Thirty Thousand for Afghanistan

Here's a little preview of the president's speech.

Based on this and other scattered bits I've heard, it looks like we'll reinforce our 68,000 troops and 42,000 allied troops with 30,000 more troops by mid-August. This seems faster than I thought given what I thought was a pace of one combat brigade per month. Four brigades plus supporting units would take a year. But it looks like we're talking no more than eight months.

But it looks like my earlier assumption that we'd have three Army brigades and one Marine brigade in the rumored 35,000 will only be three brigades total (2 Army and 1 Marine). So three combat brigades in the time frame anticipated is only slightly accelerated from what I thought was possible.

Add in 5 to10 thousand NATO troops expected and that rounds out the new surge. I'll not complain about the troops numbers (but as always, I worry about supplying all these troops in landlocked Afghanistan).

Good for the president for committing troops. Now he just has to commit himself to victory. As I've long argued, "exit strategies" are for losers who just want to define when we quit.