The long war, if smartly executed, can prevent a big war. In spending the last few years embedded with Army, Navy and Marine units, I have learned that the smaller the American military footprint and the less notice it draws, the more effective is the operation. A few hundred Green Berets going after narcoterrorists or Islamic extremists, as I have seen in Colombia and the Philippines, can be effective force multipliers. Ten or twenty thousand troops, as in Afghanistan, can tread water. And 135,000, as in Iraq, constitute a mess.
Kaplan makes a couple good points but when he leads off with garbage like this, I can't bear to write more. How can he not see that these are different situations requiring different solutions? They did not start out at the same point and end up differently because we committed vastly different levels of forces to each!
As if drawing down to a few hundred troops in Afghanistan and Iraq would magically create more effective force multipliers and success.
We are not most successful in the Philippines and Colombia because we have only a few hundred troops any more than Iraq is a so-called mess because we have 135,000 troops there.
We can get by with a few hundred in the Philippines and Colombia because the insurgents and terrorists and narco gangs are much weaker relative to the government, and so a few hundred of our troops to help the locals are sufficient. We get along with ten to twenty thousand in Afghanistan because the enemy there is weaker than in Iraq but stronger than in the Philippines and Colombia. We need 135,000 in Iraq for now because the enemy is well-armed and financed while the new government is still relatively weak and lacking the experienced troops to fight the enemy.
Rest assured, at some point in the future we will get to the point where facts on the ground allow us to draw down to several hundred troops.
