The US Army is planning to reduce the size of its force by 40,000 soldiers over the next two years, according to US media reports.<\/p>\n
The cost-cutting exercise will also see an additional 17,000 civilian employees cut from the army.<\/p>\n
The reported plan would see the US troop level drop to about 450,000 soldiers by the end of 2017.<\/p>\n
The US army had about 570,000 troops in 2012 at the height of the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan.<\/p>\n
The army would have to cut a further 30,000 troops if automatic budget cuts known as sequestration come into effect in October, according to USA Today.<\/p>\n
Nearly 10,000 US troops still remain in Afghanistan after plans for a gradual withdrawal were delayed until 2016.<\/p>\n
In Iraq, nearly all US troops were withdrawn in 2010 when President Barack Obama ended combat operations.<\/p>\n
But there are about 3,500 military personnel there now to help Iraqi forces take on the Islamic State (IS) group.<\/p>\n
The planned army staffing levels would be the lowest since 1940, a year before the US entered World War Two, when it employed about 270,000 active-duty soldiers.<\/p>\n
A year before the 11 September 2001 attacks, the level was about 480,000.<\/p>\n
–<\/p>\n
Source: BBC<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
The US Army is planning to reduce the size of its force by 40,000 soldiers over the next two years, according to US media reports. The cost-cutting exercise will also see an additional 17,000 civilian employees cut from the army. The reported plan would see the US troop level drop to about 450,000 soldiers by […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":24,"featured_media":132466,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jnews-multi-image_gallery":[],"jnews_single_post":[],"jnews_primary_category":[],"jnews_social_meta":[],"jnews_override_counter":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[14],"class_list":["post-132464","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-papa-owusu-ankomah"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132464","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/24"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=132464"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/132464\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/132466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=132464"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=132464"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/citifmonline.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=132464"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}