I have to comment on yet another article claiming we've had too few troops in Iraq since day one. And all wrong. Let's read:
In April 2003, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's three-division, invasion-lite force was too small to impose order across Iraq, or even in Baghdad, after Saddam Hussein's army and regime collapsed in three weeks.
Not even close to being on the mark. We did not invade with three divisions. We invaded with 3rd ID, I MEF, and a British division as the major headquarters. But we had about (from memory) 28 Army line battalions, 32 Marine line battalions, and 10 British line battalions. These 70 battalions represented the front-line strength equivalent of seven divisions. We replaced support units with air power and near-just-in-time logistics that eliminated the need for lots of separate artillery and logistics units. I think we had close to 180,000 troops in Iraq and Kuwait for the invasion, if I recall correctly. We could have put 100,000 troops in the Sunni neighborhoods and had 2% of the 5 million Sunnis in security strength. Since the Shias needed less policing we could have pumped tens of thousands more into the Sunni area to increase the numbers.
Really, any failure was the failure to clamp down hard by shooting looters and arresting military age men with short hair. And creating a proper counter-insurgency force from the start rather than focusing on making a small conventional force to serve as a cadre for a new army to protect Iraq from foreign invasion. I think we had some reason to do this, but in hindsight it was a mistake.
The article goes on in time:
Through the remainder of 2003, there were too few American troops to snuff out a belatedly recognized Sunni insurgency before it grew big enough to endure – for years.
One must ignore that beginning in the fall of 2003, we did grind down the Baathist insurgency through February 2004 with our troops and the poorly trained Iraqis we organized to police in a lower threat environment.
The problem was that Syria began to support Sunni jihadi insurgents in the west and Iran started to support Shia thugs in the south and center. This was not a numbers problem but a diplomacy problem. Far from fearing they were "next" on our hit parade, Damascus and Tehran felt secure enought to wage war against us.
In the following year, the article says we were short of troops:
From 2004 through 2005, there were never enough American troops in Iraq to implement a full-scale clear-and-hold strategy, sometimes dubbed “spreading ink spots,” the only proven way to defeat an entrenched insurgency.Well, in spring 2004, we did have too few troops because the thinly trained and led Iraqi troops we'd formed up to then weren't up to facing determined insurgent and terrorist attacks. Half dissolved in the enemy counter-attack.
But we did blunt the enemy offensives with the troops on hand and denied them a national uprising. The Shias stuck with us and reacted to Sunni terror by coming off the fence in large numbers to back our efforts. And we counter-attacked eventually, first against Sadr and then against Fallujah. In the big picture, the problem wasn't so much lack of troops but unGodly amounts of money and arms available to the enemy inside Iraq.
And the writer says we still lack troops:
Now, in 2006, the insurgency is compounded by Sunni-versus-Shiite mayhem that is killing thousands of Iraqis, mostly civilians, each month. Again, the 140,000 American troops now in Iraq are too few to accomplish the multiple tasks at hand: Provide security in conflict areas, defeat the insurgency with offensive operations and dampen Iraq's murderous civil strife.
On this last point in time, why is the author only counting American troops and debating whether 140,000 are enough? Why aren't we discussing the more than 650,000 total troops available for the counter-insurgency? Are American troops the only ones capable of putting down an insurgency? This will come as a shock to nations around the world that fight and suppress insurgencies all the time.
And when the key to ending the insurgency is the political and economic side, why the myopia of whether 20,000 more American troops will win the war? They won't.
I am not persuaded that we did not have enough troops to invade and pacify Iraq. The fact that we have blunted Shia and Sunni and foreign jihadi insurgencies should be pretty clear proof of that.
The higher civilian deaths the last half year are not from a surging insurgency. This is a problem of Shias taking revenge on Sunnis and Sunnis killing Shias at higher levels. It is a completely different problem we have faced since the Samarra mosque bombing and unless the Iraqis can solve this problem there is no way we can stop 20 million people from killing each other at a price we could pay. This concept sounds a lot like the mid-1990s theory of peace enforcement (Not the Chapter VII kind) where violence is the enemy and not any particular side in a war. Do we really want to say our military is for snuffing out all violence? Now that would be a quagmire.
In large measure, the increase in civilian casualties stems from Iraqi Shias striking at Sunnis in revenge atrocities. It doesn't mean that the Sunnis are stronger. If someone keeps hitting you once per day, if you start hitting back twice each day after taking it on the chin for months, would it be fair to say that violence has tripled? Clearly not.
All our military can do is buy time by killing the enemy and atomizing them while we train a government and security apparatus that can grind down the enemy that won't give up while gaining defections from the less committed insurgents. We are doing this. Slowly. So have patience.
