Jan 6, 2020
The Reality: Deploying Our Troops
Terry H. Schwadron
Jan. 6, 2020
Amid all else about the building tensions in the Middle East, it’s difficult to determine exactly how many U.S. military are in the region or on their way, especially as Iraqi leaders have now voted in a non-binding vote to expel American troops.
You and I may not need the specific numbers, but I would like to understand the difficulties of defending ourselves and of aligning Donald Trump’s boastful talk with the Pentagon’s realities.
The deployments probably tell more about our strategy than any talk coming out of the White House. Donald Trump says he ordered this week’s attacks to stop war rather than start one, but nevertheless has threatened a ton more retaliations for any Irani retaliations.
Clearly, all of this is uniquely important now because Trump’s abrupt orders to assassinate Iran’s Gen. Qasem Suleimani and to bomb Iranian-leaning militias is a United States-alone mission. In pushing away European allies, in undercutting NATO ties, in walking away from the multi-nation Iraqi nuclear treaty, Trump has isolated America in the current military retributive military sparring that is under way.
Though numbers are discussed in the hundreds of deployment, the truth is that we have at least 20,000 U.S. troops, Marines and airmen in the region, though the Pentagon does not make it easy to count.
For sake of comparison, as of October, the rough estimate is that 200,000 troops are deployed in 150 countries around the world.
Just in the last week, the military ordered 100 Marines from Kuwait to augment the defense of the U.S. embassy in Baghdad, then made available 750 troops from the 82nd Airborne Division, who are being sent from North Carolina to Kuwait on open-ended assignment. Within a couple of days, that number was multiplied to between 2,800 and 3,500 troops.
The Pentagon highlighted the speed of deployment more than the actual number. But as the breadth of the expected response from angry Iranis — and Iraqis who are mad that we undertook the drone attack on their soil without notifying them — was becoming clear, there are questions about what America is planning to do with a relatively modest number of troops.
Iran is a major military power in the Middle East, with an estimated 534,000 active personnel in the army, navy, air force and the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, plus lots of proxy militias across the Middle East.
Iran announced it had 35 hard targets in mind for retaliation; Trump countered in a tweet that he wants 52 Iranian sites targeted, one for each of the U.S. hostages held in 1979 in the U.S. embassy in Tehran.
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So, the question remains, what deployments do we have in the Middle East, a region from which Trump has made clear up to this week that he wants to bring U.S. troops home. The bring-home idea is clearly in conflict with the send-more idea.
In Syria, the United States has withdrawn thousands of troops over time, including the controversial withdrawal a couple of months ago of U.S. servicemen working who had fought alongside the Kurds in northern Iraq until the fall of the last physical ISIS outpost. Kurds turned furious as Turkish troops pushed into Kurdish homelands.
Trump said all would come home, then reversed himself and left 500 to guard oil fields in eastern Syria.
In Iraq, there are about 5,500 U.S. troops, working with the Iraqi military from a variety of bases. One of those bases, near Kirkuk in the north, was attacked by an Iranian proxy militia last week, killing an American contractor. That prompted a U.S. missile attack on the militia, killing 25 and wounding 50 militia members, both Irani and Iraqi, triggering the embassy riots. Now we can effectively add about the 3,500 crisis response troops who are assigned but deploying to Kuwait.
Of course, the Iraqi Parliament now has voted 170–0, with Kurdish and Sunni representatives boycotting the session, to demand that the U.S. troops all leave the country.
In the Persian Gulf, the Pentagon, citing Iranian aggression, including attacks on commercial oil tankers, added some 14,000 troops. Most of the troops deployed included a Navy carrier strike group, bomber and fighter jet personnel and air and missile defense troops. The air carrier group led by the USS Abraham Lincoln alone reflects 6,000.
In Saudi Arabia, some of those 14,000 troops probably are among the 1800 to 3,000 assigned to help protect oil refineries that were attacked with Iranian missiles. Before the most recent deployments, there were 200 U.S. military to operate Patriot anti-missile defense.
Still, earlier this year, The Wall Street Journal had reported that the Pentagon was considering doubling the 14,000. All such decisions seem to balance on the varying foreign policy alternatives that come to Donald Trump without the aid of any discernible overall strategy.
In Bahrain, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates and Qatar, there are about 8,500 U.S. troops. Until a year or two ago, Qatar had been the command center for U.S. and coalition forces in the Middle East and Afghanistan. In Turkey, there are another 2,000 around air bases.
In Afghanistan, at the height of the war, there were 100,000 U.S. troops, which had dropped to about 10,000 at the start of the Trump administration. Today, it is still about 12,000–13,000 that could drop again if there ever is a deal with the Taliban and the Afghan government.
I find it dizzying to follow how the United States is aligning its talk with its actions. We have a president who appears to make decisions based on television images rather than on intelligence, which he demeans, until the moment when it happens to align with his perception of a need to push back against Iran.
What’s missing from all this is how the Trump administration has hollowed the diplomatic corps, and shunned diplomacy for saber-rattling, even as it says it is doing the opposite.
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