The Pentagon is continuing to take issue with a Wall Street Journal report that the United States is considering reinforcing U.S. forces in the Middle East with thousands more troops and dozens more ships, specifically disputing a line in the story that “as many as 14,000 additional troops,” could be dispatched.
“As the Department has stated repeatedly, we were never discussing or considering sending 14,000 additional troops to the Middle East. Reports of this are flat out wrong,” said Defense Secretary Mark Esper, in a statement issued Friday morning. “DOD will always stand ready to respond to future actions by our adversaries if and when they arise, but the Pentagon is not considering sending 14,000 troops to CENTCOM. This report is false.”
Esper’s pushback comes a day after John Rood, the Pentagon’s undersecretary of defense for policy, told Congress Esper is considering bolstering U.S. force levels in the Persian Gulf region to counter Iran based on intelligence that they may be planning an attack against troops.
“In fact, based on the threat situation in the Middle East are watching, and as necessary, the secretary of defense has told me he intends to make changes to our force posture there,” Rood said in testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee.
Several senators saw that as a significant departure from the denial issued by Pentagon press secretary Alyssa Farah Wednesday on Twitter.
Missouri Republican Sen. Josh Hawley, who said Rood “directly contradicted” Farah “multiple times,” asked for a clarification from Esper to what he called “multiple contradictory public statements,” by Farah. “I think at this point it would be helpful to hear from the secretary on this issue,” he said.
“Senator, there isn’t some pending document with the secretary of defense that states ‘deploy 14,000 troops,'” Rood told Hawley and stressed that while the dispatch of additional forces was under consideration, no decisions have yet been made.
“Should I be completely shocked if I were to wake up one morning in the near future and hear on the news that we are deploying a significant number of troops back to the Mideast?” asked Tennessee Republican Sen. Martha Blackburn earlier in the briefing.
“We haven’t made those decisions yet,” Rood said. “To answer your question even more directly, based on what we’re seeing with our concerns about the threat picture, it is possible that we would need to adjust our force posture.”
There are currently roughly 14,000 U.S. troops deployed in the region, with roughly half that number on warships, including a U.S. aircraft carrier strike force.
NOTE: This story has been updated to include the statement by Defense Secretary Mark Esper issued at 9:42 a.m. Friday morning.
