The public deserves to know how many Americans will be sent into harm’s way. Troop deployments should always be part of ongoing debate in a representative democracy.

At the very least, Trump owes the public accurate information about how many troops are fighting now, whether in Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Yemen, Somalia, or beyond. As Representative Adam Schiff argued, secrecy “deprives the American people of the information they need to determine whether another escalation is taking place and the ability to hold their elected officials accountable for the results.”

The refusal to disclose the scale of new deployments compounds an existing lack of transparency about the number of troops deployed to combat zones. As Politico notes, “Caps on troop levels in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria mandated by the Obama administration have led to an elaborate Pentagon accounting system that conceals thousands of troops from the public.” And it goes on to report that “the discrepancy, which has come under new scrutiny amid leaks about actual troop levels, has led Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis to review the policy and promise to offer more accurate official numbers. But after Trump announced this week that his administration will not talk about troop numbers, Mattis’s initiative is in doubt.”

Trump’s actions are not surprising. As I noted before the election, his campaign rhetoric masked the fact that he has often been more hawkish than the Washington establishment; and as Daniel Larison presciently argued, Trump’s lack of foreign-policy experience and aversion to studying any issue enough to be informed predictably made him even more reliant on defense establishment advice than bygone presidents.

Still, Trump misled his supporters about his approach to foreign conflicts, and the fact that he is now trying to keep troop levels a secret only underscores that he has perpetrated a betrayal worth concealing.