More Men on the Ground 3

A reader provides four links, all related to the subject of troop strengths
and occupation.

1. RAND's
   Lessons Learned;


2. Steven
   Budiansky in the Washington Post;


3. Colonel
   Daniel Smith's Iraq: Descending into the Quagmire; and


4. James Quinlivan's Force Requirements in Stability Operations
   in Parameters

Everything except Budiansky and Smith's articles are a few years old. The
ratio between occupying troops to population described in these publications can
be calculated as follows (thanks to the reader, who does not wish to be
identified, for the summary table)

Country	Ratio per thousands
Germany	100 rapidly descending to 25
Kosovo	20
Bosnia	18.6
Japan	5
Somalia	5
Haiti	3.5
Afghanistan	0.2
Iraq countrywide	6
Baghdad only	11
Malaya (Emergency)	20
Northern Ireland (on occasion)	20
Horn of Africa	?
Central Asia	?

The reader notes the Parameters article sets out the following
historical ratios of adequacy for troops to population ratios.

Scenario	Ratio
Policing	2.2
Some resistance	4 to 10
Serious counterinsurgency	20

Iraq veteran and Marine Chester
has more thoughts on the concept of a "Colonial Corps" -- a force
whose primary mission is stabilization and reconstruction. He notes that the
Robert Kaplan argued in Indian
Country that smaller, but more focused American contingents actually do
better than massive deployments of large formations. Kaplan said:

In months of travels with the American military, I have learned that the
smaller the American footprint and the less notice it draws from the
international media, the more effective is the operation. One good
soldier-diplomat in a place like Mongolia can accomplish miracles. A few
hundred Green Berets in Colombia and the Philippines can be adequate force
multipliers. Ten thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can tread water. And
130,000, as in Iraq, constitutes a mess that nobody wants to
repeat--regardless of one's position on the war.

Of course this is in some sense a comparison between apples and oranges. A
perusal of the provided links shows how different one occupation is from
another. It was surprising to find from the RAND study that "The United
States and its allies have put 25 times more money and 50 times more troops per
capita into postconflict Kosovo than into postconflict Afghanistan" or that
by today's standards Harry Truman and George Marshall would be regarded as
abject failures.

George Marshall was seriously concerned about the potential economic
collapse of Germany in winter 1947, a concern that led to the passage of the
Marshall Plan in 1948, three years after the end of the war. Japan had one of
the slowest rates of recovery among the case studies. Per capita incomes in
Bosnia have recovered much more rapidly; those in Kosovo exceeded preconflict
levels within 24 months of the end of the conflict. In Japan, this did not
happen until 1956, over a decade after the end of the war.

Against Kaplan's observation there is the undeniable fact that there is an
historical inverse relationship between the number of occupation troops deployed
and American casualties. But just as in the case of Kaplan's observations, this
too may be apples and oranges.  There is at least some question about
comparing a society like Japan's, occupied in the age of mass armies by an
America willing to resort to an Atom Bomb, with the politically correct warfare
that is waged by professional armies today. Chester rightly draws our attention
to a formation which he suggests has certain characteristics of a proto-colonial corps, the Combined
Joint Task Force - Horn of Africa.

"Combined" means it has forces from more than just the US, and
"joint" means it employs members of all US forces. This task force
has in the past had responsibility for military training and operations,
sometimes diplomacy, humanitarian assistance, and intelligence collection in
the countries of Djibouti, Ethiopia, Eritrea, Yemen, Kenya, and Tanzania,
though not all of these are currently listed on its website. ...

It must be noted that these ad hoc colonial operations efforts incorporate
the concept of "jointness" in a much greater way than has been the
case in the past. Though jointness is only mandated by law amongst the
military services, it has now expanded to include the incorporation of
subject-matter experts from a variety of government agencies -- the State
Dept, the Treasury Dept, the FBI, the CIA, etc. � within military units.
Jointness concepts continue to expand � the consultation of foreign military
advisors by Central Command has recently been in the news. In this sense,
jointness means using existing agencies, personnel, and capabilities in
cross-functional and interdisciplinary ways to tackle complex problems (like
reconstruction, or colonial operations).

Neither Chester nor the unattributed Belmont Club reader touch on what the Defense
Science Board study called strategic communication: something an earlier
generation would have called political warfare or the propaganda war.

Strategic communication -- which encompasses public affairs, public
diplomacy, international broadcasting, information operations, and special
activities -- is vital to America�s national security and foreign policy.
Over the past few decades, the strategic communication environment and
requirements have changed considerably as a result of many influences. Some of
the most important of these influences are a rise in anti-American attitudes
around the world; the use of terrorism as a framework for national security
issues; and the volatility of Islamic internal and external struggles over
values, identity, and change. ... America needs a revolution in strategic
communication rooted in strong leadership from the top and supported by an
orchestrated blend of public and private sector components.

But then an earlier generation would have been ignorant of bloggers like
Chester and the "joint" response of Internet outlets to propaganda
attacks mounted by the enemy through traditional media channels.

Update

Major Mike writes in Comments:

All-in-all I think the comparisons of the various occupation force levels,
while mathematically interesting, take little of the operational differences
of each of the circumstances into account. I won�t belabor the point, but
insurgency strength and organization, insurgency weaponeering and available
re-supply, leadership capability, popular support, terrain, insurgent tactics,
and occupier objectives will all drive the force levels and organization.
Generally, the better the weaponeering of the enemy, the more difficult the
terrain, the more popular support for the insurgency, the better the tactics
of the insurgents; the more forces it will take for the liberators/occupiers
to be successful. I think the variables are too great to put a marker down as
the �correct� number or ratio.



Casualties will not correspondingly be lowered simply because occupying forces
add troop strength. Occupying force casualties will certainly rise if these
forces are unable to adapt their force structures and tactics to EFFECTIVELY
combat the insurgent group(s) or population. Adding more troops on the ground
without developing winning strategies and tactics only increases the target
density for the enemy. Highly effective and adaptive tactics could easily have
the effect of lowering the overall troop requirements and casualties.
Conversely, poor tactics and strategies have always resulted in higher unit
casualties, and bear a greater role in overall casualty rates than force
strengths. This is true in all operational environments.



Additionally, I cringe a bit with talk of re-organization to �colonial� style
forces, or a variation thereof. The post World War I explosion of
nationalistic movements throughout the world can be attributed directly to the
occupation of nations by colonial forces. Fighting an insurgent nationalistic
force would be logarithmically more costly than fighting a disgruntled band of
malcontents and outsiders. Our current reliance on our conventional forces
necessitates development of efficient and effective tactics to be successful
in Iraq. In our current situation, our force limitations are a driving factor
for immediate tactical innovation and strategic re-thinking, both key elements
in finding a quick, but decisive tactical/strategic combination for exiting
Iraq. Developing specific occupation forces would lessen this sense of
urgency, re-invigorate grass roots nationalistic movements world wide, and
plant the vision of the US as a global conqueror.



The reasons for post-invasion occupation success are as varied as the
situations in which they have occurred. Docile and defeated populations, free
from outside agitation, have been relatively easy to pacify. Divided nations
where the unpopular will of an outside nation is being imposed, have been
costly and deadly to occupy. I doubt this will change in the near future,
regardless of the amount of strategic analysis that occurs. I submit that our
current force structures, with our ability and experience in task organizing,
our weaponerring, and our advanced military educational programs, can provide
workable solutions long into the future without major force or structural
changes. In the end, it will be our mastery of the operational art that will
be the difference between success and failure, not mathmatics.

Part of the problem of wanting something is that you might get it. The desire
to have "more boots on the ground", to 'bring freedom to the Middle East' sets
in train a number of activities which may not turn out exactly as one expected.
In the comments section of the torture posts I pointed out that while the United
States had historically ceded unilateral military advantages to the enemy in
order to stay within its self-appointed moral bounds it just as often developed
compensating capabilities. Thus, it avoided using poison gas on Iwo Jima and
Okinawa because that was proscribed but it developed "blowtorch and corkscrew"
tactics which, by combination of demolition and flamethrower, buried the
Japanese defenders alive when they did not roast them: that was permitted under
Geneva. During the Cold War there was a clamor to renounce a first strike on the
Soviet Union so America built an arsensal so large that it could survive any
Soviet pre-emptive strike and still incinerate the enemy. Current criticisms of
the DOD's shortcomings in planning for the occupation of Iraq may in time
generate a Colonial Corps that Major Mike warns against.

The

Defense Science Board study pointed out that agitation for this kind of
interventionary capacity pre-dated OIF. The clamor for the organizational
wherewithal to engage in nation-building, dealing with failed states,
humanitarian intervention, etc. is ironically something that the Left has long
wanted and which Conservatives may wind up providing. Perhaps one argument for
the existence of God is the occasional discovery that a joke has been played on
humanity. But that remark is not entirely facetious.
Sam
Huntington, author of the "Clash of Civilizations", recently gave an
interview in Japan Today (hurry before the link expires) in which he argues that
God, in some sense, is the greatest ideological force today.

In an interview with Kyodo News on postelection America and the world,
Huntington, a professor at Harvard University, said the United States is now
going through a period of religious "Great Awakening." ... We have gone
through several religious revivals. They are called "Great Awakenings." We had
one before the (American) revolution, which many historians say created the
basis for the revolution, another in the early 19th century, which generated
all sorts of reforms, including the abolitionist movement to abolish slavery.
I think we are going through such a period of Great Awakening now. The
movement is in a way meeting a great concern of the American people about the
decline of morality and traditional values.

 The first Great Awakening in the 1730s and 1740s coincided with the
intensification of the wars between the British and the French, which were
fought in part here in North America. It certainly played a major role in
promoting the development of an American sense of nationality. ... The current
(Great Awakening), with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the emergence of
the U.S. as the only superpower, it seems to me, has reinforced the sense of
confidence in ability to go out and change the world in ways in which we think
it should be changed. That is very notable in the policies of the Bush
administration.