Yeah, the SAME Conventional War dogma followed in Vietnam. The "More Boots on the Ground" crowd sent 500,000 to Vietnam. How did that work out for us?
Counter Insurgency ops are complete different then Conventional Military operations. They are as much political as military. It would be wise if the Always Whining actually tried learning the differences. What THEY are advocating the US do is repeat the same errors made by EVERY force confronted by an Asymmetrical threat since out Revolution.
Maybe that is the problem. The Neo Isolationists keep manufactured excuse rather then admit they have NO clue how to win a Counter Insurgency and have been wrong about Iraq since the start. Rather then admit THEIR errors they keep trying to straddle the fence on Iraq being for the mission but against how it is being run.
Sorry, but we see thur the smoke and mirrors where. All this "overwhelming force" in a Counter Insurgency accomplishes is to alienate the local allies and results in the local forces being pushed to the margins. It also massive increases the number of targets and thus significantly increasing the casualties suffered by the US Forces.
"boots on the ground" is another one of those slogans screamed by people who actually know nothing about the topic but just cannot bear to bring themselves to actually support the effort due to their political distaste for President Bush.
It worked fine as we never lost one single battle...in fact, it worked until Nixon's "Vietnamization" of the war, when we turned the fighting roles over to inexperienced and incompetent RVN forces who proved immediately they were incapable of stopping the NVA. Had we followed "more boots on the ground" and not lost the will because of the ongoing demonstrations we'd have the capitol of a united Vietnam in "Saigon" instead of Hanoi and there would be no such place called "Ho Chi Mihn City"!
'Boots on the ground" often translates into" butts in chairs" when one is talking about something as bureaucratic as the Army. Of the 500,000 in Vietnam, around 50,000 were engaged directly with the enemy.