This raid, according to The New York Times, was approved by and recommended to the president by his secretary of defense and the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. For the recommendation to have gone forward to the president, the senior leadership of the Department of Defense would have signed off on this operation. And for that to have happened, special operations and regional U.S. commanders would have had to have blessed the planning that went into the operation itself.

The left cannot on the one hand claim Donald Trump is ignorant of military and security affairs, and then on the other hand expect him to second-guess the professional recommendations of his uniformed and civilian military leadership.

Some Obama-era counterterrorism and NSC officials are pointing to what happened as evidence that the very deliberate interagency process the Obama administration used to approve these operations has been justified.

I am inclined to disagree. My experience as a senior Department of Defense official in the last two years of the Obama administration leads me to the conclusion that the way we did things—with the military required to provide a “CONOPS,” or concept of operations, to be picked over by deputy cabinet secretaries and usually the secretaries themselves prior to being forwarded to the president for approval—was slow and ponderous in a way that created real opportunity costs and denied subordinate commanders the flexibility to exploit opportunities they saw on the battlefield. Yes, it eliminated a lot of physical and political risk, but in doing so it negated one of the primary advantages the U.S. military enjoys, which is a highly trained and capable officer corps in the field that can exercise independent judgment.

At one point toward the end of the Obama administration, cabinet secretaries—cabinet secretaries!—were literally debating whether or not it made sense to move three helicopters within Iraq and Syria. That decision should have been left to the very capable, very experienced commander on the ground, U.S. Army Lieutenant General Steve Townsend.

But this is a bi-partisan problem. To any Republicans feeling smug having just read those last two paragraphs, I have one word for you: Benghazi.

The way in which Republicans turned Benghazi into a cudgel they then used to beat Hillary Clinton had a chilling effect on anyone seeking to take any risk and personal initiative. The truth about Benghazi was that America’s very capable and intrepid ambassador on the ground, Chris Stevens, made an error in judgment for which he paid with his life. No one wanted to say that because no one wanted to be seen blaming the dead, but Stevens, in his capacity as the senior U.S. official on the ground, overruled his security officer and took risks that led to his death and the death of one other. And—and this will be difficult for some to read—that’s okay. That’s sometimes the price of doing business.