6,500 Coalition Troops in Iraq; U.S. Wants More

Sharon Behn, Voice of America

Seventeen coalition member countries have sent more than 6,500 soldiers to Iraq to help in the fight against Islamic State – and the United States is calling for more.

“There is a need for that,” Patrick Martin, Iraq analyst for the Institute for the Study of War said. “There is a strong need for additional assistance, particularly with trainers.”

The numbers fluctuate, but the latest official numbers show the 6,500 plus troops spread out across four Iraqi bases in Irbil, Taji, Al Asad and Bismayah.

Special operation units are also on the ground conducting raids and collecting intelligence: Delta Force, Seals, British SAS, Canadian special forces.

As of today, according to Australian military officials, there are 300 Australian regular forces and 80 Australian special forces and 100 New Zealand regular forces in Iraq, for a total of 480 Anzac forces. None of these operate “outside the wire.”

There are also an “unspecified number” of NATO forces and an unknown number of Turkish soldiers on the ground in Iraq, according to the Congressional Research Service (CRS).

“The coalition machine in Iraq is big,” Michael Knights of the Washington Institute told VOA. “By 2011 standards, it’s tiny, but when you compare it to the standards of today, it’s pretty big.

“The real secret to this coalition is that the Canadians, Australians, New Zealand, Spanish, Portuguese, Germans, French, Italians - these people are making significant contributions,” Knights said.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter has reached out to some 40 nations to send additional special operations forces, trainers, combat support, weapons, and aircraft to the fight.

Lack of Coordination

Currently, most coalition soldiers are training and assisting local forces - including Iraqi military, police, tribal fighters and the Kurdish Peshmerga - in everything from small unit tactics to dealing with IEDs.

But the war against IS is one of constantly shifting tactics, and more trainers are needed to keep up, as the latest battle ousting the extremists from the city of Ramadi showed.

“We had been training the Iraqi Security Forces to deal with insurgent threats, but then in Ramadi, because of the way IS had prepared its defenses, the counter-insurgency tactics needed to change more to mine-clearing and regular infantry tactics,” Martin explained.

Yet even as U.S. officials call on allies to send more trainers and personnel to help in the fight against the extremist group, some have cautioned that coalition efforts on the ground already lack coordination.

“Without a single authority responsible for prioritizing and adjudicating between different multinational civilian and military lines of effort, different actors often work at cross purposes without intending to do so,” CRS wrote in its November 2015 report to Congress.

Knights strongly disagreed. “The Americans really are the glue holding this together," he said. "There is one overarching authority, and that is Lt. General Sean MacFarland, and he is coordinating all of that. There are no western partners operating independently in Iraq.”

Knights said there were additional “loose electrons” in the Iraqi conflict theater, namely Russians, Lebanese Hezbollah and Iranian fighters, but felt they were not significant contributors.

“If you want people to stay in their thousands and pay billions of dollars to do it for you, there is nobody like the western coalition to do everything they possibly can in exchange for practically nothing, including no gratitude,” Knights said.

The Iraqi government, Knights said, was working hard behind the scenes to deconflict the area, including in Kurdistan through the Joint Coalition Coordination Center near Erbil.

“That is there to coordinate not just between the coalition and the Kurds, but the coalition, the Kurds and the federal government, to fill the gap between these two jurisdictions, particularly as war migrates in that direction,” he said.

Turkish Troops

Less clear is the role of Turkish troops on Iraqi soil, which Turkish press reports have put as high as 2,000, but that analysts believe are closer to 300. According to the Turkish embassy in Washington, “there is no official number.”

“They have trainers as well as troops near Mosul,” said Jonathan Schanzer, VP for Research for the Foundation for Defense of Democracies. “One gets the sense they are trying to prevent Kurdistan from breaking away; concern about Iranian hegemony could be part of it, and their own force projection.”

Thousands of additional soldiers are spread across bases in the Middle East supporting the relentless airstrike campaign. France for example, has 200 personnel on the ground in Iraq, but more forces aboard an aircraft carrier in the Persian Gulf and multiple fighter aircraft in the air.

Schanzer warned that with so many players involved there was the risk of an even larger war.

“There are players out there who may be playing both sides against the middle,” he said. “It’s beyond a mess. It’s a nightmare. It’s very hard to walk this back.”

Pentagon Budget Focuses on Evolving Challenges

Carla Babb, Voice of America

Secretary of Defense Ash Carter has laid out his military spending priorities for the 2017 Pentagon budget, reflecting efforts to counter Russia's assertiveness and fight Islamic State militants in Iraq and Syria.

The $583 billion defense budget request shifts the weight of defense spending to “five evolving challenges,” including a power competition from Russia and China, regional threats from North Korea and Iran, and the enduring counterterrorism threat.

Carter said Tuesday Russia and China are the United States’ “most stressing competitors,” and the new budget proposal accounts for the ongoing re-balance to Asia as well as quadrupling the budget for reinforcing the U.S. military posture in Europe.

President Barack Obama issued a statement that the budget increases for Europe "should make clear that America will stand firm with its allies in defending not just NATO territory but also shared principles of international law and order." Obama noted that "since the start of Russia’s aggression against Ukraine almost two years ago, the United States has taken decisive and sustained steps to assure our allies."

The Pentagon budget calls for $7.5 billion to fight Islamic State, a 50 percent increase from last year. It also provides $1.8 billion to buy more than 45,000 additional GPS-guided smart bombs and laser-guided rockets, which have become the weapons of choice in the air campaign against IS terrorists.

Looking Ahead

Carter said the budget will boost spending on undersea warfare, cyber, space and electronic warfare and looks ahead to longer-term threats.

“We’re taking the long view,” Carter said. “Because even as we fight today’s fights, we must also be prepared for the fights that might come 10, 20, or 30 years down the road.”

The defense budget will include $8.1 billion for undersea capabilities—from better torpedoes to unmanned undersea vehicles—and nearly $7 billion in cyber.

It also includes a massive $71.4 billion for research and development accounts, which will increase the Department of Defense’s research spending for the second year in a row.

Tradeoffs

Carter said the 2017 budget requires tradeoffs among force structure, modernization and readiness. These tradeoffs have at times pitted the secretaries of the armed services against the defense secretary.

For example, Navy Secretary Ray Mabus has said he favors more spending on a small, close-to-shore warship called a Littoral Combat Ship. Carter, however, said Tuesday the budget would include “only as many Littoral Combat Ships as we really need.”

In addition, Eric Fanning, the president’s choice for Army secretary, has recently criticized the administration’s plans to further shrinking the number of soldiers in order to free up money elsewhere.

He told the Senate Armed Services Committee that plans to decrease the active-duty Army by 40,000 soldiers are hurting the Army’s readiness.

“Two years ago when we targeted 450 (thousand), we didn’t have ISIL, we didn’t have Russia,” Fanning said.