“If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you”
-Oscar Wilde
Centcom spokesman Col. John Thomas argued that people don’t need to know the number of US troops that are deployed in the countries, and that the important metric is “capabilities, not numbers.” Of course, the figures the Pentagon was giving were never particularly useful in the first place for reporters, since they were always clearly false. source: https://lobotero.com/2017/04/04/it-is-no-longer-important/ and http://dailycaller.com/2017/03/28/nobody-needs-to-know-how-many-us-troops-are-fighting-isis-pentagon-declares/