The chairman of the House Armed Services Committee said Monday that American troops in Afghanistan are scrambling to figure out where they can cut about 1,400 troops to stay under the new troop cap set by President Obama this month.
Rep. Mac Thornberry, R-Texas, took a congressional delegation trip to the Middle East last week, spending most of his time in Iraq and Afghanistan. Rep. Rodney Frelinghuysen, R-N.J., chairman of the House Appropriations Committee’s defense subcommittee, and Rep. Seth Moulton, D-Mass., and a former Marine, joined Thornberry on the trip.
The end-of-year 8,448 cap set by the president when he revised and slowed down the drawdown from Afghanistan this year is causing problems for troops, who told Thornberry they are struggling with where they can cut personnel.
“They’re grappling with how they’re going to do that. They are looking at taking some enablers and putting them elsewhere, outside of Afghanistan. They’re looking at contracting out different capabilities, or different things,” he said. “You’ve got all of this churn to try to make sure they stay below 8,448.”
He also said the troop cap forces units to leave behind their maintainers, which hurts the military on two fronts: the maintainers’ skills atrophy, since they have no aircraft to work on, and the military must pay for contractors to repair and maintain equipment, which is more expensive.
Thornberry also repeated his call for the administration to send over a supplemental budget request to cover plans for expanded overseas operations in fiscal 2017, including keeping more troops than planned in Afghanistan and sending more service members to the fight against the Islamic State. The original plan had been to draw down from 9,800 troops now to 5,500 troops by the end of the year, before that final number was changed to 8,448.
While Thornberry said he has received no official numbers from the Pentagon, he’s heard that the military is at least $6 billion short based on activities that were not in the president’s original request.
The U.S. commitment to keeping more forces in Afghanistan, as well as a loosening of the circumstances under which American troops can advise Afghans or become involved in combat, has “made a big difference” in the Afghans’ morale and capability on the battlefield. Thornberry said a commander told him that, since the president’s announcements, they have “done more good in the last 30 days than in the entire nine months before,” saying that it’s hurting Taliban morale at the same time it’s boosting that of the Afghan troops.
Thornberry said it was clear that local forces backed by the U.S. are “making progress on the ground,” but said that even totally destroying the terrorist group’s caliphate in the Middle East is not enough to eliminate threats from the Islamic State in the future.
“Taking Mosul and Raqqa doesn’t mean the threat goes away. It is evolving to something different. We have to be prepared to evolve as well,” Thornberry said, pointing to terrorist attacks in the West for which the Islamic State has claimed credit.
He also stressed that officials must answer questions about how Iraqi forces will hold land and keep terrorists out once it has been cleared.
