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“Send in the cavalry.”

That was the advice retired Army General Russel Honore gave President Donald Trump this week about responding to the devastation of Puerto Rico by Hurricane Maria. And Honore’s opinion was well informed: in 2005, President George W. Bush sent him to bail out New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina’s 30-foot storm surge overran its levees. And by Honore’s judgment, Trump has fallen short: “This is a hit on White House decision making,” he told Bloomberg News.

Plenty of others piled on, including a pair of Trump’s 2016 presidential opponents:

“The logistics chain is broken and only the U.S. military can stand it up,” insisted Florida Senator Marco Rubio. “And it is truly my hope that at some point in the next few hours the generals that are down there now, someone with … two stars, or three stars on their shoulder, will be able to be the ultimate decision maker until we get basic logistics.”

So, how fair were such criticisms?

Taken literally, Clinton’s weren’t. By the time she tweeted, the Navy had long been coordinating with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and several Marine amphibious ships were operating off the coast. However, it wasn’t until after her comment that the White House ordered that the Comfort, one of the Navy’s two floating hospitals, head for the island. As for Rubio, we’ll have to see how the logistical issues play out in the days ahead.

But to look at the larger context of the entire relief operation, I decided to talk to someone whose experience rivals that of General Honore: retired Navy Captain Jerry Hendrix. Now a senior fellow with the Center for a New American Security, Hendrix served for decades both on the high seas and in high-level staff jobs, including with the Chief of Naval Operations’ Executive Panel and the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy’s Irregular Warfare Quadrennial Defense Review. Few people know more about military history than Hendrix, who has degrees from Purdue, Harvard, the Naval Postgraduate School and a PhD from Kings College in London. Little wonder that in 2012 was named the service’s director of naval history.Here is a lightly edited transcript of our discussion: