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Reporting now, there were aircraft in the air. there were support aircraft in the air and strike aircraft in the air. we dont know -- at least what ive read at this point, what the configuration of those forces was. but at some point someone said to the president, this is too much, and he said, hold on, lets pull it back. but, again, i think these are hard things to spin up. it takes a long time to spin up a strike package like this, and its a very serious question as to what he was going to do ...

Then it says, officials said that the president initially approved attacks on a handful of iranian targets like radar and missile batteries. the operation was under way in its early stages when it was called off. planes were in the air, ships were in position but no missiles had been fired when word came to stand down, the official said. how significant is that, that this is all going on while we have changes at the top of the defense department, general? >> yeah, its significant. i cant explain...

Wants to accomplish. and just a unilateral strike, even though it might be a proportional response to a shoot-down of a drone, where does it lead? and i think some of the military commanders were forcing that issue of saying, when youre about to use force and you dont know where its going to take you, if it spins out of the control and you dont have an end state in mind, its going to escalate very quickly. the quote from the guns of august, about what occurred in the first world war, was when a ...

This case president trump, is critically important. and as rick just said, hes not interested in intelligence. he sometimes isnt interested in the expert opinion, and that will cause problems when you have these kinds of very difficult strategic decisions to make. as you said, in this case, it appeared that someone got through to him and made him realize that the risk would probably be much greater than the rewards in what iran might do, which no one really knows. >> ive got togo. general, thank...