Blake Hall
When word of Marine Staff Sgt. Louis Cardin’s tragic death at the hands of ISIS reached the United States, many wondered how exactly it happened. As far as the public knew, there were no American-run military installations in the region of Iraq where Cardin was killed. Odder still was that Cardin’s unit had only shipped out to Iraq a few days earlier for undisclosed reasons.
Now the Pentagon and the White House are coming clean.
The Secret Base
Cardin and his comrades were sent to a heretofore secret base in northern Iraq staffed solely by American Marines. The encampment served as a ‘fire base,’ or a small makeshift camp used to provide artillery fire support for troops fighting on the ground. About 200 Marines lived in tents in the small camp, lying in wait before a planned assault on ISIS-controlled Mosul.
The skeletal camp existed for less than a week before Islamic State militants launched its own attack. Now the Marine Corps is sending even more troops to boost the base’s defenses.
The thing is, there isn’t supposed to be any “boots on the ground” in Iraq. The secret base, ensuing fight with ISIS and Cardin’s death suggest that isn’t true.
The Uncounted Troops
The Marines sent to the secret base were quietly deployed to keep the official count of American troops in Iraq below 3,870.
On Tuesday, Defense Secretary Ashton Carter explained this away by telling Congress that different units ‘are counted differently.’
“People who are temporarily assigned — and this has been true for here and in Afghanistan for some time — they, under the caps, are counted differently, as you well know,” Carter told the House Armed Services Committee. “There are some people who are subject to the troop caps, and there are some people who rotate in for a short amount of time, that are not subject to the troop caps.”