Posted on 11/01/2006 9:54:44 PM PST by SF South Park Republican
Excellent interview with Frederick Kagan by Ray Suarez on the News Hour -
Kagan on the need for more troops in Iraq:
RAY SUAREZ: Well, how many more American troops would have to be on the ground in Iraq in order to leave behind a presence after an area's clear?
FREDERICK KAGAN: It's very hard for an outsider to estimate exactly how many troops are necessary, but my best guess would be somewhere around 50,000 additional American troops would probably be necessary to pull this off properly.
Kagan on the Price of Defeat in Iraq:
I think it's very unfortunate that we're in a situation that it's necessary to ask for these sorts of sacrifices. But I'm much more worried about the consequences that defeat will have on the Army.
I think people have not really thought through what the scenario will look like as we pull out in defeat, as the ethic cleansing gets going in earnest, as our soldiers withdraw, as we have pictures on CNN and Al-Jazeera of atrocities being committed with American troops in the background, of women and children rushing at the FOBs, trying to get protection and having to be turned away.
This is going to be an incredibly searing, emotionally devastating defeat if we allow ourselves to be driven out right now. And I'm much more worried about the consequences of that on the morale of the Army than I am on the consequences of asking for some slightly greater sacrifices in order to stabilize the situation.
(Excerpt) Read more at pbs.org ...
This was yet another hit-piece on Rumsfeld by Swuarez and PBS! (I watched it too) This chant of "more troops" is a battle within the Pentagon between cold warriors and Rumsfeld's adaptation to the whole new WOT scenario!!!
I am sorry, I like Rummy, but he is totally wrong on his views that less troops are better then more.
Leaving Iraq without victory will wreck the Army and Marine Corps worse than Vietnam did. 1971-1981 was a low point in the Army's history. I saw some of that first hand. If we do that again, the jihadis won't likely give us a decade to get our act together.
"I am sorry, I like Rummy, but he is totally wrong on his views that less troops are better then more."
would it be possible to run an experiment where more troops were indeed put in for certain areas to see if we could both clear and hold and the population would tolerate our presence while continuing in other areas with the tractics we have now to test which is more effective?
(i have to think, however, that our military leaders have already tested this, have derived their conclusions from the data and that is how they have arrived at their current levels, i.e. not ego driven.)
maybe too we cannot commit many more troops because we need them in reserve for a possible move against Iran and / or North Korea or elsewhere (if Musharraf were assasinated in Pakistan), which Rumsfeld maybe cannot really say openly
And THERE, I believe, YOU have it!!!
True. He may have been right that it was possible to take Saddam down with fewer troops, but more are needed to occupy and maintain order.
As an example, compare the ratio of troops to population in Kosovo and Bosnia vs Iraq. It's a huge difference. In Iraq we have 140K for 25M or 1 for every 180 or so Iraqis. In Kosovo and other places where things have gone better it's a much greater ratio. something like 1 for every 50-100 people. Even in Afghanistan it's a better ratio
Also, just look at Saddam. In order to maintain order he needed a 500k+ regular army, 500k+ reserves and another few hundred thousand police and security forces. And we thought that 140K us troops, a good pct of whom are noncombat support and logistics and engineering troops would be able to keep things calm in the face of Sunni/Shiite warfare, Iranian subversion, Syrian subversion, AQ subversion, etc... It just doesn't wash.
By now, it's probably too late to up to the few hundred thousand we needed initially, though. At this point I think the best option is to redeploy to the Kurdish areas, the Desert and the oil fields/ports/terminals in the South and in Kirkuk, focus on protecting the borders, killing AQ and ending Iranian and Syrian subversion and let the Sunnis and Shiites duke it out and settle it themselves. As long as they're killing each other they won't be killing us. A sunni-shiite version of the Iran-Iraq war would be just fine in my book.
Whatever it is, the current strategy has to change, and the Dems will just mess it up even more.
In Kosovo at KFOR's height, it was about a 1:40 troop to population level
In Iraq, we have about a 1:180 ratio
In post-WW2 Germany and Japan the ratios were even better than in Kosovo, closer to 1:20, than 1:40.
If we had had the 500,000+ troops we had during the Gulf War things would have been a lot different.
Of course, for that you have to blame Clinton and the Congress for dismantling the military and getting rid of 10+ divisions after the Cold War ended. But Bush shares some blame for not expanding it back up again. I just don't think an Army that has 10 divisions and Marine Corps as it currently is is enough to fight the current war. We need to ramp up to at least Cold War levels if not greater. In WW2 we had close to 100 divisions.
I don't think that can be done without a draft, but we need to expand the force. Rumsfeld's light infantry, smaller means better doctrine just isn't going to cut it.
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