Retired 3-star General Mark Hertling Strikes Donald Trump's "Jackassery"

A war of words continues between US President Donald Trump and former senior army officers who are not strangers to the conflict.

In his latest show, Donald Trump mocked retired Admiral William McRaven as a "Hillary Clinton fan" who should have been quicker to capture Osama Bin Laden.

McRaven, a retired naval officer, oversaw the 2011 operation that killed bin Laden in Abbottabad, Pakistan. But that did not impress Trump, who told Chris Wallace Fox News Sunday: "It would have been nicer to have Osama bin Laden much earlier."

Major-General Mark P. Hertling photographed in December 2007 at a press conference on al-Qaeda in the heavily fortified zone of the Green Zone in Baghdad, Iraq. He accused Donald Trump of "brutality" for criticizing his former colleague William McRaven. Wathiq Khuzaie / Getty Images

However, Major-General Mark Hertling, a retired three-star general who served with McRaven, defended his former colleague and told CNN that the president's words were "disrespectful".

He said: "We will never be able to immunize ourselves against this kind of story, against this kind of" stupidity ".

"I do not need to defend Bill McCraven, he's a good friend of mine, he's a true patriot, a hero, we served both during the same period and under several presidents of both parties.

"We serve the US constitution for the military, we do not serve an individual, it is what differentiates our army from all the other armies in the world. This comment by the president was disrespectful, demoralizing, superficial and unprofessional, "he told CNN TV presenter Ana Cabrera on Sunday.

Hertling's comments were then supported in the same discussion by David Gergen, former Richard Nixon's presidential adviser, Gerald Ford, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton.

"This (Trump's comments) shows some ignorance about the difficulty of catching bin Laden. It was a wonderful moment in American history, "said Gergen.

"Stalking the man who was at the center of this moment seems to me particularly inappropriate, especially on the part of a president who, in France, did not go to this cemetery because he had declared that the secret services did not would not allow. Well, all the other heads of state are gone, "he said, referring to the Trump parade at the Armistice Day commemorations.

In August, McRaven wrote in The Washington Post Trump "embarrassed us in the eyes of our children, humiliated us on the world stage and, even worse, divided us as a nation".

McRaven said in a speech at the University of Texas that Trump's media critics were "the biggest threat to democracy" during his lifetime.