STUTTGART, Germany — The U.S. should send a 5,000-strong security assistance brigade to the Democratic Republic of the Congo to help stabilize a country ravaged by more than a decade of war, a prominent U.S. military analyst recommends.

In a “memorandum” to President Barack Obama, Michael O’Hanlon of the Brookings Institution also urges the White House to send several hundred military advisers to Libya to help train that country’s fledgling armed forces.

“The United States should, with a focused effort and in partnership with other states, make a significant push to improve security in Africa,” O’Hanlon wrote in his Jan. 23 memo, which was posted on the Brookings website. “No massive deployments of U.S. troops would be needed, and in fact no role for American main combat units is required. But we should step up our game from the current very modest training efforts coordinated through Africa Command (AFRICOM).”

The recommendation comes at a time of increased concern about instability in certain parts of Africa. The list of hotspots is long: Mali, Somalia and across ungoverned spaces in the Sahel region of western and north-central Africa, where extremists have taken root, armed in large part with weapons looted from Libyan armories during NATO’s air assault on Moammer Gadhafi’s regime in 2011.

In addition, ethnic divisions have exploded into bloody violence in South Sudan, the Central African Republic and the DRC.

AFRICOM has engaged in many of those hotspots, though U.S. military action generally takes the form of modestly sized training missions, intelligence gathering operations and logistical support to French forces on the ground in places like Mali.

It seems unlikely that the Obama administration would follow O’Hanlon’s recommendation.

In his State of the Union speech Tuesday, Obama emphasized that as the war in Afghanistan winds down, he would send U.S. forces into conflict zones only as a last resort.

“I will not send our troops into harm’s way unless it’s truly necessary. Nor will I allow our sons and daughters to be mired in open-ended conflicts,” Obama said.

GRAFENWÖHR, Germany — Less than a year after they left European soil, American tanks have returned to military bases in Germany where they had been a heavy presence since World War II.

In April last year, the last Abrams tanks left Germany, coinciding with a drawdown of U.S. forces that saw the inactivation of two infantry brigades — the 170th and 172nd.

When the 22 M1A1 Abrams departed the continent it was seen as the end of an era, as tanks had been a fixture on American bases in Europe since landing at Omaha Beach in 1944.

Now, it appears that chapter of history may have been closed a bit prematurely.

On Friday, the last of 29 M1A2 SEPv2 Abrams tanks were offloaded at the railhead at the Grafenwöhr training facilities. These heavily armored vehicles are upgraded versions of the older Abrams that left 10 months ago and will become part of what the Joint Multinational Training Command at Grafenwöhr is calling the European Activity Set.

“The EAS is a pre-positioned, battalion-plus-size equipment set with headquarters pieces and command-and-control elements,” said Col. Thomas Matsel, operations officer with the JMTC. “Units that utilize the EAS will have access to the entire breadth of military operations they may have to conduct.”

The Abrams tanks will join 33 M2A3 Bradley infantry fighting vehicles and dozens of other heavy support vehicles that will be positioned at Grafenwöhr to be used at the training facilities there, at the Joint Multinational Readiness Center at Hohenfels and at other training areas across Europe.

Retired Air Force Col. Robert Freniere unintentionally became the public face for homeless veterans after a Philadelphia newspaper wrote about his struggle to find work.

Freniere spent just over 30 years in the military, and after he was medically retired in 2006 at age 51 he landed a job with a defense contractor in Afghanistan earning $150,000 per year.

But he returned to the U.S. in 2012 to a weak economy, sequestration and the winding down of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. And few job opportunities.

Soon, Freniere became one of an estimated 57,000 homeless veterans in 2013, an estimate drawn from the U.S. government’s Point in Time Count, which is meant to provide a snapshot of how many veterans are homeless on a given night. The 2013 figure shows a 24 percent decline since 2010, according to the Veterans Affairs Department.

But Freniere’s situation is complex, and contributing to his homelessness are family issues, financial obligations and other unique circumstances.

The frequent separations from family during deployments, the transition from the military to civilian life and the mental and physical impacts of service can amplify the factors that lead to homelessness, said Kelly Caffarelli, president of the Home Depot Foundation, which helps veterans and their families get the housing they need.

“Historically, veterans are twice as likely to be homeless as their civilian counterparts,” Caffarelli said in a Jan. 23 interview.

WASHINGTON — As two of the nation's longest wars finally end, most Americans have concluded that neither achieved its goals.

Those grim assessments in a USA TODAY/Pew Research Center poll underscore the erosion in support for the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan and the loss of faith in the outcome of the wars, both launched in the aftermath of the Sept. 11, 2001, terror attacks. The public's soured attitudes may make it harder the next time a president tries to persuade Americans of the value of military action when it involves putting thousands of U.S. troops in harm's way.

In the survey:

• On Iraq, Americans by 52%-37% say the United States mostly failed to achieve its goals. That is a decidedly more negative view than in November 2011, when U.S. combat troops withdrew. Then, by 56%-33%, those surveyed said the U.S. had mostly succeeded.

• On Afghanistan, Americans by a nearly identical 52%-38% say the U.S. has mostly failed to achieve its goals. In 2011, a month after Osama bin Laden was killed, a majority predicted the war would succeed.

"What is especially interesting about these responses is that the public has continued to update its views on Iraq and Afghanistan despite the fact that these wars have received virtually no attention at all from our politicians over the past couple of years," said Christopher Gelpi, a political scientist at Ohio State University who has studied attitudes toward the conflicts. "This shows that the public is more attentive to costly wars than we might expect, even when politicians try to ignore the conflicts."

In recent months, news reports from Iraq have centered on renewed fighting with al-Qaeda fighters and a government riven along sectarian lines. In Afghanistan, President Hamid Karzai has resisted American demands to sign a security agreement setting out the U.S. role once combat forces are withdrawn by the end of the year.

Americans continue to distinguish between the two conflicts when it comes to the justification made for using military force.

By 10 percentage points, 51%-41%, Americans say the U.S. made the right decision in using military force in Afghanistan, where the Taliban had provided safe haven for the al-Qaeda terrorists who planned the 9/11 attacks. Still, that narrow majority does reflect a significant shift in views. In 2006, two-thirds of Americans said invading Afghanistan was the right decision.

But when it comes to Iraq, support for the decision to go to war has crashed. The invasion was launched in March 2003 with Bush administration officials asserting President Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, though they were never found. At the beginning, Americans by 3-1 called it the right decision.

Now, by 50%-38%, they call it the wrong one.

The poll of 1,504 adults taken Jan. 15-19 has a margin of error of +/-3 percentage points.