As recently as last week, the Obama Administration was loudly trumpeting the Afghan War as over. They’d been drawing down troops for months, making a huge deal of withdrawing the last of the US Marines from the nation back in October.

uch less publicized are this week’s muted news releases, in which the Marine Corps are reporting plans to return to occupied Afghanistan for “security operations.”

Throughout December, despite the claims of the war ending, Marines were carrying out training scenarios for their return to Afghanistan. Officials are, however, declining to say exactly when they’ll return, how many there’ll be, or what they’ll be doing.

NATO commander Gen. Philip Breedlove is giving us the broadest strokes of it, however, telling Stars and Stripes today that the American public needs to prepare itself for more US casualties in Afghanistan, saying it was “unavoidable.”