"Combat troops" is a circumlocution that has been coined for political purposes such as the fiction of "withdrawal" from a country one is in fact still occupying with 50,000 soldiers. This is well into the realm of Orwell. I'm thinking not of <i>1984</i> but of <i>Politics and the English Language</i> (<a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Langua...</a>).