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A senior administration official said Wednesday night that the Defense Department had conducted a legal review of the operation that Trump approved and that a Pentagon lawyer had signed off on it.

Trump’s new national security team — led by Flynn, the former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency and a retired general with experience in counterterrorism raids — has said that it wants to speed the decision-making when it comes to such strikes, delegating more power to lower-level officials so that the military may respond more quickly.

Indeed, the Pentagon is drafting such plans to accelerate activities against the Qaida branch in Yemen. But doing that also raises the possibility of error.

“You can mitigate risk in missions like this, but you can’t mitigate risk down to zero,” said William Wechsler, a former top counterterrorism official at the Pentagon.

They kind of knew they were screwed from the beginning

In this case, the assault force of several dozen commandos, which also included elite troops from the United Arab Emirates, was jinxed from the start. Qaida fighters were somehow tipped off to the troops’ stealthy advance toward the village — perhaps by the whine of U.S. drones that local tribal leaders said were flying lower and louder than usual.

Through a communications intercept, the commandos knew that the mission had been somehow compromised, but pressed on toward their target roughly 5 miles from where they had been flown into the area.

“They kind of knew they were screwed from the beginning,” said one former SEAL Team 6 official.