Will troops still be drawn down sometime in 2011?

My unit is slated to be deployed overseas to either Afghanistan or Iraq in December 2011 or Spring of 2012 so going off of that information, I’m not entirely optimistic about a large troop draw down or any for that matter. At least not in the near future.

I believe that President Obama is going to keep addressing this issue because it is a very important one with thousands of military families intimately involved and interested on the progress of this. I’m not at all surprised that Iraq wants us out and this is the same request they’ve been making for years. As far as Iraq being able to protect their own country with their own military and police forces in place is highly questionable. Despite the presence of corruption in these forces already, you also have insurgents posing as law enforcement and military personnel.

We usually get quarterly briefings in my unit about the state of deployments for different units and worldwide affairs and there hasn’t been any message traffic of late about scaling down the numbers of troops currently deployed in the Middle East and Southeast Asia.

Probably. However it is tactically very foolish to make definitive statements regarding such matters.

Picture yourself as “the enemy”. If the leader of a democracy publicly states that on X date he will withdraw, then all you have to do to “win” is bide your time until that date arrives. At that time there will be one of two possibilities:

1) The democratic leader will have made good on the promise and your enemy will leave the area so you can go about your business. In short, you have won.

2) The democratic leader will renege on his promise, in which case you have a tool that you can use to damage him/her in the next election cycle by going to the international press and screaming about what a liar (s)he, and making the “unpopular and unjust war” a major political issue that will drive the next election cycle and make it more likely that the naive public of said democracy will elect someone with a bit less willingness to resist your goals.

There is, of course, a third possibility that the threat in the given arena of operations has been totally neutralized by the draw down date. Unfortunately, short of total eradication of all humans in the area, this is unlikely to happen in the real world.

Just based on experience, I think these things take much longer than anyone ever expects. Further, it is hard to believe Iraq is really ready, and if we leave, it’ll revert to sectarian wars pretty soon.

Obama said he would draw down the troops, but this issue seems to be on the back burner right now. People are more concerned about the economy, and if he did draw down the troops, there would probably be a lot of unemployed soldiers pretty soon.

US adventurism usually bites us in the ass. These wars have left us much weaker and have contributed to the bad economy and in particular, to the deficit. But we are stuck in quicksand, and instead of leaning back and trying to float, we are struggling, which only gets us deeper in trouble.

The was one draw down in Iraq this summer. Now there are about 50,000 troops left in Iraq. Some new troops are going over now to replace the ones that are there that have been there for the past year. Will they stay a whole year? Who knows. Many of the people I know that recently went to Iraq have no clue how long they will be there because of all the talks. Most likely, we will be out of Iraq before we are out of Afghanistan (at least that’s the way it seems to me).

Draw downs take time and a lot of planning. I think we will see more of a draw down sometime in 2011 or 2012 from the way things sound, but how many and from which area, who knows.

We still have 50,000 troops in Germany. I doubt a pull back in Iraq and Afghanistan is imminent.
Btw, we have moved to bombing Pakistan, Yemen, and Somalia, so even if we reduce troops in Iraq or Afganistan, we’ll just move them somewhere else. Gotta keep that Military Industrial Complex going.