Do we need more soldiers in Iraq, and do we need a larger military?

As for Iraq, I’d say the answer is generally no, but only because the number of Iraqi soldiers and police is steadily increasing. Ultimately, Iraqis will have to choose their future, and really all the US can do is to keep it from being stolen by armed force.

But I do think we need a larger military. Part of the problem is the political decision made post-Vietnam to structure the Armed Forces to require reserves to be called up to fight any significant foe. I think we’re currently seeing the shortcoming of that restructuring. So I think we need to reverse that, and replicate a lot of the non-combat capability that is currently in the reserves in the standing army while keeping the reserves; a lot of the civil affairs, military police, and engineer type units. I think we have plenty of traditional combat power as is – in large measure because our advanced technology weapons provide a huge force multiplier in open combat. But that technology of destruction doesn’t do us much good in the non-combat or low intensity combat areas.

In addition to the increase above, we need an additional army division that would be a brand spanking new type: the urban division, specifically trained and equipped for combat and peace keeping operations in cities. To do it right, we need to start small and try out different tactics and equipment that are better suited to urban combat before we create the whole division. I find it interesting that almost all the elite, or at least non-traditional military units are essentially light infantry: special forces, the 10th mountain division, the 82nd airborne division, and the 101st air assault division. The urban division would be mostly light infantry, although it would need tanks, IFVs and artillery.

Tags: Iraq

The insurgents (or whatever you want to call them) have clearly stepped up their attacks in Iraq. So the question becomes, why now. They are confronted with the choice of either attacking, or laying low. If they make attacks, they expose themselves to counter attack and exposure, while if they lay low, they can go unnoticed but they may lose recruits and their own fighters. Now such thoughts may not enter into their calculations, they may be attacking more simply because the have more men, more material, and more hope. Or it could be they have decided that it is better to attack now rather than later.

I know the tactics have been dubbed asymmetrical warfare or 4th generation warfare, but there is nothing new under the sun and I’d call it classic weak versus strong or 0th generation warfare. The goal is to harass the enemy, kill him when and where possible, and hope he goes away because it isn’t worth his while anymore. Morale, or even better, the will to continue, is what is being fought over in this type of warfare. And in Iraq, we need to realize that it isn’t just the morale or will of the US that matters.

The United States will leave Iraq one day; the only question isn’t so much when but under what conditions. Our desire is to leave behind a functioning government complete with armed forces that will be able to defeat the insurgents. It would be nice if the insurgents were wiped out before we left, but not necessary. In that sense, US troops are fighting a holding action. The insurgents would like us to leave before that goal is achieved, and then to defeat the government we leave behind. So the insurgents have to do two things to win – demoralize the US, and demoralize a majority of the Iraqi’s themselves. Thus they are attacking not just US soldiers, but foreign groups (such as the UN and NGOs) that will help the fledgling Iraqi government, and the Iraqi forces (mostly police) we are constituting for the Iraqi government.

At this point, there are now more Iraqi’s under arms fighting with us than there are American troops in Iraq, and the number of Iraqi’s under arms grows daily. Soon there will be more Iraqi’s under arms for the government than there ever were US soldiers in Iraq. So the attacks against Iraqi police are important to the insurgents to keep that day from coming – not from killing that many police, but from killing enough that too few ordinary Iraqi’s become police, or soldiers, or guards. So the insurgents have to attack now before the Iraqi police and military overwhelm them.

Tags: Iraq

I know President Bush is a big fan of the Bible, as I am, and he quotes from the book of Isaiah quite frequently. So I’d like to say to him, and the nation of as a whole, that we shouldn’t commit the sin of Onan (Genesis 38) and pull out too soon, before the job is done. We have a responsibility to Iraq and to ourselves.

Tags: Iraq

“Failure to plan is planning to fail” goes the aphorism, and I’m hearing a lot that the Bush administration doesn’t have a plan for Iraq. Well. I can remember sitting in on a review for a proposal where the manager told us, “we had a plan for [another program – name excised to protect the guilty], we executed the plan, the plan was [a four letter word for excrement – name excised to protect my sensibilities]. This time, we want to make sure we have a good plan, and that’s why we want you guys to review it for us.”

The administration had a plan, and still has a plan. The basic structure is so obvious that it apparently hides in plain sight for some people. The plan is to build a new Iraq – a new government, new police, and new armed forces. Because once we have those, we can pull out, although I think we should keep a major base so that we can continue to exert influence in the region. Realistically, the government only has to be reasonably representative, the police reasonably non-repressive, and the armed forces reasonably effective. Everything else is how to get there. All the physical rebuilding is just the means to the end of the political rebuilding.

There was a lot of contingency planning for various disasters — oil fields set on fire, mass migrations, mass starvation and the like — that didn’t occur. Whether mass looting was planned on, I don’t know. It could be that it wasn’t; it could be that it was hard to shift from war fighting to order keeping and the looting occured before the switch was complete; it could be that the plan for the looting was to simply let it happen. There is nothing that says the plan has to be the right one in hindsight to be a plan. There are reports that a lot of military supply dumps full of weapons have been left unguarded, and if true, that seems to be a huge failure and somehow you think it should have been and should be now in “the plan”. There were earlier reports that the nuclear site at Tuwaitha was left unguarded when in fact wasn’t. What I know of the military tells me that if anything, we had plans for everything. They might not have been any good, but we had them.

I think we can have a good discussion as to whether our efforts in Iraq are adequate, what can we be doing better, how has planning changed with time as the facts on the ground have modified it, has the State Department / Department of Defense rivalry been harmful or helpful, were the assumptions of the planning too optimistic, and whether the big plan is the right one or not, etc.; but the position that somehow the Bush administration didn’t have any plans at all for post-war Iraq is simply wrong, and in the words of Donald Rumsfeld, unhelpful.

Tags: Iraq