I agree with everyone here. Also I don’t think this usage is always mere sloppiness. The military uses it because it is more impersonal. Compare “10,000 troops were sent to Afghanistan” vs. “10,000 soldiers were sent to Afghanistan.” The latter brings up a vision of thousands of people, and the former (for me) does not.
Especially as “force” is a perfectly useful military word referring to a group of soldiers of any size whatsoever.
I’ll just add my two pennorth, Troop as in a military unit is not confined exclusively to cavalry formations( in the British Army ) but is also a (small) formation in U.K. Special Forces amongst other things.
Uh. Right. Or that’s one of the words that soldiers or Marines will use to describe themselves, eg “troop welfare.”
C’mon, peeps. It’s short for “trooper”, which has been used for a very long time. While it’s probably a bastardization of the French word troupe (an acting company), it’s a legitimate English word. One man is a trooper and a group of soldiers is a troop (or troupe).
Well, given that they’re all supposed to be “an army of one” now, we’re lucky we don’t here about “30,000 armies” being sent somewhere.
ETA: Yes, I’m aware they don’t use that slogan any more. It’s a joke.
C’mon peep. The problem is that “troop” is invariably used in news reports to refer to one soldier, despite the fact that lots of people, like me (and you, evidently) immediately associate it with more than one.
Gotta’ love the Onion.
Of course it is. I was just pointing out the origin of the term. It was quite often used in conjunction with cavalry units (hence the lamentable TV series: “F Troop”), wherein each soldier was a “trooper”. When it became popular to spout the platitudinous and now annoyingly ubiquitous “support the troops”, everyone except military and history buffs erroneously assumed that “troops” were like “persons”, although it’s been common enough in the Army to address another soldier as “troop”.
Oddly enough, the word “troop” is used for a single soldier in the third paragraph of this DoD article: http://www.defense.gov/news/newsarticle.aspx?id=53195
That is probably because it’s the military that keep insisting that “troop” means a single soldier, contrary to linguistic sense.