Between 20 more than 58,000 soldiers were affected. Mobilisation on this scale required implementing what many soldiers called a “backdoor draft”: a stop-loss policy of forcing soldiers to extend their service. And as Iraq wound down, the war in Afghanistan ramped up: 98,000 troops were deployed there at that conflict’s peak in 2011. At the peak of “the surge” in 2007-a spike in troops to combat a raging insurgency-the number was far higher. For the first six years of the war, the number of American troops in Iraq rarely fell below 120,000 (see chart). These campaigns put an enormous strain on America’s army. Around 2,500 American troops remain today. Barack Obama, then president, pulled American troops out in 2011, only to send many back after Islamic State, an al-Qaeda splinter, tore through northern Iraq and Syria in 2014. But in the years that followed America was sucked into a campaign of nation-building and counter-insurgency against armed groups, including Sunni jihadists, disaffected members of Saddam Hussein’s Baath Party and Shia militants. The American-led coalition conquered Baghdad in just over three weeks, a remarkable display of raw military power against what was then the world’s fourth-largest standing army. But in the years that followed, it overwhelmed the American military, too, leaving it bent out of shape for the accelerating competition with China. “This will be a campaign unlike any other in history,” promised General Tommy Franks, the cigar-chomping commander of US Central Command ( CENTCOM), “a campaign characterised by shock, by surprise…and by the application of overwhelming force.” America’s air-and-ground assault quickly overwhelmed Iraq’s hapless armed forces. T HE IRAQ war began on March 21st 2003, when Baghdad’s night sky lit up with American guided bombs and tracer fire.
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