Word: troop
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Dates: during 2010-2019
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...Politicians continue to justify the adventures in Iraq and in Afghanistan, where British troop levels now stand at 9,500, in terms of national security. Britain, it is said, must take the fight to the bad guys to keep its citizens safe. Yet as the list of rickety states and terror havens has continued to expand, defense spending has failed to keep pace even as equipment costs have spiraled upward. The prospect of lean times as Britain reins in its budget deficit has pitched army, navy and air force commanders into open turf wars. Lower down the ranks, the endemic...
...Nobody expects overall troop numbers to be boosted any time soon. On the contrary, a January report by defense analyst Professor Malcolm Chalmers for the Royal United Services Institute predicts cuts of 20% to military personnel over the next six years. Political leaders justified the last cutback of this scale, the replacement of the British Army of the Rhine in 1994 by a standing force of less than half its size, as a "peace dividend" arising from the end of the Cold War. But with failed states on three continents giving cause for concern, the chance of a new peace...
...into the complexities of modern missions. Captain Matt Woodward left Sandhurst in April 2002, and deployed to Iraq the following year. "On my first tour my squadron leader was 50 miles away from me," he says. "I was running a town of 40,000 on my own with a troop of 16 people. I went to Iraq with some armored vehicles and they said, 'Right, here's your town. There's a police force here that's largely ineffective, there's no law and order in the city. Make it work.'" Now a grizzled veteran of 30, Woodward is back...
...soldiers in Kunduz had nothing to do with poor equipment or bad training. "Our soldiers were well-trained - they were ambushed," said the spokesman, who declined to give his name as per policy. As part of a new parliamentary mandate, which was passed by the Bundestag in February, German troop levels in Afghanistan will also increase from 4,500 to 5,350 later this year. (Germany is already the third-largest troop contributor after the U.S. and Britain.) The new mandate places a heavier emphasis on civilian reconstruction projects and the training of Afghan soldiers, which will make German soldiers...
...decades by Moscow and, after 1991, fell within the borders of independent Uzbekistan, Tajikistan and Kyrgyzstan. This has led to all sorts of confusion and conflict. Bloody riots in Osh in 1990 between ethnic Uzbeks and Kyrgyz marred the run-up to independence; political spats over everything from border troop movements to the sensitive issue of water access blow hot and cold between the region's capitals...