Asymmetrical Information

Yes, it can take territory; no it can't hold it. The best estimate floating around on the strength needed to occupy a country seems to be 20 troops for every 1,000 people, which would imply a force size of about 500,000.

Just out of curiosity, what is the source of this "best estimate"?

"The Clinton army?" give me a break. More like the "in spite of Clinton Army."

The weapons used to seize Iraq were conceived and built during the Reagan and Bush administrations. This was not a Clinton military, this was a Cold War military who's equipment is rapidly becoming old and obsolete.

And just because Abizaid asks for two more brigades during a large uprising doesn't mean the original plan was wrong, or that forces are stretched to the breaking point.

hi megan,
if we are serious about being the world's policeman, should this not imply that as a "public good" we need to tax the rest of the world in order to pay for this. in the abbsence of effective mechanisms to ensure that free riders show the true value of their preference for "peace, law, and order" that the usa is supposed to play, taxation of some kind would appear to be in order. what do you think?

also,
given your post's earlier analysis, might this have implied that an alternative to invasion might have been seriously considered first?

I don't know how we can estimate the size of an occupation force needed by the country's population. It would seem to me to vary by the amount of destruction we visited during the active fighting--which was precious little in Iraq. People on whom we dropped atomic bombs are probably not in the mood to fight us any longer.

However, we should keep in mind that in 1989 (the year the Berlin Wall fell) we had about 2.1 million uniformed troops. By 1993 (Clinton's inauguration) it was down to 1.7 million, and during Clinton's two terms it further declined to under 1.4 million. Which is what Rumsfeld had to work with 9-12-01.

This report is enlightening on this subject, particularly the following item:

"[I]f at any moment there was an analysis that suggested one of the services was too small, obviously we would recommend an increase in it. We just don't have that kind of analysis at the present time. And I don't believe anyone else does."

-- Donald Rumsfeld, Pentagon briefing, 12/9/03

I was under the impression that we have focused our military strategy as a "defensive" one and that for the past many years it was not considered policy that we needed an army of conquest. If you primarily want a military that can deter attack on your soil, or that of your allies, you need a technologically advanced one that can project significant fire-power on select targets. A precise response to a specific threat. If you want an army of conquest and occupation, you need more men and armour and less focus on ships and planes.

Had you made the case that we needed a larger standing army in, say, 1993 in order to be able to hold large swaths of the earth under our bootheel, you would have been laughed at.

Or should I assume that I am living in a new Empire, modeled on Rome's, in which what we really need are more phalanxae.

"We are the world's policemen, like it or not. And the department is apparently grossly understaffed."

Where does this come from? We are the world's policeman only insofar as we want to be the world's policeman. Being the economically most powerful country doesn't confer upon us a special moral status to be the world's policeman. Perhaps we ought to be thinking about a different model of world diplomacy whereby our good offices are used to enable regional powers to resolve disputes, respond to threats, and create stable, liberal democratic regimes *over time*.

That we're grossly understaffed in Iraq gives pretty good indication that despite all the talk of being the world's policeman, there isn't the domestic support or political will to actually play that role. So maybe we ought to think about a different one.

Of course, this doesn't resolve the current problem in Iraq where, as you rightly note, we're woefully understaffed - despite, I would note, all the private contractors who are fulfilling roles previously performed by the military and thereby making our on-the-ground force appear to be slightly smaller than it actually is. My answer to that problem - a speedy, but tactful withdraw - isn't going to sit well with lots of people on the right who really do believe we should be spreading "democracy," the center-left who think we now have some moral obligation to rebuild Iraq, or many other people worth talking to. But it's my answer and I'm sticking to it!

Jane,

You are mixing up Clinton's army with Bush's policy. It was not Clinton's policy that we would take over Iraq and try to make it a democracy. For Clinton's policy goals the armed forces he had were more than enough.

Now maybe you, like Bush, disagree with Clinton's policies. Fine. Then Bush should have asked to increase the number of troops. But he never did.

Bush and Bush supporters cannot logically blame this on Clinton. If Bush wants a different policy then he should make sure he has the resources for it. He did not ask for them.

This is yet another example of Bush's free-lunch conservatism. He wants a new, interventionist foreign policy but doesn't want to pay for it by asking to increase the size of our armed forces.

"Perhaps we ought to be thinking about a different model of world diplomacy whereby our good offices are used to enable regional powers to resolve disputes, respond to threats, and create stable, liberal democratic regimes *over time*."

That's exactly what we're doing... You can't do it in 72 hours...

"My answer to that problem - a speedy, but tactful withdraw"

I don't see how that solves anything except giving the left wing something to point at and say "See! It was a mistake!"...

And once again, when we try and discuss our problem, or if we even HAVE a problem, out come the knives and the backstabbing begins.

No discussion of what to do now (barring dc, who gets props even if he's wrong G). No discussion of whether the initial premise is correct. Just blame-games

We've got problems to solve. At least the Republicans are trying to solve them, however imperfectly. In the meantime, much of the Democratic Party seems to have aligned itself with America's enemies. Nice going.

Even granting that criticisms from either side, or both, are valid, so what? What were our alternatives?

1) Lie back and try to enjoy it as the Islamists continue their plan of world domination
2) Go nuclear
3) Fight back conventionally, even though we're not really staffed up for it

So far as I am concerned, #1 is right out, #2 is to be avoided if at all possible, and that leaves #3.

I'd take the criticism from the Left better if they would either show us another VIABLE option, come right out and tell us they prefer 1 or 2, or get off their butts and start trying to HELP on 3 instead of just complaining.

What GT said.

Clinton's military was adequate for the essential step of invading Afghanistan, and probably would have been adequate for pacifying it--especially since for that venture we could have gotten (did get) other countries to contribute significantly to the nation-building part. Dealing with that failed state was a key step in the fight agsinst terrorism.

But, this military was not adequate, alone, to pacify Iraq (very much not a key step). Bush et al insisted on doing that alone, and without increasing the size of the military; we all are reaping the consequences, as a failed state may well be in the process of being created.

The soldier/population ratio came from a RAND study, looking at Kosovo and other nation-building exercises.

If this was a question of force structure:

It certainly makes no sense to a million man active force sitting in Texas idle for five years.
The idea was to use the reserve system as a backup for situations like this. If anyone out there is talking about the next place after Iraq we will need half a million men, I haven't heard them....ok a few talk about Syria and Iran. We are going to add 2 more divisions, which after a while will go to reserve status.
...
The "professional army" makes a larger active force difficult: pay structure, training and advanced training, unit cohesion, preparedness and logistics. I happen to disagree with the concept of the professional, highly trained, well-paid military....that will of course be very small...but since this is what the military seems to want, it will take time to change. And Rumsfeld et al appear to want to go the other direction.

To answer the original question, I'm not convinced that we're woefully understaffed. What is it that we can't do that we should be able to do? Certainly there is no enemy force that can stand against us. They die at 10-1 when they try. When we decide to use force in Iraq, our problem is normally trying to apply as *little* force as possible. We don't have too little force, but "too much".

But, I can hear the cries now, what about all those ambushes? How come we're losing people every day to IEDs and snipers and such?

That goes with the territory when you're an occupying power. Even if we had 500,000 troops, how would that change things? Is that enough to have a trooper every 5 feet? No. More importantly, would more troops change our willingness to use violence? I doubt it. So we'd just have more troops who can't act pro-actively. More targets.

We know who and where the bad guys are for the most part already, and have since we got there. Problem is, we're not willing to bomb their towns to take them out. We're not willing to send out hit squads on the Al Sadrs. And before anyone squeals, I'm not necessarily advocating we should do any of those things. But the point is, we already have the force structure to inflict far more damage than we are willing to inflict.

The other objection, as I see it, would be that we need those 500K troops essentially as policemen. Just to patrol the streets. Show the flag lots of places and all that. And yes, I agree that in this particular situation that would likely be helpful. But that means, essentially, that we should have a huge army of MPs. Are we going to staff up for that? Does it even make sense? Would we ever need that force structure again? I don't know, but I think it's far from obvious that if we, for example, still had the Army of 1990, that the additional manpower would make all that much difference in practice.

Policing Iraq has to be done by Iraqis. There's no way we can have an army that's big enough to *police* a state with a population of 25 million. And yes, this is somewhat of an Achilles' heel in our efforts in Iraq. It's an area that has gone particularly badly, to all our misfortunes, and hence it's an area that needs a lot of focus going forward. Does this failure mean that Bush "didn't have a plan" or that the war shouldn't have been fought? Not at all. Remember that we're there trying to avoid Options 1 and 2 I mentioned in a previous comment.

We will continue to take regular low level losses until the Iraqi police and defense forces are *well* up to speed, and that's going to take a couple of years. Even at that, it may not work. We may fail there. I pray we do not, because if we do, I think Option 2 is inevitable, which would be a tragedy for all concerned.

Let's try and remember what's at stake.

1. The 20/1000 number seems soft. There must be some obvious factors that would yield better numbers quickly - number of guns in the country, distribution of those guns, number of military aged men, relative pliability of that population, etc. It's also not clear that you need to control the entire population or the entire state - if you hold the major cities, ports, and markets, you probably have a fair bit of influence in those areas that you don't control. Finally, our willingness to be either clever or brutal could raise the population-controlled-per-soldier number significantly. After all, the sun never set on the British Empire (and something like a quarter of the world's population), and they only had to deploy six guys and a packet of chips.

2. I don't know if you can reasonably say that the Clintonistas should be careful in what they say about troop deployment, lest they get tarred by the other side of the same brush (b/c reduced military size is their fault). Before you can do that, you would have to demonstrate that they too would have occupied Iraq. It seems much more likely that they would have either avoided the idiotic invasion altogether, or (untroubled by conscience), blown the country up, allowed it to sink into civil war, and then blown it up again if the new Iraq proved troublesome. (Full disclosure: I am, at best, only slightly inconvenienced by conscience myself).

Tim, thanks for your analysis. I tend to be unconvinced that we necessarily need more troops in Iraq to do the job (particularly if our goal is to get the Iraqis to begin policing themselves). However, I am open to logical arguments to the contrary.

Jane, could you please provide a source for your original figure? I have heard a number of people say we do not have enough troops but little in the way of an actual justification for a specific number or ratio.

Thanks.

Sorry "Tim" should be "DSmith"

The question is this: even if Iraq is the "wrong war", is it truly inconceivable to DLC types that we would need to occupy some country at some point? At our current staffing levels, we apparently can't win any territorial war against any state bigger than Delaware. That's a problem, to my mind.

I am very hawkish on this war. My ideas are usually discounted on all sides, so take them as you will.

I don't understand why we cannot at least move toward the force structure of 1960. We had 500k men in Europe essentially in garrison duty. They rotated a lot, most were draftees, they were paid peanuts, but it had very important secondary benefits, as in the Germans and Italians liking us better. As in Americans having contact with foreign cultures. As in college grads and young professionals working with guys they would rarely have contact with otherwise.

And I really do foresee a time when we may have 50k men in each of ten Arab countries. And perhaps should be preparing for that now.

Didn't the British Empire do much the same thing in India with less troops than what we have in Iraq? And they faced many of the same problems (in different ways)we do. I just don't see that we need more troops. We are merely taking care of things that should have been dealt with earlier, but we tried to ignore to keep from making waves with the Shiites. But the sky is not falling.

Everyone who speculates about whether or not we have don't have enough troops in Iraq right now should listen to the actual troops and their leaders before making there judgement.

Prior to last week, there were no large troop requests from any of the commanders in the field. As Rumsfeld said during the initial phases and ever since then, if they needed more troops, they would get more troops.

Abizaid said he needed about 20-30k more troops (if I'm not mistaken), and they willl be supplied. But as heas been mentioned before, more troops is not necessarily the answer. The answer is more IRAQI troops and IP's.....

The size of today's Army is fine for the task at hand. The problem is one of Force Structure - and it is being worked right now. You fine civilian folks probably have no idea that 50% of the manpower of a US Army Corps of 125,000 is tied up in non-divisional units like artillery, combat engineers, air defense missile, signal and logistics units. What is happening is that many of these units are being converted to "substitute" MPs: a National Guard Artillery Battalion recently traded its towed 155's for armored HUMMVs and re-trained to pull security duty. Since TacAir has largely eclipsed the mission of Corps artillery [about 750 cannon we have learned to do without], this makes a lot of sense.

What the SecDef is doing is trading out large portions of redundant force structure [e.g. Air Defense Artillery - which just had its 50th anniversary of its last shoot-down of an enemy plane!] for units better suited to occupation duty. No doubt the vast numbers "post-war planning" experts found on Kerry's staff have noted that a similar shift was done in US forces after WWII [Google “us constabulary” for info] in Germany and have praised it as a sound move by Rummy..

The shifting of non-battlefield logistics functions to contractor personnel is also cutting down on the “useless mouths” [no slight intended, I used to be one of them] cluttering up the theater. The fielding of modern satellite communications cuts over 1200 signal troops out of the deployed force over the next couple of years [you have no idea of the number of techies we use to keep up the comm systems!]. The whole structure of forward deployed maintenance units is giving way to a “yank it, bag it, ship it stateside and hand ‘em a new one” system that brings a lot fewer bodies to the dusty battlefield [and fills up the empty transports coming back].

In addition, large numbers [some sources say close to 5,000, which is 2 light brigade-equivalents] of "contracted security personnel" are on the ground right now, cutting down the troops we have to station on static defense of base areas.

Great masses of troops in outdated, irrelevant formations are not what we need, especially as it would take years to raise and train them. Now, a few more Civil Affairs Brigades would be most welcome . . .

"Everyone who speculates about whether or not we have don't have enough troops in Iraq right now should listen to the actual troops and their leaders before making there judgement."

The military leaders are given military objectives are make judgements accordingly. No one says we are being beaten military.

Political judgements are not their expertise nor their responsibility. And a platoon on every streetcorner handing out candy and playing soccer with the kids would have no military purpose, but would have salutary political effects. To mention an extreme and impossible scenario.

Less extreme would be adequate forces to do force protection, search-and-destroy, *and* some community outreach. If our military thinks that occupation as winning hearts-and-minds is not in their job description, they would be the first I know of. Including the Romans. And including the US Marines.

D Smith gets it exactly right. Having more troops in Iraq would only provide the insurgents with (a) more provocations and (b) more targets.

The only viable plan is that which we are pursuing right now: maintain a force sufficient to stabilize the situation at a strategic level, while standing up a government and an Iraqi military/police force to hand off to at the earliest possible opportunity.

More troops and a heavier hand by the U.S. in Iraq would only make it more difficult for the Iraqi Governing Council to gain credibility, thus further delaying the handoff. Ironically, it would also increase the cost of maintaining the occupation force, as well as U.S. casualty numbers, thus making it more difficult, not less, for us to stay until the job is done.

"make it more difficult for the Iraqi Governing Council to gain credibility, thus further delaying the handoff."

Well, I guess it is a matter of defining objectives. In post-WII Europe, we did not speak of making West Germany strong enough to *probably* stay democratic and ward off a Soviet attack. We guaranteed it,with troops at the front.

If our objective is to create a stable democratic Iraq, and one strong enough to transform the region, and failure is absolutely not an option, then our committment must be commensurate.

So far, the IGC does not reassure me. Nor am I convinced that Iraq will remain a free-market democracy 5 years down the line without at least the current US presence.

bob mcmanus: the U.S. presence in Germany post WWII was intended to defend against possible Soviet aggression. If a similar threat were looming over Iraq, a commensurate military commitment from the U.S. might be warranted. But in fact the current U.S. presence in Iraq is more than enough to defend against any conceivable attack, and to protect the IGC against any insurgency, unless we act in such a heavy-handed fashion that we provoke a general uprising.

Whether or not you like the IGC, remember it is only an interim structure, set up as the path for returning sovereignty to Iraq. The goal is to have the Iraqis ratify a constitution and arrange for elections. All the while training larger and larger numbers of Iraqi security forces to assume more and more responsibility for maintaining law and order over there. In a relatively short period of time the responsibility of our presence can and should be reduced to that of a S.W.A.T. team maintained in-country only to head off revolution(s), allowing the new government to survive long enough to become "the norm". For that we won't need three divisions, either.

Of course I do not fear external invasion. 5 yrs down the line, assymetrical warfare, terrorism financed by Syria and Iran seem not only possible, but likely.

And my ambitions for Iraq reach quite higher than being like Jordan and Egypt, both of which are breeding grounds for terrorism.

I just wanted to forestall anyone ever saying: "We gave them freedom, gave Iraq the tools and the Iraqis blew it." Either we invade more countries than Iraq, or Iraq has to be guaranteed success.

I'm with Thorley. Where do you get this estimate, Jane? I defy you to find one crisis in Iraq that was due to the lack of troops.

To give one example Tacitus found offensive, that Muqtada Sadr was able, while we seeking him, to travel from Kufa to Najaf unmolested showed an unacceptable lack of coverage and control.

And in general, we do not control Iraq. Transport of arms and materials are not interdicted or even risky. Arms are usually discovered in caches, rarelyy in transit. Westerners stay in the Green Zone.

It's only this weekend that the call came out for more troops. The trouble is that most of the troops we have over there aren't trigger pullers. They are the very troops everyone thought we needed. Civil Affairs and MPs, Engineers building power plants and schools. Now we need grunts, rotorheads and track toads. I would submit that they're on their way.
We seem to be in the process of building two more Army Divisions, hopefully with a similar increase in the other Services. I belive we need three more Active duty Army, one more Marine Divisions.
It wouldn't take a whole long time to staff these outfits. After all the Armed Services are turning away voluteers that probably would have qualified for OCS in my war, thirty five years ago. Run the kids through recruit and basic schools for their MOS and then pull cadre out of existing units. It would take less than a year if Congress would spend the money.
A lot of the problems we're facing couldn't be planned for. Who could know in advance that so many Iraqi Military formations would just up and go home? Those are who, plus Iranians and Syrians, we are fighting now. If those units hadn't just dissolved before we fought them, we wouldn't be facing them now.

IIRC, Gulf War I had 250,000 US troops and about an equal number from allied countries, including about 100,000 from gulf nations. Our allies are certainly capable of devoting more troops. They too have reduced the size of their armed forces I assume, but you still could bring out much more than 25,000 troops.

The other point is that in an occupation, a troop from the US doesn't equal a troop from say an Arab country. I'm sure that 100,000 troops from countries like India, Pakistan, Turkey, etc. would have a much easier time of keeping order than US troops.

Manish, I'd have to see a source on that. Other than the Brits, who supply (as I recall it) about 40K troops, the remainder of NATO would be hard-pressed to supply more troops than they already have.

The Russians and Chinese could do more, but if you think the Russians were going to cut off the gravy train -- or the Chinese were going to help their one adversary of any military significance -- then I'd check your pizza for funny mushrooms.

Manish,

I recall that we had 500K for GW-I, but that included Air Force and Naval aviation/shipboard personnel as well as the Army and Marines on the ground.

Bob, the Marines might not be handing out candy and playing soccer at every streetcorner, but they sure are doing a heck of a lot of it.

All--keep in mind that the use of military might is simply politics by force. Once you identify the political objective, you can determine whether or not military force will help you achieve it. This is basic analysis first clearly enunciated by Clauswitz, but rarely followed by politicians. I happen to be old fashioned in the sense that military force should be used to support political objectives only if they relate to national security. Removing the terrorist support network fostered by Hussein was and is a valid political objective directly related to our national security, but we didn't develop the will to do so until after 9/11.

The size of the military is determined by various assumptions, and the one that used to drive force size was that we needed to be able to fight a war and a half. During the Reagan era, the military did a study under that assumption and came up with a force strucure. (Such studies are done periodically.) When Cheney was SecDef, he decreed that another study be done in light of the dissoulution of the Soviet threat, but without changing the war and a half assumption. Unsurprisingly to those of us in the military, this did not result in a change in the force size, although it did result in a slight change in the force structure. Cheney didn't like the result and told the military to do it again. Same result. Guess what, folks? If you want a different force size, you need to change the assumptions/missions. During the Clinton era, military missions actually increased while force size and funding decreased. Promotions became just as fast and were heading faster than during the Vietnam war, which is always a bad sign, but unlike Vietnam where the promotions were needed to replace the killed or wounded, the promotions were needed because so many people were getting out because the conditions were bad and getting worse.

Where am I going with this? Right here--once you determine what you want to be able to accomplish with the military as it relates to national security, then you can decide what the force structure and size ought to be. But it's that first step that is rarely publicized and/or debated, but it should be.

One of the earlier posters said we should have another two Army divisions and another Marine division in Iraq. Okay, but then what do we do if North Korea decides to invade South Korea? Or we need to evacuate an embassy? Or send troops to Haiti? Did you know that within one year of the end of GW-I that the Marines had been committed over 20 times? Marines were deploying away from home more often than the Blue & Gold crews for the boomers! This affects morale in negative ways. The steady and continued use of the Reserves is also degrading morale.

So, debate loud and often. What should we be able to do, militarily, that supports our political national security goals?

Jane:

To answer your question, it is inconceivable that we need a standing army that is sized to immediately occupy a country of much greater than 5 million people.

We can quickly destroy almost any country in the world (by nuclear or non-nuclear means) with little more cost to us than bad PR and some hurt feelings ("hurt feelings" includes increased terrorism and probably trade problems). Those we can't annihilate, we can't occupy - they have nukes. So I don't believe that any non-nuclear (and non-ICBM capable) country in the world presents the sort of threat that requires immediate invasion.

So we can pick the time of any invasion. Even if we pre-announce war by 18 months, it won’t matter – no country out there is close enough to us in military strength that they could re-arm fast enough to create real problems for us. (If the Iraqi war was to start today, rather than lo those many months ago, would the time-to-outcome really have been any different?). If we can pick the time of our invasion, and we believe that occupation is necessary, then we can time the invasion to allow for an orderly draft (with no college deferments). Our willingness to compel young men/women to serve is probably a pretty good proxy for how certain we are that it's necessary to occupy the other country. If we aren’t willing to draft, we aren’t sure enough that we need an actual occupation.

Plus, we have the added benefit of not paying for a military that's much larger than we normally need. Hello, peace dividend.

Comments are Closed.