The Army is sending another 100 (ish) people to Iraq:
A new force of special operations troops being deployed by the United States to Iraq will likely number around 100, U.S. Army Colonel Steve Warren said on Wednesday.
“It will be … probably around 100, maybe a little bit less,” said Warren, a spokesman for the U.S.-led military campaign against Islamic State. “It’s really going to be a majority support personnel, everything from … aviators to collectors. So actual forces who will do offensive or kinetic operations, it’s a very small number, double digit.”
U.S. Defense Secretary Ash Carter announced the deployment of the force in congressional testimony on Tuesday. A U.S. official, speaking on condition of anonymity, had told Reuters on Tuesday that the total number might be around 200.
The decision to station a special forces team (the “kinetic” folks) in Iraq full-time has been getting the most attention for obvious reasons, and the announcement of their deployment even created what appeared to be a minor diplomatic dust-up with Baghdad, though that now looks settled. Special forces are often tasked to do a lot of non-combat things, particularly training, but the “kinetic operations” line above tells you that this particular group of special forces are going to be tasked primarily with carrying out raids on ISIS targets. “Raids,” you may recall, was the third “R” in Defense Secretary Ash Carter’s “Three Rs” plan for the ISIS fight, so this deployment isn’t a great surprise.
Are these new forces going to make a difference? Who knows? The research on so-called “decapitation”–aka assassination–strikes (which admittedly are usually conducted from the air, but how a terrorist leader dies seems less important than the fact of their death, right?) is at best inconclusive. On the other hand, part of the reason it’s inconclusive is because so many decapitation airstrikes result in false alarms–dead terrorists who later wind up miraculously alive–and that shouldn’t be as big a problem in the case of a ground strike. Other kinds of raids, like hostage rescue missions and intelligence-gathering operations, can’t really be conducted by air, so in that sense stepping up this kind of activity could be a good thing. In another sense, though, this will obviously significantly increase the potential for American combat casualties.
The other risk this escalation (and that’s what it is) poses is that it could lead to further escalations. First its a few hundred trainers, then some forward-operating spotters, then special forces, then the next thing you know you’re moving 100K+ troops into the region and nobody really knows how or why you got to that point. Ah, I’m probably just being paranoid–it’s not like that exact scenario has played out at any other time in modern American history. Seriously though, I know there are some folks who would welcome a much bigger deployment of combat troops to Iraq, but a) many of those people have been empirically proven to be dolts,
b) it’s not clear that a major US deployment would help the ISIS fight more than it hurts (and it will hurt on some level), and c) neither the Iraqis nor the US public want it.
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