Defense Secretary Ash Carter has said it. Joint Chiefs Chairman Gen. Joseph Dunford has said it. The top U.S. military spokesman in Iraq said it — last year.
But administration officials from the White House to other parts of the Pentagon have a hard time saying it without adding some sort of caveat.
The impolitic truth they seem to choke on: U.S. troops are in combat in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, and maybe in Somalia and Libya, too.
The latest to express dismay with the mealy-mouthed locutions coming from White House and Pentagon press secretaries is former Defense Secretary and CIA Director Robert Gates, who said it is a “disservice” to American troops not to speak openly about their wartime service.
“They are being killed. They are in combat, and these semantic backflips to avoid using the term combat is a disservice to those who are out there putting their lives on the line,” Gates told MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week.
Carter has tried several times to end the ambiguity, testifying before Congress that U.S. troops are in combat. Period. Full stop.
And most recently when announcing the death of Navy SEAL Charles Keating IV, during an attack on Peshmerga forces in northern Iraq.
“He was in a firefight and he died in combat. So, let me be very, very clear about that,” Carter told reporters in Germany. “His mission was to advise and assist the Peshmerga. That was a dangerous mission that took him into combat — combat, and that’s where he perished heroically.”
On the same day though White House press secretary Josh Earnest was insisting Keating was not on a “combat mission,” but nevertheless “equipped for combat.” Brig. Gen. Charles Cleveland, a senior military spokesman in Afghanistan, called it a “combat situation.”
And if you ask the question at a Pentagon briefing, you have a hard time getting a simple declarative sentence in response. Instead you get references to troops being “in harm’s way.”
Pentagon press secretary Peter Cook, when asked if he was willing to say troops are in combat in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, said this: “They have been in certain situations, absolutely. They have found themselves under fire. That is combat … but it is fair, as well, to say that the role of U.S. forces in places like Iraq and Afghanistan is different than previously when they were in the lead in terms of combat operations. They are not in the lead in combat operations now, but they certainly have found themselves in combat. Yes, that’s a fair statement.”
The distinction Cook seems to be drawing is that while the Obama administration has not sent troops into combat, they can sometime simply find themselves there.
Why the “semantic backflips,” as Gates calls it?
Critics say doing so admits that the U.S. is back at war, and acknowledges President Obama’s failure to keep a key promise for which he has already claimed credit, namely to have ended the wars in both Iraq and Afghanistan during his administration.
“I have a feeling it’s got everything to do with the politics of — we’ve ended combat operations in Iraq. It’s over. We’re done. We’re out of there. We’re all of a sudden back there,” Gates told MSNBC.
The New York Times last week called it Obama’s “unexpected legacy,” a president who has been at war longer than any other in American history.
“Mr. Obama, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2009 and spent his years in the White House trying to fulfill the promises he made as an antiwar candidate, would have a longer tour of duty as a wartime president than Franklin D. Roosevelt, Lyndon B. Johnson, Richard M. Nixon or his hero Abraham Lincoln,” the Times said.
As Senate Armed Services Committee Chairman Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., is fond of repeating, “Wars don’t end because politicians say so.”
Or as the no-nonsense U.S. military spokesman in Baghdad, Col. Steve Warren put it bluntly last October, “We’re in combat. I thought I made that pretty clear, so I’ll clear it up. Of course it is. That’s why we carry guns.”
