Warsaw, Poland NATO decided on Saturday that it will move its mission training Iraqi ground forces—now being done in Jordan—to facilities inside Iraq, no later than November. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg told reporters the mission was moving to become more efficient—it will allow a greater throughput of trained Iraqi officers—and because Iraq is somewhat safer for the trainers. Part of the training involves the removal of tens of thousands of improvised explosive devices, a senior NATO official said in a backgrounder for the press. “We want people to be able to come back” to their homes after ISIS forces are ousted from the territories they’ve held, he said, but “they’ve booby-trapped everything. You open a refrigerator, it explodes,” and booby traps have been found in bodies, toys, “everything.” Iraq needs the capacity to take this mission on, he said.
More than 100 B-21s will be needed if the nation is to avoid creating a high demand/low capacity capability, panelists said on a Hudson Institute webinar. The B-21's flexibility, stealth, range and payload will be in high demand for a wide range of missions, both traditional and new.