Secretary of Defense Mark Esper became the latest Pentagon official to take aim at reports that additional troops might be sent to the Middle East, calling an anonymously sourced Wall Street Journal report “false.”
“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,” Esper said in a statement on Friday, in an apparent effort to clarify remarks to Congress made by a military official the day prior.
