Where’s the Final Report? Lawmaker Grills Pentagon Officials on Who’s Being Held Accountable for Niger Ambush by Kyle Rempfer - Military Times
The final report on the fatal Niger ambush, which will include who is being punished, awards, and a redacted investigation into the deaths of the four fallen U.S. soldiers, is tied up in the offices of the secretary of defense.
That has at least one lawmaker frustrated.
“We can’t process what actually occurred because we’re not getting a full report,” Arizona Rep. Ruben Gallego, a Marine veteran, said Thursday. “That’s my dissatisfaction right now, because there are currently operations probably happening in AFRICOM and I have zero doubt that there’s actually been full changes.”
The comments occurred at a House Armed Services Committee hearing that took testimony from Africa Command and Defense Department leaders.
“I don’t know who was responsible for this major mess-up and it scares me that the DoD is at this point still hiding this information and it has been two years," Gallego said.
If the reports don’t come out soon, he added that Congress will have to take some “extraordinary measures to actually get that to happen.”
During the hearing, Gallego cited several reports by the New York Times that stated the military has been trying to pin the blame for the October 2017 Niger ambush on junior officers. The attack caught American forces off-guard following an overnight mission, and resulted in the deaths of four American and four Nigerien soldiers…