NBC News: How many troops are serving in America's legacy wars? We still don't really know.
Washington,
November 10, 2019
Veteran's Day is a time to honor those who served, but the U.S. public has been given less and less information on how many U.S. personnel are fighting in legacy wars and how many are actually coming home. Every administration has wrestled with accounting for personnel levels, trying to balance national security with transparency, but since late 2017, the Trump administration hasn't publicly released any levels for Afghanistan, Iraq and Syria. There are several ways personnel levels are made available to the public. The Defense Manpower Data Center, or DMDC, publishes quarterly data segmented by active-duty, National Guard and Reserve forces, as well as Defense Department civilian employees. "I know that they say that we could get them on classified briefings, but the thing is, classified briefings prevent us from actually sharing that information with the public," Rep. Jimmy Gomez, D-Calif., said in a telephone interview. "If we were developing a policy, we could not reference that information we received. So the public is still sort of in the dark when it comes to the troop levels," |
