CNN military expert bruises Trump's Pentagon over Niger debacle: 'They have a lot of questions to answer'

On Friday morning, CNN's Chris Cuomo and Alisyn Camerota began the questioning of the events that led to the deaths of four military members in Niger.

The New Day hosts invited analysts Barbara Starr and military expert retired Major General James "Spider" Marks, to attempt to explain what little is known about the incident which has roiled a White House that has struggled to explain why President Donald Trump failed to call the grieving families -- and then botched it when he did.

With Marks relaying the little information that the Pentagon has released regarding the engagement, he suggested that there are many more questions that need to be answered.

"What were the intelligence assets available for the Africa command to approve this engagement?" Marks asked. "And I would never second-guess those decisions. When you do your forensics on all of this, there are higher priority targets someplace else that were taking intelligence collection assets away, that the folks on the ground had been given a good snapshot that this was a permissive environment"

"So the team worked desperately. you can only imagine they were fighting for each other,-- there is incredible confusion, they haven't seen anything like this in the previous 29 patrols they have connected in the area," he continued. "They are outgunned, out-manned by ISIS fighters.,hey don't know what's going on. At the moment of the engagement, they don't know what is taking place other than they are being shot at."

"What was the purpose, what was the objective of this engagement?" Marks asked. "At the end of all of these, every time there is a death, you know, there is an investigation."

Watch the video below via CNN: