More Men on the Ground

Kevin Drum points out that Andrew Sullivan's argument that Rumsfeld starved
Iraq of troops founders on the problem of arithmetic. (Hat tip:
Glenn
Reynolds)

Here's why I ask. Suppose Rumsfeld had agreed with guys like Eric Shinseki
and proposed an invasion with more troops. How many could he have called on? 
Several months ago I chatted with Phil Carter about this and then did a bit of
research on my own, and as near as I can tell the answer is this: if we used
every single active combat brigade of the Army and Marines � denuding our
forces everywhere in the world to do it � and then filled up every possible
National Guard and reserve brigade, we might scrape up about 500,000 troops.
...

Realistically, then, the maximum number of troops available for use in Iraq
is probably pretty close to the number we have now: 300,000 rotated annually,
for a presence of about 150,000 at any given time. The only way to appreciably
increase this is to raise the Army's end strength by several divisions, and
this is exactly what Kagan and Sullivan think Rumsfeld has been too stubborn
about opposing.

Jason Van Steenwyk at Iraq Now makes a very similar argument,
tackling the

Fred Kagan article which Andrew Sullivan quotes for support.

Just how many troops does Kagan think it would have taken to guard all
these dumps? Assuming, of course, that we could even have known where they
were all located. All the Iraqi tribes and clans amassed large ammunition
stocks of their own, even under Saddam Hussein. I'm talking about hundreds of
mortar shells, artillery shells, landmines, machine guns, and RPGs at a time,
which are buried in the back yards of sheikhs and those loyal to them all over
the country.

The clans, you see, were very nervous about a civil war, even down to the
interclan level within provinces and cities. Saddam Hussein managed to keep a
lid on clan v. clan warfare within the Sunni community. But the sheikhs had to
plan for after Saddam, too. And they did. It's foolish to suppose that simply
forming a ring around the ammunition dumps would have prevented an insurgency.
There is no problem getting explosives in Iraq, even without tapping the
official government stores.

The heart of Kagan's argument was that the Donald Rumsfeld failed to expand
the US ground forces immediately after taking office. With more troops
available, Kagan argued, it would have been possible to:

• Capture or kill thousands of Iraqi soldiers who were at that time still
  concentrated in combat units and had not yet melted back into the countryside
  with their weapons and their skills.


• Guard the scores of enormous ammunition dumps from which the insurgents
  have drawn the vast majority of their weapons, ammunition, and explosives.
  


• Secure critical oil and electrical infrastructure that the insurgents
  subsequently attacked, setting back the economic and political recovery of
  Iraq.


• Prevent the development of insurgent safe havens in Najaf and Falluja, or
  at least disrupt them at a much earlier stage of formation.


• Work to interdict the infiltration of foreign fighters across Iraq's
  borders.

Steenwyk attempts to rebut each of Kagan's arguments point by point, in part
based on his own experience in Iraq. The main thrust of his counterargument is
that more troops per se would not have made a difference if a purely defensive
posture were adopted. And a more effective offense was impossible at the time
because of the lack of targeting intelligence and the policy of ignoring Syrian,
Iranian and Saudi provocation.

There is no reason of course, why intelligence improvements and changes in
policy towards Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia cannot be combined with an increase
in available ground forces. Rumsfeld's efforts to reorganize divisions into a
larger number of smaller brigades and the reallocation of money from weapons
systems like submarines to the ground forces are tacit acknowledgement that the
ground forces need to be augmented. So it is not as if Rumsefeld was against
more available men in principle. OIF was planned from the outset with
more men than were available (the 4th ID did not attack through the Sunni
Triangle, thanks to the UN and Turkey) and the OIF rotations have used as many
men as were sustainably deployable. A larger ground force implies creating
distortions in the "whole spectrum force" capability or a bigger defense budget.
It's a political decision at heart and a money decision in particular as are
aspects of policy towards Syria, Iran and Saudi Arabia. It needs to be addressed
in the Congress as much as the DOD; and it needs to arise from a national
consensus, which the recently concluded Presidential election indicates is slim
at best.

Update

Ex-Marine and Iraq veteran

Chester says this about military manpower or the lack thereof. He dissects
the assertions of Stratfor's George Friedman that the US ground component is a
"broken force".

After Viet Nam, the nation's military leadership decided that in the future
they did not want to fight another unpopular war. They therefore restructured
the US Army such that nearly all of its combat support and combat service
support units were transferred to the Reserves. We've heard various figures
but for some specialties, close to 90% of the personnel needed for some key
support missions are reservists. The thinking on the part of the Army
leadership, specifically Chief of Staff General Creighton Abrams, was that
since any large scale deployment of Army combat forces would require combat
service support personnel to be activated, that politicians would be hesitant
to commit the Army to a large-scale conflict unless they were sure that it
would be supported be an electorate totally fine with watching its citizen
soldiers deploy and possibly die. This situation continues today. One reason
why such a large number of the Army personnel deployed in iraq are reservists
is because there simply are no active-duty troops who do their jobs. ...

Friedman's thesis is thus:

1. Rumsfeld is correct about the changing nature of war, but wrong about
   the tempo of the change.


2. The US needs drastically more troops in Iraq.

Friedman even mentions that the US' personnel policies "have not been
radically restructured to take into account either that the U.S. needs a
wartime force structure or that that force structure must be congruent with
the type and tempo of operations that will be undertaken." But he doesn't
quite go the whole nine yards and say what is left unsaid: The US cannot
commit more troops to Iraq because it has no more troops to commit. Troops
must be cycled and rotated on a manageable schedule. We have maxed that out.
Any further increase in troop rotations would leave us strategically
vulnerable in other theaters. 150,000 or so at a time is the best we can do.

 

One of the interesting things about Andrew Sullivan's criticism of operations
in Iraq is the nonrecognition of the fact that military means is only partially
a function of raw troop numbers. US ground forces are actually smaller than many
of the other major powers. Using  these
CSIS
estimates (West) and

CSIS Estimates Asia and
CSIS
Estimates Middle East as a basis, we have the following figures for world
ground forces manpower:

Nation	Manpower (thousands)
USA	472
China	1,600
North Korea	950
South Korea	560
India	1,100
Turkey	495
Russia	348
Iran	540
Former Iraq	350

What made US forces comparatively potent compared to these other armies was
many of the very things whose advantages have been negated or diluted in the
Iraqi campaign: namely, strategic mobility, supporting fires, the control of air
and space and targeting systems. The US was never going to win the "numbers
game" if it could not compensate for it in other ways with which it provided
itself for conventional battlefield. But the kinds of capabilities it needs to
restore its comparatively few numbers to a dominant position in Iraq are things
like HUMINT, language capabilities and robotic systems. Without these
capabilities, simply adding more troops can bring some relief, but never a
decisive access in strength.

To a large extent the development of US HUMINT and language capabilities
hinges on the development of Iraqi forces and the retention of experienced
soldiers into the US Armed Forces. The creation of a new Iraqi state always had
an implicit military dimension, a fact of which the insurgents have always been
cognizant but of which many US commentators have been dismissive. Many of the
'transformational' efforts reported in the press, such as training programs for
Iraqi security forces, the 'flattening' of US Army formations by breaking them
up into smaller independent units, the rotation of the same units back into
Iraq, the development of unmanned aerial and ground vehicles -- and the
elections -- especially the elections are part of the effort to increase the
military means. That's not to say that simply adding more troops will not
ipso facto help, but it is only one factor in the equation and the one
bounded by the harshest constraints.

Update 2

Parapundit reviews the presentation of Howard Hart, a former CIA clandestine
operative who has little patience for Porter Goss, but less for the agency for
which he once worked.

Howard Hart, former CIA clandestine service officer, said on C-SPAN 2 that
there are far far fewer clandestine service officers serving abroad than there
are faculty members at the University of Virginia. He also said there are
fewer than there are FBI agents serving at the FBI NYC office. He was speaking
at the Miller Center of Public Affairs at University of Virginia on Dec. 3,
2004 for a seminar entitled Futre of CIA Espionage Operations. Hart expects
many more countries to develop nuclear weapons in the future. Hart says it is
extremely difficult to recruit people into the clandestine service of the CIA.
It is hard to reach them to recruit them in the first place. The universities
with the highest concentrations of talent are hostile toward the CIA.

CIA's intake of junior officers every year is low. 1995: 25 junior trainee
case officers for the year. More died that year. Same happened during the
Carter Administration. He said Stansfield Turner, DCI under Carter, was a
disaster. He said it wasn't until the Iranian embassy seizure that Carter
realized the world is full of bad people and that the CIA needed the
capability to defend against those bad people.

More than half a century ago military analysts played the numbers game
between formations of dissimilar capabilities and types. During World War 2, a
battleship was rated the 'equivalent' of an Army Corps (2 divisions). Some more
recent equivalences used by military accountants would be ground forces
division=carrier battlegroup=airforce air wing, but these are more notional than
actual. No one would dream of using the one in place of the other. Part of the
problem with arguing, as Kagan and Sullivan do, that X number of troops should
have been deployed to Iraq instead of Y number is that sheer troop numbers are
not a good numaire or yardstick for what one really wants to measure,
which is capability. Howard Hart's recital of the sheer paucity of American
clandestine agents raises the question of what the real constraining factors of
battlefield dominance are. There is probably more than enough conventional
military firepower in Iraq to incinerate any conceivable target. Even during the
second battle for Fallujah, the calls on artillery and air did not stretch their
capabilities. But where these fires are to be directed or raids are to be
launched is a function of actionable intelligence. And that -- as Howard Hart
suggests -- may be constrained in some ways.