Donald Trump lashed out at a retired Army colonel who criticized the Republican nominee's comments about the battle to reclaim Mosul in Iraq – declaring he could teach the military expert "a couple of things."
"I've been hearing about Mosul now for three months," Trump told ABC News' George Stephanopoulos on Wednesday.
"'We're going to attack, we're going to attack.' Why do they have to say three months before the attack, 'We're going in?'" he asked. "Don't talk about it."
"[It's the] element of surprise. So you can tell your military expert that I'll sit down, and I'll teach him a couple of things," he said.
The rebuke followed the remarks of retired Army colonel and former dean of the Army War College, Jeff McCausland, who said the GOP nominee's "surprise" strategy shows "Trump doesn't know a damn thing about military strategy."
But Trump doubled down on his belief coalition forces were wrong to telegraph their strike on the ISIS stronghold beforehand.
"One of the reasons they wanted Mosul, they wanted to get the ISIS leaders they thought were in Mosul," he told Stephanopoulos. "Those people have all left. As soon as they heard they were going to be attacked, they all left. Why can't they win first and talk later?"
ISIS captured Mosul in 2014, and shortly thereafter, its leader Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi proclaimed the birth of a self-styled caliphate.
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