an interagency deputies meeting. The deputies recommended at that time that they go ahead. It was so easily approved it was sent straight up" to then-President Obama. That was Press Secretary Sean Spicer saying that the Trump team had ok'd an assault on an al Qaeda outpostDuring Raid What Was President Doing? Feb. 24: He never went to the situation room to observe the attack. Huffington Post worked back the timeline to find that during the 50-minute firefight which cost the life of a Navy SEAL and wounded four other SEALs, the President was tweeting. He wanted so tell us about an interview on The Brody File that night that we should all 'Enjoy!'
    
in Yemen that had been thoroughly planned and ok'd by Obama's team.

“Not what happened,” was Colin Kahl's tweeted response to Spicer's apparent attempt to shift blame. Kahl is now a professor at Georgetown University's School of Foreign Service. He was deputy assistant to President Obama and national security adviser to Vice-President Biden. Most important, he was in the room January 6th.

In a television interview , Kahl related that months ago the Pentagon had asked the White House for expanded authority to conduct raids against the deadly affiliate in Yemen , al Qaeda in the Arabian Peninsula (AQAP), a group that has sought in at least three instances to detonate bombs hidden aboard American commercial jetliners. All of those plots were thwarted, but AQAP is presumed to be developing further plots. In that deputies meeting, said Kahl,

The Pentagon basically outlined their request for a general set of authorities that would allow them to [conduct raids] and also to put some additional forces into the field, but they did not brief a single specific raid, they did not brief a target, a compound or what we call a con op — a concept of operation — and the deputies made no decision . Basically, since we were so close to the end of the Obama administration that the recommendation by the deputies was to simply provide the information to the Trump team so that they could run a deliberate process and that recommendation went forth to President Obama who agreed that he wasn't going to jam Trump in the last week of his presidency with a major escalation in Yemen, that this was something the new president had to own and conduct a process for.

There was no process. The raid cost the life of Navy SEAL Chief Petty Officer William (Ryan) Owens, 36, of Peoria, Illinois. Three others in SEAL Team 6 were wounded in a 50-minute dawn firefight. The Trump administration at first claimed no civilians died but had to work that back as those in the town reported at least eight women and seven children, ages 3 to 13, had been killed. A Defense Department spokesman said that commandos had seen several women "run to pre-established positions as though they’d been trained to be ready and trained to be combatants.” As for children. towns people displayed "grisly photographs of bloody children purportedly killed" by the raid. Among them was the 8-year old daughter of Anwar al-Awlaki, an American citizen who Obama had killed by drone strike in 2011. Photos of her, alive and dead, are being circulated on social media to inflame the Arab world.

The al Qaeda militants knew the Americans were coming. It's believe the noise of low-flying drones gave them away. “They kind of knew they were screwed from the beginning,” one former SEAL Team 6 official said about
The Osprey tiltrotor aircraft
the troops. Marine helicopter gunships and Harrier jets had to be called in.The unplanned air assaults are what are believed to have caused the civilian deaths. One of the MV-22 Ospreys, an aircraft capable of horizontal and vertical flight, that was to rendezvous with helicopters coming from the fight carrying the wounded, suffered a "hard landing" that injured two more troops and damaged the aircraft enough that it couldn't take off. One of the Marine jets destroyed the $75 million aircraft with a GPS-guided bomb to prevent its capture by the militants.

President Trump called what you just read "a successful raid". It hadg killed an estimated 14 AQAP members, although that was not the raid's objective. Spicer said it was "a successful operation by all standards". Before the importance of whatever was taken could be known, Trump called it "important intelligence that will assist the U.S. in preventing terrorism against its citizens and people around the world". Four days after the raid a military official said that analysts had only just begun to work their way through the materials. That was the mission: the capture of computers, thumb drives and cell phones. What was actually captured has not been mentioned.

The setting for how the mission was approved to go forward is what has caused the most alarm. A plan that had never been approved by the Obama administration was never examined by the major parties in the Trump administration. It was simply decided on as a group ate dinner at the White House. It was never reviewed in the Situation Room where a military plan can be examined in detail with written exposition, maps, visuals, nor seated at the dinner was the full complement of those who should learn of a significant military operation, its odds for success, its worth versus its risks. Nor could their views be heard.

Present were Vice President Mike Pence, Defense Secretary James Mattis, Joint Chiefs chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford, national security adviser Michael Flynn, CIA director Mike Pompeo. Also present presumably to offer their opinions were Trump son-in-law, Jared Kushner, and Stephen Bannon, the former head of the alt-right web organ Breitbart News who has somehow emerged as President's Trump's strategic adviser — or Rasputin as some would have it. Bannon's qualification is that he had once been in the Navy.

In the interview earlier mentioned, Colin Kahl laid out how missions such as that undertaken in Yemen are decided on (one thinks of the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, as example):

We ran a very careful process where basically in a situation room senior officials from all the different departments and agencies … we'd all sit around and basically discuss pressing issues of national security. When our military is involved in combat operations , or counter terrorism operations, if they request an expansion of authority so that they can do more — put more boots on the ground, take a more active role in a combat situation — that's precisely what we debate around the table. The deputies then make a set of recommendations … to the cabinet, who then make a set of recommendations to the president, who oftentimes convenes a National Security Council meeting to discuss it. That's how we ran the process. That's not how Trump ran the process.

A raid like this represents a significant escalation in the nature of our actions in Yemen. It's not just the raid itself. it's that there's a broader set of authorities … you need to have not just the defense dept around the table, you also need your intelligence professionals so that they can vet the intelligence to make sure that they agree with the risk assessment the Pentagon is making. You also need the State Department at the table so that they can go through the political implications — what happens if civilians die? What are the implications for tribal relations in Yemen or diplomatic relations? You need the communicators in the room so that you know you're on message and coordinated with your allies. You also need the legislative team in the room so that you can notify Congress. This is a deliberate process that you owe the president — a holistic assessment — and the problem is, even if you've got a bunch of smart capable people around a table at dinner like Secretary Mattis, who I think the world of, and Joe Dunford … who's an amazing man, you need a fuller picture than those two gentleman can provide for the President to make a decision of this gravity.

hypocrisy

The raid is a reminder of the Benghazi raid by al Qaeda that caused the death of the American ambassador to Libya, Christopher Stevens, and three others, two of whom were former Navy SEALs. A week-long attempt by the Obama administration to mask that al Qaeda had been the perpetrator expanded into a Republican attempt to blame the deaths directly on Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who somehow should have been personally involved in safeguarding not an embassy, not even a consulate, but an outpost far from the Libyan capital (and a hotbed to which Amb. Stevens was foolhardy to visit on the anniversary of 9/11).

Republican-controlled committees in Congress conducted nine investigations and Fox News ran its version of the story like a tape loop daily that first year, always with the building on fire in the background, and continually rekindled the subject over a four year span. The reason, of course, was entirely political: to tar Clinton so as to prevent her from attaining the presidency. As it turned out, other Clinton foul-ups took care of that.

Our point? Here we have much the same story, but Republicans are still in control. The raid in which "almost everything went wrong", a senior military official said to NBC News, should most certainly prompt an investigation, particularly to probe how the decision was made to go in, but with Republicans holding majorities in the committees, there's no chance of one investigation much less nine. Trump's fiasco will just fade away.