So basically anybody can be put in there on the ground for any reason as long as it isn’t specifically “combat”. Cock-eyed.
Via HuffPost:
Sixty-six American troops killed. Two hundred ninety-five Wounded in Action.
Are those numbers from an American combat operation? Not according to our government, which said they, and the other 50,000 troops in Iraq (which included me), were part of the “official end to Operation Iraqi Freedom and combat operations,” under Operation New Dawn, after August 2010.
I thought back to that, today, as I read about one very interesting line in the Senate resolution authorizing military action in Syria, which passed the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. Most in the media, and on the Hill, talk about how the resolution disallows American troops on the ground. That isn’t true. What the bill says is, “The authority granted in section 2 does not authorize the use of the United States Armed Forces on the ground in Syria for the purpose of combat operations.”
That is key. Officially, those 66 Americans killed, and 295 wounded in Iraq were not part of combat operations, either. Yet, for those of us on the ground, we knew they very much were.
Whenever we send troops to the kind of asymmetrical battlefield that we had in Iraq, and would definitely see in Syria, they are automatically combat troops. They can face attack at any time, and would have to respond appropriately, at any time. To say they will be in any kind of safe-zone, away from combat, is naïve.