You said — “People at press conferences simply repeat what they’ve been told by the units they represent. Do commanding generals ask their troops to carry out CSI missions in the mid-battle - something for which most troops aren’t even trained? If they did, I’d be worried about their competence.”
They have plenty of time afterwards to do all that they need to do. As it stands now, they’re simply shown to be fools in the press because they didn’t get it straight, and then continued it until *someone else* has to call them to account. If you’re going to come out with a *false story* in the beginning — then it pays for *that person* to be the one to correct it. If someone else has to correct it, then it makes the original source of the story look like a liar...
They're not minders of trivia involving individual soldiers - they're commanders of war efforts. The press can want what they want. But the military's job is not to hunt up information for the media. It is to defeat the enemy.