Size Matters

The debate over how large our Army should be to defeat Saddam's regime continues to rage three years after Baghdad fell.

So the media seems to be taking the criticisms of the half dozen generals criticizing Rumsfeld as legitimate. One of the officially sanctioned reasons for being upset is that we invaded Iraq with too few troops. Since we crushed the Iraqi military in three weeks we clearly did not have too few troops to take Baghdad (which critics said could not be done and once we reached the city it would be Stalingrad on the Tigris, by the way).

So they argue that we had too few troops to occupy Iraq (I disagree), noting that General Shinseki called for several hundred thousand troops. Let's call it 300,000 even and use that as the figure. And we'll use it despite an Army study that concluded we'd need 300,000 for Afghanistan and 100,000 for Iraq occupation duties. Let's just assume the particular prediction of 300,000 was uniquely worthy of being listened to at the time.

I was going to make this a wide-ranging post about what we would do with those troops, how we'd deploy them, how we'd rotate them, and how we'd have sufficient reserves for other contingencies, but Jeff at Caerdroia conveniently asked these question. So I'll just focus on finding those 300,000 troops for Iraq.

Let's call our troops commitment at an average of 150,000 troops and call it 15 brigades. We'll ignore the two Marine regiments for the sake of rounding and just use these numbers. Since I'm not counting Army troops in Kuwait or the area, it may balance out.

The argument is that we have too few troops to pacify Iraq (the "density" issue) and too few in order to avoid stressing the Army out rotating forces through Iraq.

We have about 600,000 Army on duty, including, say, 100,000 reservists. The operational army is about 315,000. Say that 30,000 of the reservists are combat units, so call it 345,000 deployable troops on duty right now.

Others complain that the Guard shouldn't be overseas so much when it is needed at home, so one goal is to keep the Guard combat units out of the mix. Higher tax rates for that wonderful sense of "sacrifice" are fine but don't dare call up military reservists, I guess. But no matter, we'll assume our reserves are for some nebulous "really bad" war that may never happen or disaster relief, but nothing violent in between.

The bottom line is that 345,000 operationial troops are being used to keep 150,000 deployed in Iraq.

So let's look at our options. Just to maintain the present combat force in Iraq would require 30,000 more active duty Army troops to replace the Guard combat units currently mobilized. But the rotation and troop density issues are unresolved.

If 300,000 American troops are needed to pacify Iraq (and why Iraqis don't count with so many bean counters, I do not know, but I'll not count them in the spirit of the exercise), then we'd need to double the troops in Iraq. This doesn't imply 150,000 more troops, but 345,000 more just to keep the same rotation policy going. And we'd need more institutional army troops to support this increase in line strength. Let's be conservative and say 20% of this number in support personnel will be needed. So now we need 69,000 (call it 70,000) to support this increase of 345,000. Now we are up to 445,000 additional troops. And this ignores the 2% rule that says that 25 million Iraqis can only be pacified by 500,000 troops. Again, if we can't count Iraqis, this gets tough. But we'll just assume that our high quality troops make up for this rule and that 300,000 cited by General Shinseki in the field is enough to pacify Iraq. But we still haven't unstressed the force by providing a rotation base sufficient for at least two years off for each year deployed unlike our current one year on and one off (although with the new brigades we are getting to the 2:1 ratio in terms of combat brigades, critics count numbers and not deployable units so scratch this fact for this exercise).

Assuming 300,000 in the field need 600,000 to allow 2:1 deployment ratios to unstress the force, we are up to needing 900,000 operational troops alone--585,000 more troops than the 315,000 current operational force to support inadeqately the current force in Iraq. Add 20% as additional support troops and we need 117,000 (call it 120,000 to round) for a grand total required additional Army strength of 705,000 troops on top of the 500,000 active component troops we now have. This would address the use of the Guard, the density issue, and the rotation base.

Now, I'm assuming that nobody who says we used too few troops was considering flooding Iraq with troops in 2003 to reach 300,000 without a massive expansion because we couldn't have done even one rotation--talk about stressing the force!

And don't call up the Guard combat units--hurricanes, forest fires, and earthquakes can happen at any time, right?

So we'd have to expand the Army before the invasion. And we won't even address the dilution in troop quality that would be required to hit that 705,000 increase in troops. The mind boggles at this.

And if we want reserves for other contingencies and the Guard is off limits, let's add another cool 100,000 troops to have two divisions and support troops held back in case North Korea gets aggressive. Is this enough just in case? No, but I'm starting to feel cruel in this exercise.

So how long would it take to train and equip more than 805,000 troops? Remember, many critics bizarrely say our existing number of troops were ill-trained and equipped to invade and occupy Iraq. How well could we have trained and equipped these additional troops to the satisfaction of the war critics? Could we ever reach that standard?

I'd guess that we'd be ready to invade Iraq sometime in 2015--give or take a couple years. I'm sure that anti-war side would have been ready to debate that long.

Hey, maybe Saddam's boys would have been better negotiating partners?