This is not the first time Operation Lone Star, the costly exercise in political grandstanding launched by Gov. Greg Abbott in March 2021, has been shaken by a terrible loss. Army Times reported in December that over the preceding two months, four soldiers involved with the operation had died by suspected suicide.

Furthermore, a number of the 10,000 men and women deployed to the border or otherwise providing support to the operation have reported issues with morale, housing, or even with being paid on time.

All of which raises the question of why we’re sending service members to the border — an extremely dangerous place, to hear Republicans tell it — with so little consideration and without even basic safety devices. As Morales noted, water rescues are a regular occurrence along the river, as are accidental drownings.

The most plausible answer to that overarching question — sadly, outrageously — is that Operation Lone Star is a political operation designed to highlight President Joe Biden’s weaknesses and raise Abbott’s national profile.

A similar case could be made about Abbott’s brief, ludicrous border shutdown last month, which began when he announced that Texas Department of Public Safety officers would be conducting their own inspections of every commercial vehicle traveling north through the state’s ports of entry.

These were redundant inspections. The federal government, via Customs and Border Protection, inspects northbound truck traffic already. And the costs of this stunt were immediately obvious, as trucks sat idle for hours on the Mexican side of the border, in some cases with their produce wilting.

Direct costs to Texas were estimated at $4.2 billion, according to an analysis by the Perryman Group. And those are just the costs that can be readily quantified: Mexico this week announced that a new rail line that it’s building will connect with New Mexico rather than Texas, citing Abbott’s border shutdown as the reason.