April 23, 2004
The Myths of Iraq
From StrategyPage, The Myths of Iraq (this is my condensed version)
The country is in flames! Actually, most of the country continues to rebuild and is at peace. The fighting is restricted to a few areas, but this is where the reporters and cameras go. Construction and commerce do not make for dramatic news stories and so are rarely covered...Americans are hated in Iraq! Not according to the polls that have been conducted, nor according to the experience of most Americans working in Iraq...
U.S. troops are fed up with the war and leaving in droves! New recruits, and people wanting to stay in are at record levels in the armed forces. This applies to reservists as well as active duty troops...
The Iraqi Governing Council is despised by most Iraqis! Any 25 Iraqi leaders would be despised by most of the population.... But Iraq has lots of constituencies, including over a hundred tribes and dozens of religious leaders with large followings...
The U.S. Army doesn't have enough troops to handle current combat operations! Although combat commanders feel that "too much ain't enough" when it comes to troops, they learn how to go with what they got. ... Sending more troops won’t help with the basic problem; gathering intelligence. That requires people who speak Arabic and have police experience. More American troops won’t solve that problem, more trained Iraqi police will.
The effort in Iraq detracts from the war on terror! Arab countries are where al Qaeda comes from, they were just using Afghanistan as a base. Invading Iraq forced al Qaeda to come and defend its Arabian heartland. The Iraq operations inflamed al Qaeda members in Saudi Arabia to start attacking Saudis and other Arabs. This cost al Qaeda a lot of support among Arabs, and would not have happened if Iraq were not invaded.Posted by John Weidner at April 23, 2004 08:07 PM | TrackBackThe war on terror is mainly a police and intelligence function. The troops that are needed most for counter-terrorism are special operations (Special Forces and commandoes.) Special operations forces were pulled out of Afghanistan for the Iraq campaign, but most of the action in Afghanistan is best handled by regular coalition troops, Afghans and the Pakistanis. After 2001, the war in Afghanistan was mainly political, not military. Special Forces troops specialize in a particular part of the world, and they are all over the planet chasing down terrorists. The war in Iraq gave the Special Forces an opportunity to work intensively, and without restraint, in an Arab country.
U.S. Army should be expanded! It takes several years to recruit new troops, train them and organize them into new units. By then, the army leadership feels they won’t be needed. But the army will still have to pay for them. This will mean less money for training and new weapons and equipment. To the army leadership, that strategy will get more soldiers killed in combat in the long run....
Iraqi army should not have been disbanded after Saddam fell! The Iraqi army has been, for over half a century, the chief source of tyranny and oppression in the country. Army commanders overthrew the government time after time, and used their soldiers to brutalize the population. By keeping all, or part, of the army intact, and armed, coalition risked a quick return of the warlord attitude that gave the Iraqi people dictators like Saddam (and several others who preceded him.)...
Iraqi security and army troops, and police cannot be relied on! About half the police and security troops have worked well with coalition troops when put under pressure (attacked by al Sadr militia or Sunni gangs). Another 40 percent simply fled and about ten percent went over to the rebels. This was because the screening and training process for Iraqi police and security troops is still a work in progress....
I think the US army should be expanded; I think we should be providing the army with more money for this purpose, so it can be done without having to rob Peter to pay Paul. I realize this will take a couple years.
Posted by: Phil Fraering at April 24, 2004 08:42 AMDepends on what we will need two years from now. Suppose that we are successful in creating a fairly stable Iraq, where most counter-insurgency and policing is done by Iraqi forces? We could probably just keep 30,000 or so troops there.
What other Iraq-sized commitments do we anticipate? None I can thinl of. Most of our GWOT operations are small-unit affairs.
And technology is constantly increasing the effectiveness of the troops we have, and in effect increasing the size of our units. A bigger force with more people will almost certainly cut budgets for technology.
We are trying, for instance, to get to a point where much more reconnaisance is done by robots and UAV's, and the information is instantly available to all our troops. Things like that have the same effect as having more men.
"What other Iraq-sized commitments do we anticipate?"
Well, that's a problem. I don't know what's going to happen. But the military was struggling with maintaining readiness even before the war broke out; as one example, although not manpower-related: we cancelled the M-8 tank to pay for the Bosnian operation. I think right now we could use more troops in Iraq, not necessarily to patrol Iraq, but to more effectively close the borders. (Or to threaten Syria with invasion if they were to continue as they have; this would reduce the number of borders we'd have to patrol). (As one example). I realize this would take time...
Also, crises in Syria, and I think another two brigades in Afghanistan (one of combat troops, and one of really well armed civil affairs troops, along with transportation gear).
I don't think we should cut the budgets for technology. I want to increace the overall funding for the DoD. I am really aggravated at the draft proponents who sit in the stupid little offices in the Senate and talk about how we need more manpower, while they've cut the Navy's budget to where they're conducting a RIF of 20,000 people during a shooting war.
We could find the volunteers if the people in the Senate (and to a lesser extent, the House) were willing to increace the DoD's overall budget. But (as I wrote at my 'blog) they'd rather call for a draft; since they don't have to worry about a draft actually being implemented, they get off the hook for funding it, and they've pretended to come up with a solution.
If they said, "We need to start building an extra couple brigades now and an extra couple brigades next year" there's a chance that Rumsfeld might actually change his position (which is that what Congress is willing to actually fund right now is what we need) and ask them for the money to do it with.
(At the moment, the way things are set up, if Rumsfeld asks for 30,000 more troops as an "temporary emergency measure," they can actually get a temporary appropriation to pay for it, but if it's a permanent increace in the force structure, he can't. So he's gone with the temporary increace. I suspect due to politics he can't ask for a permanent increace, because it would actually decreace the amount of money he has to work with. )
(Some people insist on blaming Rumsfeld for the fact that Congress isn't willing to pay more for a larger military; I disagree with them. He didn't elect Congress; we did.)
Well, enough ranting for now...
Posted by: Phil Fraering at April 24, 2004 02:12 PMAnd I forgot to mention: where I said "Crises in Syria," that was a brain fart... I meant "Crises in North Korea."
Oh, and a couple comments about the Iraqi police have occured to me: part of the reason those who left did so was because of extorsion of various sorts by the insurgents; having their families threatened, etc... I think part of the reason the Kurdish units have been more reliable is that their families are in a relatively more secure area.
(Well, that and the tents).
Posted by: Phil Fraering at April 24, 2004 02:16 PM
