I missed this article the first time around but Real Clear Politics linked to it recently. I'm not going to comment on the subject of troops withdrawal from Iraq. What I want to note is this paragraph:
A top U.S. commander in Iraq, Lt. Gen. John R. Vines, told reporters last month that four or five of 17 battalions, roughly one-quarter of U.S. forces in Iraq, could be pulled out if security conditions improved and if Iraqi national elections scheduled for December went smoothly.
This is so clearly wrong that it amazes me that it made it into print in a major newspaper. How do I know it is wrong? Well, I know we have about 17 US brigades as the base force in Iraq--not 17 battalions. A battalion is about a third of a brigade--less than a third, really, when you count supporting units attached to a brigade.
If the reporter even knew the basic fact that a brigade is about 5,000 troops and a battalion about 800, it would be possible to know that we couldn't possibly have only 17 battalions in Iraq when we have 138,000 troops there as the base force. The reporter would know that we simply could not have that many support troops sitting in bases supporting only 17 combat battalions in the field.
Even if Vines mis-spoke and used the term "battalion," anybody worth their salt would know that was a simple word error and report on "brigades."
But the reporter didn't know anything about military structure and the editor didn't know enough to question this.
So how do we expect them to report issues of tactics, operations, and strategy when they can't get the basics right and don't even know enough to recognize a clear mistake?
