ON FIGHTING A 16-DIVISION WAR WITH A 10-DIVISION FORCE

ON FIGHTING A 16-DIVISION WAR WITH A 10-DIVISION FORCE >by Keith W. Mines > >March 8, 2005 > >Keith W. Mines recently retired from the U.S. Army reserves >after 22 years of active, reserve, and National Guard >service, including military and civilian assignments in >Grenada, Honduras, El Salvador, Israel, Somalia, Haiti, >Hungary, Afghanistan, and Iraq. A former intelligence >analyst, he currently serves as a Political Officer with the >U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. Mr. Mines is a founding member of >the Council on Emerging National Security Affairs (CENSA). >These views are decidedly his own and do not reflect U.S. >government policy. > > > ON FIGHTING A 16-DIVISION WAR WITH A 10-DIVISION FORCE > > by Keith W. Mines > >The United States military has undergone two transformations >since the end of the Cold War. The first, from 1989 to >2000, was marked by a simple downsizing of the force, a >reduction from 18 to 10 Army divisions, from 2 million to >1.4 million personnel. There was some modernization of >equipment and limited transformation of doctrine and >tactics, but the end-state was essentially a smaller version >of the Cold War force. > >The second transition, from 2000 to the present, took this >smaller force and made it more effective by capitalizing on >new technologies and better management. > >While downsizing was an unavoidable response to the demise >of Cold Wars mega-threats, and transformation a natural >effort to improve and modernize a somewhat stodgy force, the >net result has been a near disaster. The current force is >simply too small to manage the totality of America's >threats, and holding the line on a permanent increase in the >future will create a risky window of vulnerability. In >short, we are managing a 16-division fight with a 10- >division force. Powell was right: we need to be prepared >to apply overwhelming force overwhelmingly, and to do so we >need a much larger ground force. > >IRAQ - A CATALOGUE OF LOSS >The catalogue of what we have lost for refusing to increase >the size of the force to respond to the post-9/11 world is >considerable. It has played out in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in >the larger war on terror, and is causing structural damage >to the force itself. > >I served for seven months in Iraq's Al Anbar Province and >experienced the net result of the minimalist force structure >first hand. The trivialization of the force-size debate >that took place during the recent campaign ought to now be >revisited in a serious manner. Whether field commander X >requested more troops at any given time is less the issue >than what a larger force might have produced in Iraq in >terms of stability and ultimate success. And the answer is >a good deal. > >First, a larger force could have stopped the looting that >occurred in the immediate aftermath of the allied advance. >The absence of a follow-on force to quickly replace the >dissolved host country police and security forces allowed a >security vacuum to evolve that tainted the occupation and >destroyed key infrastructure. It also created a window of >opportunity for the insurgents that never completely closed. > >Second, the border was left largely unchecked. In Al Anbar, >which is one-third of Iraq and has the key Saudi, Jordanian, >and Syrian borders, there was a single cavalry regiment (the >3d ACR, about 10,000 troops) to cover the entire province >from May to September 2004. This incredibly skilled unit >conducted a holding action in Al Anbar that should be >studied as an economy of force operation by war planners. >But no amount of skill can compensate for simple lack of >manpower and large swaths of the border were left unwatched. >The arrival of the 82d Airborne Division in the fall of 2004 >helped, but even a division was inadequate to cover the >province's vast terrain. To date the border has never been >adequately defended, and the rat lines of foreign fighters >never fully closed. > >A third area was the garrisoning of cities, something which >in Al Anbar was destined to be controversial because of the >contrarian nature of its Sunni population. While the Sunnis >would never have endured a lengthy occupation, there was a >window of opportunity in the immediate aftermath of the >invasion when they watched to see which way the wind was >blowing. A large occupation force which rapidly provided >security, rebuilt the infrastructure, provided jobs, and >trained host country security forces would have been endured >through the middle of 2004 and could have won over a large >enough swath of the society to squeeze out the operating >space of the insurgents. Absent such a force the coalition >ended up with a sitting occupation that garnered resentment. > >The training of host country security forces was a fourth >key area. The training of the new Iraqi army was handed off >to contractors who worked very effectively given their >limited mandate, but whose timeline stretched into 2006 >before the new force would begin to deploy. A police >training program was even slower to materialize so coalition >military units were forced to use internal assets to conduct >training programs. This effort worked well in some areas >but less well in others; it was in any event never something >the force was adequately staffed to carry out. In Al Anbar, >the absence of adequate forces to conduct police training >meant that by the summer of 2004, a full year into the >occupation, there was not a single police officer who had >more than 3 weeks of training. The Iraqi Civil Defense >Force was a further ad hoc effort to create security forces >that was hampered by the simple unavailability of dedicated >trainers. > >A fifth key area was securing lines of communication. The >LOCs in Iraq stretched to thousands of miles, and traffic on >them was constant -- they have always been vulnerable. >Engineering assets were unavailable to improve physical >security of lines of communication and special units were >unavailable to conduct operations against those attacking >them. Hundreds of coalition casualties accrue to the simple >inability to provide security to these LOCs. > >Sixth, and perhaps the most visible cost of the inadequate >force levels in Iraq, was POW management. The reports on >Abu Ghraib show a guard force that was overwhelmed and >exhausted. A larger force dedicated to prisoner of war duty >would not alone have fixed the problems of morale and >discipline there, but it would have gone a long way to >ensuring the proper conduct of these facilities. > >A seventh and final area was the apportionment of civil >affairs units. In Al Anbar there was a single company of >civil affairs specialists to cover the entire province when >I arrived in August of 2003. Like their companions in the >3d ACR they were incredible force economizers, but admitted >they were fully unable to conduct the range of governance >and infrastructure projects that were required to produce >stability. A full brigade of civil affairs specialists (the >304th) arrived during the fall of 2004 and was, for six >months, able to carry on an incredible amount of work (this >may, as an aside, have had something to do with the >stability the province experienced during that period). But >this unit was finishing its year-long deployment and >transitioned out in the spring, it was replaced again by a >much smaller unit. > >The minimalist force structure in Iraq has been wrong from >the start, and has produced a level of hostility and >confusion that may be too late to correct. Given two >possible models for successful transitions -- El Salvador >with its very small number of advisors and reliance on host >country forces designed to deflect nationalist rage, and >Germany, with an overwhelming force garrisoned in the >country for a decade -- in Iraq we chose neither. Instead >we have worked the middle ground, with just enough forces to >elicit a strong response from Iraqi nationalists but >inadequate forces to make the transition work. It has been >a veritable recipe for instability. > >AFGHANISTAN - POWER AND SECURITY VACUUMS >Our lack of adequate forces is causing lost opportunities >and security vacuums elsewhere. In Afghanistan we similarly >fought with the minimal number of forces possible. This was >adequate to win the war but inadequate to win the peace, its >later reversal was welcome and may have occurred in time to >correct the earlier error. In any event it was a concession >that nation-building of the kind that is required in the >post-9/11 world is manpower intensive and there are simply >few work-arounds. > >The key gaps in Afghanistan were with the training of host >country security forces and extending security into the >countryside to strengthen the central government and deny >sanctuary to resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda forces. The >training mission for the new Afghan army was initially given >to a Special Forces company, a force multiplier to be sure, >but not a force that was large enough to train a national >army of such ethnic and geographic diversity. The slow >roll-out of this force and unavailability of international >forces to cover the gap (which could have been leveraged by >a larger U.S. force), left the Karzai government without the >forces it needed to extend its control over the countryside, >something which is only now, two years later, slowly >beginning to take place. > >THE LARGER WAR ON TERROR >Elsewhere we are also losing opportunities, less dramatic >but no less important. We have all but stopped our >engagement with host country forces in the new democracies >of Central Europe and those we conduct with our new Central >Asian allies are done in a seriously reduced scale, there >are simply not enough U.S. forces to conduct exercises. >Similarly engagement with traditional allies has also ground >to a halt and we have attempted unsuccessfully to outsource >engagement with African militaries. This key piece of >alliance building and interoperability has been crucial to >our ability to work with and develop allies, and for decades >has been a major factor in keeping other countries in the >game and focused, while promoting the western model of >civil-military relations for emerging democracies. It is >also key to the next phase of the war on terror, much of >which will be fought not through large-scale regime changing >campaigns like Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the shadows, and >generally not by blue-eyed Farsi speaking Americans, but by >host country forces. Engagement with these forces is >crucial to this piece of the campaign. At our current pace >of operations, we will not have the ability to conduct >traditional exercises and engagement for several years. > >GUTTING THE FORCE >The minimalist force structure is also creating structural >problems in the force itself. The very nature of service in >the National Guard and Reserves is changing in such a way >that makes sustaining the force an impossibility. Guardsmen >and Reservists have lives, families, careers. The unwritten >understanding has always been that reservists would be >deployed for six months at a time in peacekeeping missions >such as the Balkans and Haiti, or up to a year in wars such >as Gulf I. Contractually, they know that they can be called >up for as long as two years and are prepared for that >possibility in extreme cases. But few reservists and even >fewer soldiers and officers leaving active duty are prepared >to be used as filler for an inadequate active duty force >over a twenty year career. And the best of our officers and >NCOs, the ones who have real jobs that provide them the >valuable experience they bring to the guard and reserves >when they are called up, will not be able to sustain >constant long-term call-ups. Having spent the past two >decades rebuilding the force from the hollow army of the >70's, we are hollowing it out again, and doing long-term >structural damage to the force in the process. > >A TASK-ORIENTED FORCE FOR THE POST-WESTPHALIAN AGE >What size force then, does America need? It has become >almost clich to say that the greatest threat the U.S. faces >is of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of >terrorists. It is perhaps more accurate, and more helpful, >to consider that the world is in the throes of the greatest >geopolitical revolution in three and a half centuries. As >Michael Ignatieff puts it "the ascendancy of the modern >state might be closing. Since the Peace of Westphalia in >1648, ending the Thirty Years War, international order has >depended on states possessing a monopoly of the legitimate >means of force within their own territory and having this >monopoly recognized by other states." He says that despite >the failure of the system to stop the orgy of interstate war >that nearly destroyed European civilization between 1914 and >1945 "such order as there is in international relations has >depended on the fact that states alone possessed the >capacity to make war, and that holders of state power could >reliably assume that other holders of state power would >desist from aggression if presented with a credible threat >of force. . . The success of deterrence has encouraged us >all to believe that states could be presumed to be rational >enough not to engage in surprise or preemptive use of >chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons on any occasion... >This era may now be ending." Ignatieff then goes on to >examine what the new era could do to liberal democracies and >their free institutions if it plays out that non-state >actors do acquire and use weapons of mass destruction, a >vital question. But the operational question is what kind >of force is required to successfully manage international >security in this new, revolutionary age. > >If the Cold War threat was of a single freight train which >the Free World needed to stop in its tracks and contain from >laying track elsewhere, the post-9/11 threat is of a >thousand Passats driving undetected around the world, some >with components for weapons of mass destruction and some >with terrorists. The security of the civilized world >depends on reducing the number of these Passats while >stopping new Passats from being built. It requires a wide >range of operations -- a combination of alliance building >and engagement, nation-building and training of host country >forces, direct action missions by special forces (generally >with a large conventional support structure), and most >importantly, direct confrontation and the threat of >occupation. The latter is one of the most compelling tools >the United States has to manage this unsettling world. It >can be a deterrent that dampens the enthusiasm for weapons >of mass destruction and support for terrorism, and can be >used as it has been in Iraq and Afghanistan to directly >change threatening regimes. But the deterrent is no better >than the force that would carry it out. And there can be >little doubt that the deterrent value of the U.S. force is >less today than it was in 2002, before the display of our >minimalist force structure was made in Iraq. > >All of these are manpower intensive tasks, and taken >together are just as daunting as the task of containing >Soviet communism. All can be supported by better technology >and transformation, but technology applied to assisting >human beings, not as a stand-alone component. Hence the >limits of transformation when applied to smaller force >levels. > >A SERIOUS DIALOGUE >Precisely how much larger the military needs to be I leave >to the experts. But one would hope it would be left to >force planners, not ideologues. The battle of Fallujah, but >for the presence of precision close-air support, was fought >not all that differently than the siege of Stalingrad or >Antwerp. In such fights there is no substitute for adequate >numbers. The current U.S. military fights better than any >force in history. It is owed the simple quantity to match >its quality.

ON FIGHTING A 16-DIVISION WAR WITH A 10-DIVISION FORCE
by Keith W. Mines

March 8, 2005

Keith W. Mines recently retired from the U.S. Army reserves
after 22 years of active, reserve, and National Guard
service, including military and civilian assignments in
Grenada, Honduras, El Salvador, Israel, Somalia, Haiti,
Hungary, Afghanistan, and Iraq. A former intelligence
analyst, he currently serves as a Political Officer with the
U.S. Embassy in Ottawa. Mr. Mines is a founding member of
the Council on Emerging National Security Affairs (CENSA).
These views are decidedly his own and do not reflect U.S.
government policy.

ON FIGHTING A 16-DIVISION WAR WITH A 10-DIVISION FORCE

by Keith W. Mines

The United States military has undergone two transformations
since the end of the Cold War. The first, from 1989 to
2000, was marked by a simple downsizing of the force, a
reduction from 18 to 10 Army divisions, from 2 million to
1.4 million personnel. There was some modernization of
equipment and limited transformation of doctrine and
tactics, but the end-state was essentially a smaller version
of the Cold War force.

The second transition, from 2000 to the present, took this
smaller force and made it more effective by capitalizing on
new technologies and better management.

While downsizing was an unavoidable response to the demise
of Cold Wars mega-threats, and transformation a natural
effort to improve and modernize a somewhat stodgy force, the
net result has been a near disaster. The current force is
simply too small to manage the totality of America's
threats, and holding the line on a permanent increase in the
future will create a risky window of vulnerability. In
short, we are managing a 16-division fight with a 10-
division force. Powell was right: we need to be prepared
to apply overwhelming force overwhelmingly, and to do so we
need a much larger ground force.

IRAQ - A CATALOGUE OF LOSS
The catalogue of what we have lost for refusing to increase
the size of the force to respond to the post-9/11 world is
considerable. It has played out in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in
the larger war on terror, and is causing structural damage
to the force itself.

I served for seven months in Iraq's Al Anbar Province and
experienced the net result of the minimalist force structure
first hand. The trivialization of the force-size debate
that took place during the recent campaign ought to now be
revisited in a serious manner. Whether field commander X
requested more troops at any given time is less the issue
than what a larger force might have produced in Iraq in
terms of stability and ultimate success. And the answer is
a good deal.

First, a larger force could have stopped the looting that
occurred in the immediate aftermath of the allied advance.
The absence of a follow-on force to quickly replace the
dissolved host country police and security forces allowed a
security vacuum to evolve that tainted the occupation and
destroyed key infrastructure. It also created a window of
opportunity for the insurgents that never completely closed.

Second, the border was left largely unchecked. In Al Anbar,
which is one-third of Iraq and has the key Saudi, Jordanian,
and Syrian borders, there was a single cavalry regiment (the
3d ACR, about 10,000 troops) to cover the entire province
from May to September 2004. This incredibly skilled unit
conducted a holding action in Al Anbar that should be
studied as an economy of force operation by war planners.
But no amount of skill can compensate for simple lack of
manpower and large swaths of the border were left unwatched.
The arrival of the 82d Airborne Division in the fall of 2004
helped, but even a division was inadequate to cover the
province's vast terrain. To date the border has never been
adequately defended, and the rat lines of foreign fighters
never fully closed.

A third area was the garrisoning of cities, something which
in Al Anbar was destined to be controversial because of the
contrarian nature of its Sunni population. While the Sunnis
would never have endured a lengthy occupation, there was a
window of opportunity in the immediate aftermath of the
invasion when they watched to see which way the wind was
blowing. A large occupation force which rapidly provided
security, rebuilt the infrastructure, provided jobs, and
trained host country security forces would have been endured
through the middle of 2004 and could have won over a large
enough swath of the society to squeeze out the operating
space of the insurgents. Absent such a force the coalition
ended up with a sitting occupation that garnered resentment.

The training of host country security forces was a fourth
key area. The training of the new Iraqi army was handed off
to contractors who worked very effectively given their
limited mandate, but whose timeline stretched into 2006
before the new force would begin to deploy. A police
training program was even slower to materialize so coalition
military units were forced to use internal assets to conduct
training programs. This effort worked well in some areas
but less well in others; it was in any event never something
the force was adequately staffed to carry out. In Al Anbar,
the absence of adequate forces to conduct police training
meant that by the summer of 2004, a full year into the
occupation, there was not a single police officer who had
more than 3 weeks of training. The Iraqi Civil Defense
Force was a further ad hoc effort to create security forces
that was hampered by the simple unavailability of dedicated
trainers.

A fifth key area was securing lines of communication. The
LOCs in Iraq stretched to thousands of miles, and traffic on
them was constant -- they have always been vulnerable.
Engineering assets were unavailable to improve physical
security of lines of communication and special units were
unavailable to conduct operations against those attacking
them. Hundreds of coalition casualties accrue to the simple
inability to provide security to these LOCs.

Sixth, and perhaps the most visible cost of the inadequate
force levels in Iraq, was POW management. The reports on
Abu Ghraib show a guard force that was overwhelmed and
exhausted. A larger force dedicated to prisoner of war duty
would not alone have fixed the problems of morale and
discipline there, but it would have gone a long way to
ensuring the proper conduct of these facilities.

A seventh and final area was the apportionment of civil
affairs units. In Al Anbar there was a single company of
civil affairs specialists to cover the entire province when
I arrived in August of 2003. Like their companions in the
3d ACR they were incredible force economizers, but admitted
they were fully unable to conduct the range of governance
and infrastructure projects that were required to produce
stability. A full brigade of civil affairs specialists (the
304th) arrived during the fall of 2004 and was, for six
months, able to carry on an incredible amount of work (this
may, as an aside, have had something to do with the
stability the province experienced during that period). But
this unit was finishing its year-long deployment and
transitioned out in the spring, it was replaced again by a
much smaller unit.

The minimalist force structure in Iraq has been wrong from
the start, and has produced a level of hostility and
confusion that may be too late to correct. Given two
possible models for successful transitions -- El Salvador
with its very small number of advisors and reliance on host
country forces designed to deflect nationalist rage, and
Germany, with an overwhelming force garrisoned in the
country for a decade -- in Iraq we chose neither. Instead
we have worked the middle ground, with just enough forces to
elicit a strong response from Iraqi nationalists but
inadequate forces to make the transition work. It has been
a veritable recipe for instability.

AFGHANISTAN - POWER AND SECURITY VACUUMS
Our lack of adequate forces is causing lost opportunities
and security vacuums elsewhere. In Afghanistan we similarly
fought with the minimal number of forces possible. This was
adequate to win the war but inadequate to win the peace, its
later reversal was welcome and may have occurred in time to
correct the earlier error. In any event it was a concession
that nation-building of the kind that is required in the
post-9/11 world is manpower intensive and there are simply
few work-arounds.

The key gaps in Afghanistan were with the training of host
country security forces and extending security into the
countryside to strengthen the central government and deny
sanctuary to resurgent Taliban and Al Qaeda forces. The
training mission for the new Afghan army was initially given
to a Special Forces company, a force multiplier to be sure,
but not a force that was large enough to train a national
army of such ethnic and geographic diversity. The slow
roll-out of this force and unavailability of international
forces to cover the gap (which could have been leveraged by
a larger U.S. force), left the Karzai government without the
forces it needed to extend its control over the countryside,
something which is only now, two years later, slowly
beginning to take place.

THE LARGER WAR ON TERROR
Elsewhere we are also losing opportunities, less dramatic
but no less important. We have all but stopped our
engagement with host country forces in the new democracies
of Central Europe and those we conduct with our new Central
Asian allies are done in a seriously reduced scale, there
are simply not enough U.S. forces to conduct exercises.
Similarly engagement with traditional allies has also ground
to a halt and we have attempted unsuccessfully to outsource
engagement with African militaries. This key piece of
alliance building and interoperability has been crucial to
our ability to work with and develop allies, and for decades
has been a major factor in keeping other countries in the
game and focused, while promoting the western model of
civil-military relations for emerging democracies. It is
also key to the next phase of the war on terror, much of
which will be fought not through large-scale regime changing
campaigns like Afghanistan and Iraq, but in the shadows, and
generally not by blue-eyed Farsi speaking Americans, but by
host country forces. Engagement with these forces is
crucial to this piece of the campaign. At our current pace
of operations, we will not have the ability to conduct
traditional exercises and engagement for several years.

GUTTING THE FORCE
The minimalist force structure is also creating structural
problems in the force itself. The very nature of service in
the National Guard and Reserves is changing in such a way
that makes sustaining the force an impossibility. Guardsmen
and Reservists have lives, families, careers. The unwritten
understanding has always been that reservists would be
deployed for six months at a time in peacekeeping missions
such as the Balkans and Haiti, or up to a year in wars such
as Gulf I. Contractually, they know that they can be called
up for as long as two years and are prepared for that
possibility in extreme cases. But few reservists and even
fewer soldiers and officers leaving active duty are prepared
to be used as filler for an inadequate active duty force
over a twenty year career. And the best of our officers and
NCOs, the ones who have real jobs that provide them the
valuable experience they bring to the guard and reserves
when they are called up, will not be able to sustain
constant long-term call-ups. Having spent the past two
decades rebuilding the force from the hollow army of the
70's, we are hollowing it out again, and doing long-term
structural damage to the force in the process.

A TASK-ORIENTED FORCE FOR THE POST-WESTPHALIAN AGE
What size force then, does America need? It has become
almost clich to say that the greatest threat the U.S. faces
is of weapons of mass destruction in the hands of
terrorists. It is perhaps more accurate, and more helpful,
to consider that the world is in the throes of the greatest
geopolitical revolution in three and a half centuries. As
Michael Ignatieff puts it "the ascendancy of the modern
state might be closing. Since the Peace of Westphalia in
1648, ending the Thirty Years War, international order has
depended on states possessing a monopoly of the legitimate
means of force within their own territory and having this
monopoly recognized by other states." He says that despite
the failure of the system to stop the orgy of interstate war
that nearly destroyed European civilization between 1914 and
1945 "such order as there is in international relations has
depended on the fact that states alone possessed the
capacity to make war, and that holders of state power could
reliably assume that other holders of state power would
desist from aggression if presented with a credible threat
of force. . . The success of deterrence has encouraged us
all to believe that states could be presumed to be rational
enough not to engage in surprise or preemptive use of
chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons on any occasion...
This era may now be ending." Ignatieff then goes on to
examine what the new era could do to liberal democracies and
their free institutions if it plays out that non-state
actors do acquire and use weapons of mass destruction, a
vital question. But the operational question is what kind
of force is required to successfully manage international
security in this new, revolutionary age.

If the Cold War threat was of a single freight train which
the Free World needed to stop in its tracks and contain from
laying track elsewhere, the post-9/11 threat is of a
thousand Passats driving undetected around the world, some
with components for weapons of mass destruction and some
with terrorists. The security of the civilized world
depends on reducing the number of these Passats while
stopping new Passats from being built. It requires a wide
range of operations -- a combination of alliance building
and engagement, nation-building and training of host country
forces, direct action missions by special forces (generally
with a large conventional support structure), and most
importantly, direct confrontation and the threat of
occupation. The latter is one of the most compelling tools
the United States has to manage this unsettling world. It
can be a deterrent that dampens the enthusiasm for weapons
of mass destruction and support for terrorism, and can be
used as it has been in Iraq and Afghanistan to directly
change threatening regimes. But the deterrent is no better
than the force that would carry it out. And there can be
little doubt that the deterrent value of the U.S. force is
less today than it was in 2002, before the display of our
minimalist force structure was made in Iraq.

All of these are manpower intensive tasks, and taken
together are just as daunting as the task of containing
Soviet communism. All can be supported by better technology
and transformation, but technology applied to assisting
human beings, not as a stand-alone component. Hence the
limits of transformation when applied to smaller force
levels.

A SERIOUS DIALOGUE
Precisely how much larger the military needs to be I leave
to the experts. But one would hope it would be left to
force planners, not ideologues. The battle of Fallujah, but
for the presence of precision close-air support, was fought
not all that differently than the siege of Stalingrad or
Antwerp. In such fights there is no substitute for adequate
numbers. The current U.S. military fights better than any
force in history. It is owed the simple quantity to match
its quality.

I replaced the >'s with < br_ >s it took about 30 seconds.

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