So a commando raid runs into problems in Yemen.
So a GI gets killed.
So a multi-million dollar assault aircraft is lost.
So a bunch of civilians get killed.
So maybe no valuable intelligence was captured. Maybe the bad guys burned their code books. They’re trained to do that.
So what.

This is war. People get killed, sometimes innocent civilians.
Gear is captured or must be scuttled to prevent capture.
This happens in combat. Things go wrong, even in the battles you win, and you don’t win all battles even in the wars you win.

Trump has blamed Obama for planning the raid sloppily, even though Obama delayed the raid so Trump’s advisors could review the battle plan. Now Trump is blaming his generals. The press is blaming Trump, which I think is just as unfair, shit happens in war time. Really. Let’s face it, even if the raid was a total fuck-up, we only lost one guy and one plane. It sounds like we got off easy. As far as I’m concerned, being able to withdraw in good order and with minimal casualties from an action that goes wrong is damn near as good as an all-out victory.

Now Trump is parading the weeping widow for political points, probably because the soldier’s father is bad mouthing Trump and blaming him for his son’s death.

If we want to blame anybody, the only thing we know for sure is that Trump is claiming the raid was worth it because we gathered “valuable intelligence”. That’s just another Trump lie. Its too early to know if any of the stuff we got was valuable at all, it has to be inventoried, collated, crosschecked, compared with other intelligence…in other words, we don’t know whether or not the raid was worth it or not. Maybe so, but we can’t know yet. It’s too soon.

Maybe we shouldn’t publicize the results of our commando raids. Win or lose, the enemy knows whether he’s been hit. We don’t need to know, unless we need to determine the effectiveness of our war fighters and leaders, and it’s too soon for that too.

We know Bush and Obama mounted effective counter insurgency actions against the Jihadists. They probably mounted a few that went south, too. Its too soon to be judging Trump for that. Its smells too much of Benghazi.