US military officials privately refute Pentagon chief’s spin to reporters

Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth is in spin mode about the U.S. soldiers killed in Kuwait as part if the new war with Iran, military officials are telling CBS News.

According to the report, the soldiers who died were in "a makeshift office space" in a tactical operations center at the Shuaiba port in Kuwait. The U.S. ally is entering day four of the barrage of attacks from drones and missiles.

When speaking to the press on Monday morning, Hegseth claimed that there was an incredible weapon that Iran had that managed to make it past air defenses and the fortifications. It turns out that was false.

"You have air defenses, and a lot's coming in, and you hit most of it," Hegseth said Monday during the Pentagon briefing. "Every once in a while, you might have one, unfortunately, we call it a squirter, that makes its way through. And in that particular case, it happened to hit a tactical operations center that was fortified, but these are powerful weapons."

Three top military officials dispute that the operations center was "fortified." Speaking to CBS News, they said it was little more than a triple-wide trailer that left American soldiers no protection. The trailer had some "T-walls" surrounding it, large concrete walls that an individual can walk through when accessing the building, but would protect it from any nearby explosions or shrapnel. There was zero protection for the trailer itself. So, when drones attacked from above, they were sitting ducks.

Two officials told CBS that the attack struck the trailer dead center.

Three officials told the reporters that there was a discussion before the strike about it concentrating too many soldiers in one place which "wasn't defendable."

A fireball engulfed the trailer, which added to the complications in retrieving the bodies of the U.S. soldiers. Two sources told CBS that they never even heard warning sirens ahead of the attack, despite top equipment designed to detect and alert anyone on the ground.

The larger problem, they said, is that the warning siren hadn't worked all week. There's also no counter-rocket system that can shoot down drones like that. There were requests for some kind of protections but the Trump administration never sent anything.

"We basically had no drone defeat capability," the source told CBS.

One of the sources lamented, "I'm sorry for their families' losses. They were nice people doing what their nation asked of them."

Along with the six killed, 18 have been seriously injured.

Ahead of the strikes, the U.S. evacuated the embassy in Israel but nowhere else. The State Department has now called on every American across the entire region to leave Bahrain, Egypt, Iran, Iraq, Israel, the West Bank and Gaza, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Syria, the UAE and Yemen.

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