ISIS News Today 2017: Pentagon Reviewing How It Counts Troop Numbers in Iraq, Syria
Washington is reviewing the whole concept of maintaining artificial caps on troop levels to make the number of deployments more transparent. At present, the Pentagon observes "force management levels" that set limits on the number of troops it is supposed to send to other countries.
Former President Barack Obama had set relatively small numbers of troop deployment to send the impression he was ending U.S. involvement in Middle East conflicts. The force management level is 5,262 in Iraq and 503 in Syria which the Trump administration has maintained.
But the numbers are misleading considering the military has found a loophole by deploying more troops and security personnel on a temporary basis for less than six months. So instead of large-scale deployments, troops are added incrementally in the hundreds, not the thousands, The Spokesman-Review reported.
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Several hundred Marines were recently sent to Syria and have been deemed as temporary so as not to count against the cap. The actual number of American troops in Syria now stands between 800 and 900, significantly understating the U.S. troop presence under the force management level.
Another means applied by the army to work around the troop number limits is hiring private contractors. The Pentagon employs 45,549 across all of Central Command's area of operations including Afghanistan. Some 3,592 of them are assigned in Iraq where the United States is involved in the war against Islamic State (ISIS).
In some cases, the military deployed helicopter squadrons without their mechanics and replacing them with more expensive civilian contractors. But this overdependence on contractors harms "unit cohesion" or tactical smoothness that arises when an entire unit is deployed together.
This problem is one of the reasons why the Pentagon is reviewing how it counts U.S. troop numbers in the Middle East.
"That's one of the issues we want to take a close look at to make sure we are not in any way harming our mission effectiveness," Pentagon spokesman Capt. Jeff Davis told AFP.
