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The Pentagon retreated from its defense of a drone strike that killed multiple civilians in Afghanistan last month, announcing Friday that an internal review revealed that only civilians were killed in the attack, not an Islamic State extremist as was initially believed and claimed.
“The strike was a tragic mistake,” Marine Gen. Frank McKenzie, head of U.S. Central Command, told a Pentagon news conference.
For days after the Aug. 29 strike, Pentagon officials asserted that it had been conducted correctly, despite 10 civilians being killed, including seven children. News organizations later raised doubts about that version of events, reporting that the driver of the targeted vehicle was a longtime employee at an American humanitarian organization and citing an absence of evidence to support the Pentagon’s assertion that the vehicle contained explosives.
A preliminary analysis said that it was “possible to probable” that explosives were in the car and that drone operators took only a cursory scan of the courtyard before launching an attack.
The U.S. military’s top officer asserted last week that a drone attack on a sedan near the airport in Kabul, Afghanistan, was a “righteous strike” that foiled a plot by the Islamic State in the waning hours of the immense evacuation effort.
The officer, Gen. Mark A. Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told reporters that secondary explosions after the drone strike last Sunday supported the military’s conclusion that the car contained explosives — either suicide vests or a large bomb. General Milley said that military planners took proper precautions beforehand to limit risks to civilians nearby.
The Army has launched far-reaching reforms that will transform how it attracts and recruits new soldiers, its top leaders said in a press conference today.
The moves come after the service failed to meet its recruiting targets for two consecutive fiscal years, which caused its end strength to fall from an original level of 485,000 in late 2021 to around 452,000 active duty soldiers today — its smallest full-time force since 1940, the year before the U.S. entered World War II.
:confusion-shrug:In the army, only 19 soldiers have rejoined.
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