The Pentagon manages to pull out all “combat brigades” from Iraq by cleverly renaming them “Advise and Assist brigades”.
Soldiers from the 2nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team of the 25th Infantry Division are deployed in Iraq as members of an Advise and Assist Brigade, the Army’s designation for brigades selected to conduct security force assistance. So while the “last full U.S. combat brigade” have left Iraq, just under 50,000 soldiers from specially trained heavy, infantry and Stryker brigades will stay, as well as two combat aviation brigades.
For some reason, the old joke about military intelligence springs to mind. They might as reasonably have renamed them “penguins” for all the good it’s going to do. And regardless of what they are called, the only relevant point is that there are still 50,000 American combat troops in Iraq.