Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said Friday that the public should go easy on the military for misreporting some of the aircraft and munitions used in the Syria strike last week.
Information released by the Pentagon and the Air Force claiming an extended-range version of Lockheed Martin’s Joint-Air-to-Surface Standoff Missile was used, and that the service’s F-22 Raptor fighter jet did not participate, turned out to not be true.
Instead, a standard version of the JASSM — not the extended-range one — was launched and the F-22 helped protect ground forces.
“First of all, I’m glad that they corrected the record as opposed to letting it stand. I watched the press conference as well and I think maybe we should cut people a little bit of slack, you know,” Wilson said, referring to a Saturday morning Pentagon briefing on the strike by chief spokeswoman Dana White and Lt. Gen. Frank McKenzie.
Wilson spoke about the mistaken reports during an appearance at the American Enterprise Institute think tank.
“They are trying to get information out about an operation that happened the night before on a Saturday morning and taking questions from a hundred different directions about operational details, and I think they did a pretty good job,” Wilson said. “If you get something wrong on a question like the version of a particular missile or those kind of things, they just correct the record, it’s not that big of a deal.
“But I thought they did a really good job, and I’m glad they were there,” she said.
The Pentagon corrected the record Thursday after being questioned about the type of missile used dropped by two Air Force B-1 bombers. It was the first time that any JASSMs were used in combat.
“They were not JASSM-ERs. So, I misspoke when I gave that information the first time,” McKenzie said.
The Air Force said this week that F-22 jets were not in the area and did not take part in the strike on Syrian President Bashar Assad’s chemical weapons facilities, but it walked that back on Thursday and confirmed they did provide overwatch operations, according to a report by Military.com.
