How many ground troops has the United States deployed against the Islamic State? No one knows, because the Pentagon won't say.
What the Department of Defense will share is the "force management level," which counts only the permanent troop deployments in Iraq and Syria. That tally comes to around 4,000 soldiers, but it's a serious undercounting of the total anti-ISIS forces the U.S. has on the ground in the Mideast, as temporary deployments are extremely common thanks to troop caps set by the White House.
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