Goodbye Iraq: Last US combat brigade heads home | Hacker News Reader

Goodbye Iraq: Last US combat brigade heads home

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"Combat troops" is a circumlocution that has been coined for political purposes such as the fiction of "withdrawal" from a country one is in fact still occupying with 50,000 soldiers. This is well into the realm of Orwell. I'm thinking not of 1984 but of Politics and the English Language (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua...).

Garbage.

Combat troops are trained to break things and kill people. They're equipped with plenty of armored vehicles and artillery.

We may or may not be occupying Iraq, but if we've got e.g. mostly Military Police (MP) then it truly means something significant has changed.

Let's put it this way: if we were to decide to depose the current Iraqi government, would the troops we still have there be a good choice, let along our first?

Well since this is HN, let's agree on a way to decide the matter objectively. If you can find historical usages of the phrase "combat troops" (as distinct from just "troops") that are devoid of the political implication I mentioned, I'll agree that the phrase is a factual one.

I'm finding it hard to establish similar criteria for "withdrawal", however, because there are so many misleading usages of that word in the media right now. I just saw "US Withdraws From Iraq" as a headline in Google News a few minutes ago. Although the transitive usage of this verb can correctly describe a partial drawdown (as in "he withdrew part of his objection"), the intransitive usage cannot. This is a fact. It's also exactly the sort of thing Orwell was writing about.

Also,

Garbage.

I hesitated to make my original comment and double-hesitated to respond to this, but I'm giving it a try because I know you're a good commenter in general. I think a serious discussion of this topic would be interesting. It may be impossible, though, even here. If we can't discuss this civilly, let's bail.

One way to confirm what I'm saying is to look at the roles women are allowed in the US Army:

The US Army has traditionally been composed of a number of branches, see this Wikipedia list: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/US_Army#Branch_Establishment

The major combat branches are Infantry, Artillery and Armor (originally Cavalry). Women cannot serve in these and other related front line combat branches, e.g. see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Women_in_the_military.

Note for example that Sgt Leigh Ann Hester, the first woman to earn a Silver Star for "direct participation in combat", was a member of a MP company escorting a supply convoy. That woman who was captured and then rescued in the hotter part of the war was a member of a successfully ambushed supply convoy.

Also go back to that first Wikipedia page and look for where combat vs. support is used to describe. E.g. in the context of the new standardized combat brigade system (Heavy (mechanized infantry or tank), Stryker (wheeled death traps in the wrong terrain) and Infantry (light infantry or airborne)):

"In addition, there will be combat support and service support modular brigades. Combat support brigades include Aviation brigades, which will come in heavy and light varieties, Fires (artillery) brigades, and Battlefield Surveillance Brigades. Combat service support brigades include Sustainment brigades and come in several varieties and serve the standard support role in an army."

Actually, I thought of a much easier way to decide the factual question. Google web search is too clogged up with recent material, but Google book search is another matter:

http://www.google.com/search?hl=en&tbo=1&tbs=bks:1&#...

Clearly the phrase "combat troops" is not a recent coinage. I think I'll take your technical point on that and decline to repeat myself about the rest.

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