Recent unannounced deployments of hundreds of U.S. troops to Iraq and Syria are meant to preserve the element of surprise, not to keep the American public in the dark about the number of troops involved in the war against the Islamic State, Pentagon officials said Monday.
President Trump repeatedly criticized the Obama administration for saying too much about troops’ movements and future plans, a criticism he repeated in an interview with the Financial Times published on Sunday.
“I am not the United States of the past where we tell you where we are going to hit in the Middle East. Where they say … ‘We will be attacking Mosul in four months,’ ” Trump said. “There is no reason to talk.”
Recently, a Marine artillery unit was dispatched to Syria in preparation for the coming offensive to liberate Raqqa, with no public announcement until after they arrived. Pentagon officials say the secret deployments are meant to maintain operational security, and not intended to mislead Americans about the size and scope of the U.S. commitment.
“We want to keep them informed,” said Navy Capt. Jeff Davis, a Pentagon spokesman, “but we want to inform them after the fact. If we inform them before the fact, we inform the enemy.”
Davis cited the March 21 assault on the Tabqa dam in Syria as an example of where additional U.S. forces were used in order to help local fighters take ISIS by surprise, in part because the deployment of additional firepower, including ground artillery units and Apache attack helicopters, was not announced.
The Pentagon routinely provides what appear to be exact numbers for U.S. ground troops deployed in the fight against ISIS; 5,262 in Iraq, and 503 in Syria.
But those numbers correspond to troop level caps, known as “force management levels,” imposed under President Obama. They don’t include additional forces that can be called forward by U.S. commanders on a temporary basis.
The Pentagon is reviewing the whole concept of maintaining artificial caps on troop levels, because in order to stay under them, commanders have employed workarounds such as deploying helicopter squadrons, without their mechanics, and then replacing the regular troops with more expensive private contractors.
“We’re looking at things like unit cohesion and the ability of units to stay together and operate as a whole,” Davis said.
Davis said any change would be aimed at providing an accurate picture of the number of U.S. troops in the war zone, without giving away any tactical advantage.
“I think we will always be able to tell you a baseline enduring number,” Davis said. “I think where we would like to retain the element of surprise, such as you saw with the assault on Tabqa, we would like to do that.”
