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It turns out the Pentagon has a bit of a counting problem — or worse, a leadership problem. Pentagon spokesman Pat Ryder recently dropped a bombshell during a press briefing on Thursday, revealing that the number of U.S. troops in Syria is more than double what we were led to believe.

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“As you know, we have been briefing you regularly that there are approximately 900 U.S. troops deployed to Syria,” he began. “In light of the situation in Syria and the significant interest, we recently learned that those numbers were higher and so… asked to look into it, I learned today that in fact there are approximately 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria.

This isn’t some minor miscalculation. For months, Americans were told there were 900 U.S. troops deployed to Syria. Ryder himself acknowledged this. So, how do you go from 900 to 2,000 without someone at the Pentagon — or the White House — catching it earlier?

The additional troops, according to Ryder, are classified as “temporary rotational forces that deploy to meet shifting mission requirements,” while the core 900 are on “longer-term deployments.” Fair enough, but why was this information withheld until now? Ryder’s explanation doesn’t inspire much confidence. “Given that this number is significantly higher than what we’ve been briefing, I wanted to let you know as soon as I found out this information.”

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This raises serious questions about who is actually running the show at the Pentagon. If Ryder only just “learned today” about the actual troop levels, what does that say about the chain of command? Who else doesn’t know what’s going on? And, of course, one can’t help but wonder what we’re not being told. Is Ryder lying? Did he not know the actual number, or did the Pentagon not realize there were 2,000 U.S. troops in Syria?

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Is it really so hard to believe that the Pentagon could have been mistaken that there were only 900 troops in Syria? With this administration, I could believe it.

Back in January, we discovered that Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin had been hospitalized for nearly a week before anyone outside the Pentagon knew about it. What started as a troubling example of the Biden administration’s lack of transparency quickly escalated into a full-blown scandal as more details came to light. Not only was the public kept in the dark, but even the White House was clueless about Austin’s absence.

Adding to the chaos, we later learned that Austin’s deputy, who was reportedly on vacation at the time, had been placed in charge without initially being told the full reason why. The Pentagon’s handling of this incident wasn’t just negligent — it was outright alarming. How does the White House remain oblivious to the hospitalization of a key Cabinet official for days? And why isn’t Joe Biden in regular communication with his Secretary of Defense?

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This wasn’t just a failure of protocol; it was a glaring failure of leadership. It’s hard to imagine how an administration can claim to be running a competent operation when such fundamental lapses occur without consequence.

The Pentagon has been plagued by scandal and transparency problems under this administration, and frankly, it doesn’t matter whether the public was lied to or whether the Pentagon just accidentally discovered their numbers were wrong; deception and incompetence have plagued this administration for nearly four years, and I can’t wait to see it go.