Presumptive Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney doesn’t seem to understand the myriad considerations that went into President Obama’s decision to carry out the special operations raid that killed Osama Bin Laden. An ad put out by the Obama re-election campaign highlighting the president’s decision to strike into Pakistani territory to kill Bin Laden sparked a furor by questioning whether Romney would have made the same call.

Since the ad appeared, Romney, his surrogates, and so-called independent groups like the nouvelle swift-boaters have all rehashed the same dubious line in Romney’s defense: That any American president (or “any thinking American“) would have ordered the bin Laden raid. Just last night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News Channel show, Romney yet again issued this defense:

ROMNEY: But if the president wants to remind people of his decision, well, that’s entirely appropriate. But I think it was a big mistake for the president to try to make in this a political event by suggesting that I would not have done the same thing. I mean, frankly, Sean, almost any American in the position of presidency hearing that Osama bin Laden could have been taken out would have certainly pressed the button and said: get rid of the guy.

HANNITY: Oh, absolutely.

ROMNEY: And of course I would have.

Watch the video:

However, Romney and his allies’ repeated responses to the ad that “any thinking American” would have ordered the raid don’t account for the actual events surrounding Obama’s call.

Romney assumes that Obama was 100 percent sure bin Laden was at the compound in Pakistan. However, the intelligence was far from certain:

“There wasn’t any direct evidence that he was there. It was all circumstantial.” — Robert Gates

“The circumstantial case of Iraq having WMD (weapons of mass destruction) was actually stronger than the circumstantial case that bin Laden is living in the Abbottabad compound.” — CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell

“Ultimately, it was a 50/50 proposition as to whether this was actually bin Laden.” — President Obama

Romney thinks that anyone would have ordered the raid based on his assumption that bin Laden’s whereabouts were known. In fact, Vice President Biden and Robert Gates opposed a special operations assault that the president ultimately decided on, particularly because of uncertainty as to whether bin Laden was at the compound.

Romney claimed that “we haven’t heard all the different military options there were” for the bin Laden raid. But various reports have outlined a number of courses of action Obama could have taken. “Most were variations of either a JSOC raid or an airstrike. Some versions included cooperating with the Pakistani military; some did not,” the New Yorker reported.

In an analogous choice in 2005, George W. Bush and then-Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld decided not to strike at senior Al Qaeda commanders in Pakistan because of the potential risk to relations with the notoriously sensitive country. When Obama said in his first presidential campaign that he would strike in Pakistan to get bin Laden, McCain criticized him as irresponsible. Romney echoed this concern when he said in August 2007, “I do not concur in the words of Barack Obama in a plan to enter an ally of ours.”

By Lawrence J. Korb, Alex Rothman and Max Hoffman

Military personnel costs have nearly doubled since fiscal year 2001 and now consume one-third of the Pentagon’s base budget — about $180 billion per year.

The Pentagon’s personnel budget is composed of three major items: military pay, health care, and retirement. If left unreformed, increasing expenses for these programs will consume a growing share of the defense budget, diverting funds from other critical national security initiatives such as training and modernization.

In light of the pressing need to reform the military’s compensation systems, the Center for American Progress recently released “Reforming Military Compensation,” a new report which identifies opportunities to reduce personnel costs without breaking faith with the men and women who are serving or have served.

In the Pentagon’s FY 2013 budget request, Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta and the Joint Chiefs of Staff wisely seek to address the threat of mounting personnel costs. The request calls for significant changes to the Defense Department’s pay, health care, and retirement systems in order to ensure the solvency of the compensation system.

The reforms proposed in the FY 2013 request are a courageous first step by the Pentagon leadership to address personnel costs and ensure long-term military readiness. The CAP report endorses the Pentagon’s proposals while identifying areas in which the Defense Department can go further to ensure the long-term viability of the military’s compensation programs.

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By John Norris

Foreign aid has never been the most popular program in the federal budget. Most Americans think that it is the single largest item of government spending, greater than defense spending, Medicaid, or Medicare. Asked to guess how much of the budget goes to foreign aid, the average American estimates about 25 percent — when in reality it has been consistently less than 1 percent.

Given that it is an election year, and that spending on international affairs makes an easy target, it should come as no surprise that the Rep. Paul Ryan’s (R-WI) budget absolutely decimates spending on both international development and international affairs in general. (The Ryan budget would cut $31.6 billion from the international affairs account over the next four years.)

So yes, much of the public’s view of foreign aid is based on misperceptions. But the U.S. government, including Congress, deserves its own share of blame for the public’s cynical view toward foreign aid for one important reason: the United States still is not very selective in how it delivers aid. This year, the U.S. will deliver economic and security assistance to 146 countries around the globe. That approach is too scattershot, and makes it far less likely that any given aid program will actually nurture real change over the long haul. We continue to offer aid to too many bad partners and too many countries that are ready to graduate from assistance programs. The bottom line: we should be doing much more in fewer places if we hope to foster real change.

In our new report, Engagement amid Austerity: a Bipartisan Approach to Reorienting the International Affairs Budget, we rank all 146 countries receiving U.S. aid as to whether or not they rate as a good investment for scarce U.S. assistance dollars. Looking at everything from corruption to the percentage of the population living on less than two dollars a day, the report offers readers like you a wide array of data to reach their own conclusions about vital programs that make a huge difference for millions of people.