Military officials are appalled at the "willful incompetence" of President Barack Obama's administration and its interference in the campaign against the Islamic State (ISIS), said Lt. Col. Ralph Peters.

"We've a president so arrogant, an administration so arrogant, they think they know how to run military tactical affairs; not just strategic, but tactical affairs, better than military professionals.

"Everyone is appalled at the incompetence, the willful incompetence of this White House," Peters, a retired Army Lt. Colonel, told Fox News' "America's Newsroom" on Monday. Peters said recent statements by Robert Gates and Leon Panetta, both former secretaries of defense and directors of the CIA, showed they were "angry" about the micromanagement of the White House in military affairs.

Speaking at the Reagan Library over the weekend, Gates claimed the White House was making military decisions based on politics.

"When a president wants highly centralized control in the White House at the degree of micromanagement that I'm describing, that's not bureaucratic, that's political," Gates said Saturday.

Panetta, in his recent memoir, "Worthy Fights," wrote that he thought the White House was "eager to rid itself of Iraq," and predicted the U.S. could be embroiled in a 30-year war in the Middle East because of Obama's decisions.

Peters said Gates and Panetta "don't want to speak out," but were doing so because "they feel it is their patriotic duty. They're compelled to do this now." He said the White House was "obsessed with controlling everything for domestic political purposes."

The problem went beyond the Obama administration, and included "lawyers approving targets, lawyers deployed with battalions," Peters explained, adding that to win the war against the Islamic State, Obama must give the "strategic direction," and then "let the people who know how to do it, do it." "I'll tell you how you win it. You get the lawyers out of it. You get the politicians out of it. You tell our military, 'Destroy Islamic State. And what happens in Iraq and Syria, stays in Iraq and Syria,'" he said.

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