Pentagon, Washington. There are some happy people at the Pentagon these days, as the Trump Administration has passed over the authority to decide on just how many American boys and girls go there to die, is now in the US military’s hands itself.
The Pentagon has announced that Defense Secretary James Mattis will now have authority to make decisions about how many US troops are deployed to Afghanistan without first having to get formal agreement from the White House.
General Mattis will decide under his new authority and will have to keep President Donald Trump fully informed and briefed, officials said. This is an unprecedented example of giving the keys to a candy store, over to a child. It is normally why the US has civilian leaders, to provide oversight of the military.
This is a huge change from the Bush and Obama administrations, where the White House approved troop levels, largely because tens of thousands of personnel were involved and this can have serious political consequences for an administration.
Without a care in the world. the Trump administration has already delegated the authority to set those official troop levels in the fight against ISIS in Iraq and Syria to Mattis in April. A US senior defense official told News Fropnt that the decision concerning troop levels in Syria and Iraq was communicated via an internal policy memo back in April.
Right now there are currently about 8,400 US troops devoted to occupation duty in Afghanistan, which encompasses both US counter terrorism forces to fight ISIS and the Taliban as well as the effort to train, advise and assist Afghan forces in a separate effort to pacify the population, during the NATO occupation of the southwest Asian nation.
American Pentagon and White House advisers have been reviewing an option to send 25,000 to 50,000 additional US forces to occupy and pacify. The Defense Intelligence Agency is now conducting a broader military review involving both Afghanistan and Pakistan, so a decision on exactly how many additional troops might not come for several more weeks, defense officials have said in recent days.