Earlier in August 2017, Trump, during remarks on his Afghanistan policy, hinted at his plan to increase secrecy around troop deployment.

“I’ve said it many times how counterproductive it is for the United States to announce in advance the dates we intend to begin, or end, military options. We will not talk about numbers of troops or our plans for further military activities,” he said, echoing an earlier sentiment.

“The secrecy bit is always bullshit—the Taliban is not changing its strategy if it hears we’ve got 11,000 vs. 15,000 troops in Afghanistan,” said Jason Dempsey, a senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security and an Army infantryman with two deployments to the country, in an interview with POGO. Dempsey, who worked on veterans’ issues under the Obama administration, has written extensively on the relationship between the military and the public.

“That absolutely is something the American public needs to know … we need to know which sons and daughters are being put in harm’s way and for what purpose and for how long,” Dempsey said.

The squeeze on information is apparently being felt inside the Pentagon as well. John F. Sopko, special inspector general for Afghan reconstruction, published his concerns in his public quarterly report in October 2017 that the department was overclassifying information about Afghan forces’ capabilities. Key measures of progress were suddenly classified or restricted, hampering the mission of the office. Although his team could use the data internally, it could not make that data public.

“We’re having trouble getting information, although we can get classified information. It’s just that we cannot share it with the American people who ultimately are paying for the Afghan military, the Afghan police, their salaries, weapons, et cetera,” Sopko told NPR in January 2018. By then, Sopko was also forbidden from publishing data on the territorial gains and losses in the country. Removing this information, Center for Strategic and International Studies national security analyst Anthony Cordesman told the New York Times, meant “there now is no official estimate of progress in the war.”

Things didn’t get any cheerier for Sopko, who watched as whole categories of information became classified. Sopko spoke frequently to the press about how the push for secrecy was making his oversight mission more difficult.

“The classification, in some areas, we think is needless, but we don’t have classifying authority,” Sopko told Military Times this April. “The only people who don’t know what’s going on are the people who are paying for all of this and that’s the American taxpayer,” he added.

Although overclassification got worse under Mattis and Trump, it’s not a new issue. During the Obama administration, Sopko took issue with the sudden classification of data that had been public for six years prior. The Pentagon backed down a week later, after Sopko criticized the classification decision in a quarterly report.

Secrecy without justification seems to have become the new normal. In the spring of 2018, the Department of Defense refused to declassify the size of the U.S. nuclear arsenal, reversing a seven-year trend. The Obama administration began declassifying the total size of the arsenal in 2010, in hopes that other nuclear-armed nations would follow suit. “Increasing the transparency of our nuclear weapons stockpile, and our dismantlement, as well, is important to both our nonproliferation efforts and to the efforts we have under way to pursue arms control that will follow the new START treaty,” the Pentagon told reporters at the time.

Declassification requires sign off from the Department of Energy and the Department of Defense, according to Aftergood. When the Federation of American Scientists requested the data for 2018, the Department of Energy authorized the release. The Pentagon, in a letter with no explanation, denied the request.

“The logic is opaque to me. Does this increase readiness? Does it increase deterrence? I would say no, and no. It increases ambiguity. And ambiguity is normally not what you want in nuclear weapons policy, you want clarity,” Aftergood told POGO, who had requested the data be made public. “I don’t really know how to assess DOD’s thought process that led to this conclusion but it occurred within the climate that Mattis established.”

Nuclear weapons policy wonks have historically been able to guess the size of the stockpile using open source methods. In 2010, for example, Hans Kristensen and Robert Norris of the Federation of American Scientists were off by only 87 warheads. (They guessed 5,200, it turned out to be 5,113.) But once again, the effect is that the public and experts are left with piecemeal information and estimates, and ultimately are unable to hold the government accountable.

This is true of the Navy as well. In 2018, the Navy removed data on aviation accidents from a public facing website, and offered no explanation. This change was made as the Navy faced an 82% spike in accidents between fiscal years 2013 and 2017, Military Times first reported. A Navy public affairs officer denied the change had anything to do with the Pentagon-wide Mattis guidance, saying it was part of a website redesign.

The creeping secrecy has since extended to the military’s public acknowledgment of air strikes. Prior to 2019, the Air Force and Central Command released fairly detailed summaries of air strikes. Details like location, intended target, and number of enemy combatants killed or targets destroyed are crucial for human rights and watchdog groups that attempt to investigate reports of civilian casualties.

