President Donald Trump's strikes on suspected drug trafficking vessels, apart from being illegal, appear to have been executed with no proper planning, retired Rear Adm. William Baumgartner told MS NOW's Nicolle Wallace on "Deadline: White House."
This comes after explosive reporting that military officials fired on survivors of at least one strike, an act considered a war crime under both U.S. and international law, which has sent the White House and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth scrambling to alternatively justify and point fingers for the action.
"Admiral Baumgartner, just if you can, if you can just illuminate if that much of it rings true to you that when you are carrying out a military strike, there are eyes on it," said Wallace. "And that's how a president or any policymaker can visit the tank and watch the operation in real time if it's vital or imperative. But for anyone doing any sort of oversight in Congress, when they decide to have that role, or within the agencies' intelligence and military, that many people at least always have eyes on an operation and ears on the chain of command."
"That would be true," said Baumgartner. "There are going to be a number of people that are that are watching it and monitoring it in real time. In fact, that's normally what makes our operations successful, because we do have that kind of command and control and monitoring. So that would happen in this particular case. It is kind of interesting here."
"It makes it sound like it was just unexpected that there would be survivors," he said. "And what that tells me is this was a tremendous failure in planning. The military has a great planning system. And you look at what are possible contingencies. It's almost inconceivable to me that a good planning system wouldn't have said, what if we don't kill everybody on the first strike? What do we do with the survivors? What's the what are our legal responsibilities? What resources do we have to take care of those survivors?"
What all this means, Baumgartner said, is that in all likelihood, there were things "that theyweren't prepared for, that theyshould have been prepared."