intelligence is not perfect, intel, as representative johnson just said, or vice just said, it is never perfect. we re not going to get perfection in the world of intelligence. it is probablistic language. we have confidence in intelligence systems, they are not perfect, we have good reason to have confidence in them and that has been expressed in accuracy and precision of the strikes. i understand. this one strike was bad, tragic, horrible, not to say the intelligence system as i whole is wrong. but given that we ve had multiple mistakes we already know about, including the ac-130 gun ship attack in 2015 that destroyed a hospital is killed 42 civilians, what assurances can you give us and the american
assessment. when we do have tragedies, be they navy destroyers colliding with merchant ships, we lost 14 sailors a couple summers ago. we had a lot of accountability. we fired a lot of admirals as a result of that. we had an ac-130 gun ship conduct a series of firings in afghanistan. we held a lot of people accountable for that. i think the military in this case is going to have to go through this, point by point. i think there will be accountability. what about the growing tension between the united states and france right now, sir? france announced it was recalling its ambassador to the u.s. over the exclusion from a nuclear deal. secret nuclear submarine deal. that deal with the uk and australia, that upends the prior deal that france had with australia. how significant is this back and forth right now? well, the back and forth between the u.s. and france is more significant than any other i can think of, alex, going back
this kind of environment, you look at the worst-case analysis. you plan for the worst thing the enemy can do to you and then you backward plan from that. tucker: right. why was our perimeter so close to the taliban? why wasn t the taliban told to stay at least 2,003,000 meters away from the airfield? we had no standoff, where was the ac 130 in the air? why didn t we have some mobile armored firepower on the ground in the form of bradleys or tanks? you can fly them in and fly them out when you re finished. i don t understand what was going on. it strikes me that no one seemed to think this was really a dangerous environment. the only thing i can conclude is that this half-assed operation was mckenzie s fault primarily but he s also got the secretary of defense, i assume that he briefed him, in which case the secretary of defense should be removed. and i know millie is very unpopular with lots of people, he s just advisor. apparently he didn t give very good advice.
members were. no indication that british service members were killed and also no indications that u.s. state department officials were killed in the attack at abbey gate. but what we what is very clear from the general, the mission continues. they will continue evacuations. they ramped up security. this was it s clear that somehow the bomber got past the so-called taliban security that was on the outer perimeter. they re going to try to push the crowds back further. but you have overwatch. general mckenzie was clear that they have ac-130 gun ships, they have ah-64 apache helicopters and a lot of isr over that airport. there will be i imagine a number of ways in which the u.s. military tries to indicate that any further attackers may be better beware before approaching the airport.