So yesterday, the secretary signed a deployment order for about 500 soldiers from the 1st Infantry Division headquarters element from Fort Riley, Kansas. They'll be deploying to the Central Command area of responsibility later this month -- I'm sorry, later in October.
Of those 500, approximately 200 will deploy to Baghdad and Erbil as part of the 475 increase that the president announced on the 10th of September. If you want a breakdown of that, I actually got it: 138 will go to the Baghdad joint operations center; 68 of them will go to the JOC up in Erbil; and 10 will be working out of the ministry of defense there in Baghdad. ...
138 to Baghdad, 68 to Erbil, 10 to the ministry of defense in Baghdad. They're going to provide command-and-control of the ongoing advise and assist effort in support of Iraqi and Peshmerga forces. And they're going to continue to help us all degrade and destroy ISIL.
The remaining of the 300 remaining that are not going into Iraq will be based still in the Central Command AOR, but outside Iraq. And I'm not going to detail exactly where they're going to be.
We already have headquarters elements of 1st Armored Division in Jordan. Or we did at the time of that post. Perhaps it is gone. Perhaps it was replaced.
Perhaps the new contingent going to an unnamed location is going to Jordan to replace the element sent there more than a year ago.
Normally, a division headquarters controls 3-5 maneuver brigades plus support brigades (artillery, engineer, logistics, air defense, etc.).
I don't know what this means. But we have command and control elements on the ground in and near Iraq.
