Waltz: Drone Strike Debacle Shows It’s ‘Fiction’ That We’re ‘Just as Safe’ Post-Withdrawal and Can Effectively Do Over-the-Horizon Operations

On Friday’s broadcast of the Fox News Channel’s “The Story,” Rep. Michael Waltz (R-FL) reacted to the Pentagon admitting that the August 29 drone strike killed civilians and not any ISIS-K members by saying that you need assets that have now been removed in order to avoid such mistakes and wondering, “when is the administration going to quit this fiction that we are just as safe as we were with this full surrender and withdrawal?”

Waltz stated, “I reject Gen. McKenzie’s position on over-the-horizon counterterrorism. It is going to be far more difficult. The strike that they took earlier was in a remote location versus this one in a teaming city. You need other assets on the ground, and that’s what people need to understand. You need human assets on the ground. You need signals capability. We now have none of that. It’s all been removed. And so, when is the administration going to quit this fiction that we are just as safe as we were with this full surrender and withdrawal? We are not. We have no bases in the region. Our local allies are being hunted down and the terrorists now are much, much better armed. And we are effectively blind in many ways, in terms of our intelligence.”

He added that there will always be time constraints in counterterrorism missions, “The difference is, before, we had human assets that could verify. We had sensors. We had signals intelligence. You can verify that drone intelligence so that you don’t make mistakes like this. Again, all of that is now gone.”

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