Pentagon Ends Review of Deadly Niger Ambush, Again Blaming Junior Officers
by Steven Woskow | Jun 7, 2019
The military is a bureaucracy and like every other bureaucracy they protect their own. On October 4, 2017 four special operations soldiers were ambushed in Niger. They were all killed along with their interpreter. The news set of a storm in D.C. with clueless Senators claiming they didn’t know we even had military operations in Niger, in spite of the fact that we had been there since 2013 and it was no secret.
But the U.S. military has been in Niger since 2013 and this wasn’t a secret. U.S. Africa Command (AFRICOM) has been tweeting about U.S. involvement in Niger for years. And thousands of troops serve across Africa every day.
Now, two years after the event, the Pentagon has submitted their review to acting Secretary of Defense Patrick Shanahan.
WASHINGTON — Acting Defense Secretary Patrick Shanahan has effectively closed the book on a lengthy Pentagon investigation into a deadly ambush in Niger in 2017, officials said on Wednesday, approving a high-level review of earlier findings that mostly blamed junior officers.
The major blame was put on junior officers and this doesn’t sit well with the families or other Green Berets.
But other senior officers in the chain of command escaped punishment, including a Green Beret colonel who was responsible for Special Operations missions in northwest Africa at the time.
Lt. Col. David Painter, a battalion commander based in Chad, ordered Captain Perozeni’s team to continue. Colonel Painter was ultimately punished for improperly overseeing predeployment training. But two military officials on Wednesday said he is expected to be promoted to the rank of full colonel in the coming months.
Maj. Gen. J. Marcus Hicks, the head of Special Operations forces in Africa, who had been previously scheduled to retire in the coming weeks.
Col. Bradley D. Moses, then the commander of the 3rd Special Forces Group, is the only person in the Special Operations chain of command involved in the ambush who remains unpunished. Colonel Moses is currently the chief of staff of Army Special Operations Command and, according to Defense Department officials, is scheduled to take a staff job in Afghanistan in coming weeks. A rising star in the Army Special Forces community, Colonel Moses is widely considered to be in line to be promoted to brigadier general, a promotion that requires Senate confirmation.
Captain Perozeni, who was put in command of the Green Beret unit — Team 3212 — just weeks before it deployed to Niger, was reprimanded twice. In both cases, however, he successfully appealed the punishments, and Army commanders twice rescinded them.
The father of Staff Sgt. Dustin M. Wright, one of the soldiers killed (himself a former soldier who can trace the family’s lineage in the armed services to the War of 1812), said in an interview on Wednesday that he was infuriated with the final review’s conclusions.
“There’s no way in good confidence I could encourage anyone to join the United States Army right now, and our family goes back over 200 years,” he said.
