When the Pentagon wants to
mislead the public about where US troops are, generally speaking, they just
lie. Yet sometimes the number of troops is just too big to claim as a rounding
error, and questions start happening.
This
week, the focus is on over 44,000 US military personnel deployed
to “unknown,” which immediately raises red flags, because
that’s not a place. Pentagon officials, however, say there is “no good way” to
describe where they are.
Pentagon
spokesman Col. Rob Manning, on the one hand, presented this as an “operational
security” and “denying the enemy any advantage,” including, it seems providing
any specifics on who “the enemy” at this point even is.
At
the same time, Manning presented this as simply a limitation of the Pentagon’s
current capabilities, and that there is literally “no personnel system” in the
Pentagon that tracks where everyone is, and they just stick everyone else in
“unknown” so the number of troops they officially have balances out with the
number of troops deployed in actual, real places.
Pentagon
spokesman Eric Pahon went a step further, saying that the figures are flat out
fiction, and were “not meant to represent an accurate accounting of troops
currently deployed to any location. They should not be relied upon for a
current picture of what is going on.”
Secretary
of Defense James Mattis suggested that the situation was complicated, but also
that he wasn’t entirely comfortable with the lack of accounting for troops
abroad, saying at some point he was going to try to put everything together and
figure out where everyone really is.
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