Its initial contribution was a mere 200 soldiers.
An army of a mere 420,000 soldiers would make "a huge difference in the capabilities that we have" said Odierno earlier this month at the Council on Foreign Relations.
Most of these are now considered mere foot soldiers in the Islamist movement, swept up in Afghanistan during the swift rout of the Taliban.
But the enormous death toll of the March 5 airstrike, and the fact that its target seemed to be mere foot soldiers, suggested that something new might be happening that the public had a right to know about.
Randall Stross's "The Microsoft Way" (1996) offered a formula that was strikingly similar to Schmidt and Rosenberg's: "Gates recruited smart people, put them to work on a campus well suited for intense concentration, and maintained their allegiance with stock options whose value made millionaires of mere foot soldiers in the product-development groups.
The witness, Jamal Ahmed Al-Fadl, made his statements under questioning by three defense lawyers in Federal District Court in Manhattan who seemed to want to show that their clients were mere foot soldiers who went to military training camps in Afghanistan with moral aims and were duped into a misguided jihad.
In a memorandum that is being sent to Attorney General Janet Reno, the defense lawyers contend that executions of their clients, who are accused of being mere "foot soldiers" in a terrorist conspiracy, would only turn them into Islamic martyrs while creating a blood feud between the United States and the Muslim world.
The Union Army enrolled over a million men in the final year of the Civil War, but by the time the nation's Centennial year arrived 11 years later, the force had shrunk to a mere 29,000 soldiers -- in a country of 40 million people spanning a continent.
To cross the narrow bridge, the army column had to stop, dress its line, and close its rank to a mere three soldiers abreast.
If and when it happens, he will return as more than a mere foot soldier.
