>I was referring to soldiers, I stand corrected
>
>and the number was off the top of my head, so it is a guesstimate at best I didn't research the current number.

I think this ambiguity, or should I say, doublespeak, comes from the HQ themselves. When you say "nnn troops", it sounds like a faceless mass ("troops" was always meaning "military units"); "nnn soldiers" sounds more personal, soldiers are individual people.

For the whole duration of the news coverage since 9/11 (and I really don't know how it was before) I've heard only once that a number of soldiers was expressed in soldiers, in all other cases it was measured in troops. At first it sounded ridiculous to me, using a name of a group to measure the number of group members, as if we'd say "movies this year were seen by 12 million audiences". But then I got the feeling of why is this manner used.