'Amateur hour': Hurricane Katrina military director blows up on CNN about inadequate Harvey response

Army Lt. Gen. Russel Honore (Ret.) -- the military commander who coordinated the armed forces' response to Hurricane Katrina -- slammed President Donald Trump's response to Hurricane Harvey as "amateur hour" and said that in Texas, tonight, there are "a lot of citizens hanging on by the thread of their life."

Honore was speaking with CNN's Erin Burnett live from Houston, TX about the devastation spawned by the historic storm that has deluged southeastern Texas, Hurricane Harvey.

"What worries you about tonight?" Burnett asked him.

"That night's coming," he replied. "We've got a lot of citizens out there who are hanging on by the thread of their life. Twelve years ago today I arrived in New Orleans, post-Katrina."

Since then, he said, "The federal government took their hand off it to go off and fight terrorism, and now, each time we have a Sandy or now a Harvey, the solution is different, it's cooked locally by the state."

"I know I'm sounding critical, but if we don't talk about this now," Honore said, "there comes upon a time when the mission is too big for the state National Guard and they need to get the hell over it and bring the big dogs in when you've got a big mission."

"This whole operation didn't have the scale," he said. "They need to stop patting each other on the back while there's poor people still out here waiting to get rescued."

"The American people have put too much confidence in us," he concluded. "We've been too successful overseas deploying to come out and amateur hour and incrementally deploy the force. You gotta come in big and you've got to be there right at the edge of the storm so you can come in and rescue people."

Watch the video, embedded below: