The Pentagon Has Unreported Thousands Of Deadly Airstrikes In Syria, Iraq, And Afghanistan

Military Times: The U.S. military's stats on deadly airstrikes are wrong. Thousands have gone unreported

The American military has failed to publicly disclose potentially thousands of lethal airstrikes conducted over several years in Iraq, Syria and Afghanistan, a Military Times investigation has revealed. The enormous data gap raises serious doubts about transparency in reported progress against the Islamic State, al-Qaida and the Taliban, and calls into question the accuracy of other Defense Department disclosures documenting everything from costs to casualty counts.

In 2016 alone, U.S. combat aircraft conducted at least 456 airstrikes in Afghanistan that were not recorded as part of an open-source database maintained by the U.S. Air Force, information relied on by Congress, American allies, military analysts, academic researchers, the media and independent watchdog groups to assess each war's expense, manpower requirements and human toll. Those airstrikes were carried out by attack helicopters and armed drones operated by the U.S. Army, metrics quietly excluded from otherwise comprehensive monthly summaries, published online for years, detailing American military activity in all three theaters.

Read more ....

WNU Editor: No one in the main stream media has picked up this story yet, but this is a bombshell of a report. Over the years this blog and other websites believed that the Pentagon was unreporting air strikes, casualties, cost of operations, etc. .... but we never had the data. Kudos to the Military Times to actually compile public records and the data to get a clearer picture on what has been happening .... and to document it. The conclusions of this Military Times report are obvious .... it puts everything into question on how the U.S. has prosecuted the wars of the past 16 years. Needless to say .... this is my must read post for today.