“Casualty Cover-Up”: The Pentagon Is Hiding Troop & Contractor Losses in the Middle East
Posted by shieeet@reddit | anime_titties | View on Reddit | 39 comments
RealAbd121@reddit
This is gonna back fire soooo hard, because instead of getting 1-3 deaths a week, you're going to have the dam break and suddenly there are 60 names of dead soldiers all dropping at once!
NetworkLlama@reddit
US military regulations require notifying next of kin of dead, injured, or missing US troops within 24 hours of the military learning of it. Notification must be in person by an officer and a chaplain.
The families are given 24 hours before the names can be publicly released by the military. The families are not bound to these limits and can talk to the press immediately if they wish.
Hegseth and others might try to mess with this timeline, but there are a lot of troops in these offices who will not keep silent. Next of kin notification is considered a sacred duty in the US military, and anyone trying to undermine it will be climbing a very steep cliff.
RealAbd121@reddit
People who attempt to carry out the law against Leadership's wishes have been getting systematically fired. Eventually, laws will become irrelevant.
It's already extremely common tactic everywhere else to simply label dead soldiers as MIA, Injured, or even awoll; mainly as a way to hide the deaths and buffer the news over time. There is no reason why the US wouldn't start doing this if they degenerate long enough!
NetworkLlama@reddit
They may not carry out the notification, but someone will start leaking that they're getting delayed. Every major unit in the US military has someone, usually multiple people, responsible for arranging notifications as part of their regular duties. That means thousands of people with access to multiple means of notifying the press. It would not remain secret for long.
Professional-Syrup-0@reddit
Gotta love how when this was brought up in the not so recent past most Redditors insisted it’s impossible to hide/cover up American casualties.
But now that they are once again caught doing it Reddit suddenly be „Durr everybody does it! Nothing to See here, please move along!“
nw342@reddit
"But people will start asking questions when they dont hear from their loved ones"
My god reddit, these are deployed soldiers. What's the difference between not hearing from them because they're busy with war, and because they're dead?
Future-Excuse6167@reddit
War has a lot of down time. These guys aren't in some field in the Ardennes, they're in luxury hotels across the middle east.
Question: Is there anything preventing a journalist from soliciting and verifying claims of family members who suspects their soldiers are dead?
Professional-Syrup-0@reddit
There are a whole lot of national security laws making a lot of information about US military deployments confidential.
Case in point:
Classified wars against classified enemies entail a whole lot of other privileged information
Information about personnel deployments directly affects OpSec and as such falls under extra confidentiality, should anybody dare to dig too deep there they gonna have visits by federal agencies.
BridgeGuy540@reddit
LOL. No. As someone connected to this war, they are most definitely not in luxury hotels across the middle east. However, you're not wrong about the amount of downtime and connectivity.
Future-Excuse6167@reddit
I just know some of the missile strikes on hotels in Qatar (?) were justified by saying the hotels were housing US troops who had vacated their bombed-out basses (and bunkerless) bases.
Where do you house a few hundred people impromptu? I imagine tourism is way down.
DerCatrix@reddit
Israel is good at preventing journalists from doing things
Future-Excuse6167@reddit
Well, I was thinking there might be a loose-lips-sink-ships kind of law that would legally prevent family members from disclosing the status of their soldiers.
MelodiusRA@reddit
You are the king of non-sequitors on this sub lol.
Status_Winter@reddit
I think I read the same thread. Redditors saying that there’s no way deployed military personnel could disappear without it being noticed by their families because they all have cellphones etc. Complete nonsense. Yes lots of countries do this shit. We call them “Dictatorships”.
Hamiltonblewit@reddit
While Trump’s government is relatively authoritarian compared to his predecessors, there has been no laws in place that restricts Americans from using the internet or inquiring about war-time losses - unlike say, Iran and other governments banning their users from the internet in certain conflicts
Status_Winter@reddit
I agree he doesn’t quite have the unrestricted powers of an Ayatollah…quite yet.
But what he has done since becoming president is wage absolute war against the freedom of press in America. He’s accused journalists of treason just for covering his war in Iran. He intimidated studios into suspending talk show hosts who criticise him. He sued the BBC for 10 billion dollars lol. Don’t try to tell me that’s somebody who cares about freedom of information. That’s dictator shit.
-SneakySnake-@reddit
Trump won't ever get that. The movement to that sort of singular authority isn't something the current state of America supports, you're talking something like a massive crisis in line with a war - not a regional conflict or a bombing offensive, I'm talking something America hasn't had direct experience with since the Civil War - a massive economic collapse or some combination of things. If you follow what lead to the Ayatollahs, it's a pretty dramatic series of incidents combined with huge, widespread social upheaval.
I know the temptation is to believe the worst about the situation, but don't give anyone any more credit than they deserve. Skirting and ignoring the law is one thing; blatantly rewriting it on that scale is another thing entirely.
Hamiltonblewit@reddit
Yeah, he’s a terrible person and dictator wannabe, but he hasn’t enacted enough laws or executive powers to tangibly limit reporting on war time losses more than usual.
There has been immense coverage over our base losses, school strikes, with CNN reporting the F-35 hit before anyone else I believe. There are no restrictions in place so far outside of the norm
Hamiltonblewit@reddit
It is practically impossible to hide casualties if it’s an immense scale, but from all indications, the losses aren’t large where they approach the thousands, that’ll have a lot of families asking question on social media
Scodo@reddit
Right? The threads they're talking about had people claiming 500+ us soldiers killed in the first 3 days with absolutely no source and no peep from soldiers in the units supposedly suffering mass casualties. Of course people are going to call it nonsense.
Hamiltonblewit@reddit
I’m full expecting more losses then recorded, but I mean, it’s not as simple as taking what the Americans and Iranians are saying and dividing by two, much less believing either side lmao.
bachh2@reddit
Yeah, imagine telling the truth about casualties in a conflict.
In short, there is no good reason to do so.
Everyone lie about it. It will take years, if not decade to come even close to a good estimation. So when reading casualties number, do it with a bowl of salt.
Future-Excuse6167@reddit
Don't normalize this. This is not not normal.
bachh2@reddit
Unfortunately that's how thing always been.
Future-Excuse6167@reddit
I don't know that it is.
I've been following American wars from a very antiwar left perspective since 2000 and have never heard accussations that an admnistration was hiding casualty numbers of actual US troops.
This is not normal.
notabee@reddit
The U.S. learned its lesson during Vietnam about having direct, graphic depictions of war available to the public. There's a reason that all the prior gulf war footage was shot from specially designated areas and looked more like a nightvision-hued videogame than videos of humans being violently splattered. Some of those images leak out eventually, but after the fact. Hell, most of the wikileaks drama really started with a leaked helicopter video of journalists getting gunned down by laughing soldiers, leaked by another soldier and facilitated by the site. That initiated a massive effort to squelch further leaks because the military cares a lot about optics at this point. Well, up until we got the current degree of clueless hubris in charge that is loudly and proudly announcing doing crimes.
Future-Excuse6167@reddit
Iranian FPV drone footage is going to be hell for these guys.
notabee@reddit
Indeed it will be. I would love to put more of an "if" in front of that, but it really looks like they're going to just keep doubling down. The recently announced firing of a bunch of generals really isn't a good sign.
Piss_in_my_cunt@reddit
Wow you’ve followed wars from a self-acknowledged biased perspective for checks notes 2 decades. War is millennia old. Don’t he stupid.
Dependent-Dream7180@reddit
Unfortunately this is nothing new. Minimizing your own casualties has been a thing since ancient times.
DanoPinyon@reddit
No way! Who would have guessed?!?!?!
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
______________________________________________________________________________________________________________
_____________________________________________________________________________________________________________-
Michelangelor@reddit
It’s pretty obvious CENTCOM is lying about essentially everything they can get away with, but it would be cool if Intercept could make a better argument than “according to our analysis”
kitti-kin@reddit
This seems pretty cut and dry, no?
Hamiltonblewit@reddit
We’ve seen all of social media analyzing Americans packing up from their bases and moving equipment and troops out before this conflict, with Iraqi FPV drones showing completely empty bases with no personnel, only to say 10,000 troops were killed in missile strikes on bases early on. What are we doing here
kitti-kin@reddit
I'm sorry that you're on social media, but what does that have to do with this article? They offer a concrete example of numbers being under-counted. I don't really care if the under-counting is less than some nobody on twitter says it is, that person should not be seen as an authority.
Gruejay2@reddit
The problem is that it'll take time to verify. I suspect Trump and Hegseth are trying to buy time while they prepare to commit another fait accompli.
sockpuppetinasock@reddit
Fuck these people. Fuck these people so much. Can't even give these soldiers the dignity of acknowledgement. Casualty figures have always been a top priority to every administration. Bush and Obama called families of each KIA. So did Biden.
Big_Red_Machine_1917@reddit
It has been a while, but if I remember right, this basically the same situation the United States had in the later half of it's war in Afghanistan. American troop suffered fairly low causalities, because most of the dirty work was being done by mercenaries, who's deaths did not have to be reported, since they weren't public employees.
possiblecurb@reddit
But often times American.