America’s air-and-ground assault in Iraq quickly overwhelmed the country’s hapless armed forces. But in the years that followed, it overwhelmed the American military, too
after Islamic State, an al-Qaeda splinter, tore through northern Iraq and Syria in 2014. Around 2,500 American troops remain today.
The intense pace of operations had a wider impact on American forces, as a paper published in 2009 by the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a think-tank, warned. By 2007 the share ofwith high-school diplomas had fallen to 79%, the lowest level for 25 years. A growing number of volunteers were being given waivers for criminal records, obesity or other issues.
Worse still, all of that came at a crucial period for America’s global position. In the decade prior to its invasion of Iraq,roughly doubled. In the decade that followed, it quadrupled. Meanwhile America frittered away extraordinary resources. The cost of military operations in Iraq since 2003 runs to more than $800bn on a conservative estimate, and into the trillions on more expansive measures.
“A vast number of navy and marine officers could be trusted to explain the intricacies of every street in Baghdad,” says Eric Sayers of the American Enterprise Institute, another think-tank, and a former consultant for Indo-Pacific Command, America’s military command for Asia, “but far fewer came to know much at all about the military and diplomatic geography of maritime South-East Asia.”
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