Condemn the president for failing to connect the dots before 9-11 and preemptively attack Afghanistan; and also condemn the president for connecting the dots to attack Iraq.
Condemn the President for failing to put enough troops into Afghanistan to win; and condemn the President for putting so many troops in Iraq that we alienate the locals and therefore cannot win.
Indeed, they can condemn the President for failing to put enought troops into Iraq after the fall of Baghdad to keep resistance from developing; while now condemning us for having so many troops in Iraq that we provoke resistance.
So let's add another. The anti-war side says we rely too much on firepower and don't use infantry to patrol; while condemning the US for failing to equip the Iraqis with modern tanks and other high tech weapons. Some say we don't trust the Iraqis enough to give them good weapons on par with our Abrams and Bradleys.
I bring this up because I've stated over and over again that we need to create a counter-insurgency focused Iraqi military to suppress the Baathists, Sunnis, and jihadis who fight us in Iraq. We can take care of external defense until the domestic front is quiet. At that point, the Iraqis can decide what they want their army and military in general to look like.
LTG Dempsey put it well in this press conference:
Q General, this is Bob Burns from AP. I wonder if you would look ahead into the future. And what is the plan for the end state in terms of the size of the Iraqi army, the size of the other elements of the military -- Iraqi military, the Iraqi police? And when do you foresee getting there?
GEN. DEMPSEY: We've got a force that we've agreed upon with the current sitting government. And of course, when the new government comes in, we'll have some opportunities there to discuss that with them, as well.
Right now we're building a 10-division army. It's a light infantry army with some enablers that will allow it to have some ability to project force around the country, and at end state, it will number approximately 160,000.
The police -- to talk about the MOI forces, we really have to break it down into the separate components. There are special police, and there's approximately 25,000 of those. They're almost at end state now, and those are commandos and public order battalions. And then there is the what you and I would describe as the station-house police. And based on a ratio of approximately one to 200 by population, that number comes out to about 135,000. And we're right at about 75,000 trained and equipped right now. We train about 3,500 every couple of months at a variety of institutions both inside Iraq and out. Then there's also border police. We need 27,000 border police; we're at 18,000. There's a 6,000-man highway patrol; we have 3,000.
I think the simplest way to answer your question about end state is that that force as I just described it is the agreed-upon force. We call it the objective COIN force, counterinsurgency force, because it has the necessary capabilities broadly to provide internal security. And the army will largely be built out in '06 and the police will be largely built out in the first half of '07.
Q Can I follow up, just a quick follow-up?
MR. WHITMAN: Sure.
Q General, Bob Burns again. On the Air Force. Are you planning to train and develop an Air Force that would include Iraqi attack air crews?
GEN. DEMPSEY: Well, I'm glad you brought that up because it allows me to mention that what we've got is we've got essentially three phases here in terms of Iraq's national security. We've got this objective counterinsurgency force, which is largely, as you might expect, a ground-centric force, and yet we also have a five-year plan inside of a 10-year vision. And we're working with our Iraqi counterparts to determine what force they will over time require to account for their external security as well.
And in doing so, we realize that they will -- as we discuss this with them, they're going to have to make some decisions, as any nation does, about what size ground force can they afford in order to modernize what they have and also to put money into other than ground forces. So, stated another way, they have 10 divisions out through '06, '07, but they may not end up with 10 divisions in the future as they decide how to account for the budget share from their economy and apply it to modernization and to the addition of things like aircraft.
Go it? We are creating a counter-insurgency force first because there are insurgents and terrorists to defeat. Conventional forces to fight organized conventional militaries must wait. The biggest mistake we made in the post-major combat phase was the year-long effort to jump right to a small regular army on the assumption that we could beat the Baathist dead enders largely on our own with the help of ad hoc Iraqi civil defense units.
As we realized that the insurgency (which I think is now downgraded to a terrorist campaign with good press agents) was the main threat, we retooled our program to train a security force able to go after an internal enemy. In time, the Iraqis can think about a military--including an air force--able to defend their national territory from external enemies, be we aren't there yet. Luckily for the Iraqis, we can carry the burden of defending their national territory until they can. We are carrying the burden of internal defense, too, as we build the COIN force.
So admit it. You know it is true. If we were creating a mini-me version of our military right now, before the internal enemy is defeated, our press would be deriding our efforts as much as they deride them now for focusing on a force to defeat internal enemies.
The only thing we can do to quiet these people is to win the war.
