When General Shinseki said before the Iraq War that it would take several hundred thousand troops to pacify Iraq, he was sort of right. But not vindicated by the outcome of the war. Worse, conventional wisdom has twisted his comments.
When in 2003 Congress asked Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki how many troops it would take to stabilize Iraq, he gave his personal, professional opinion of 500,000. It was not what the administration wanted to hear, and the deputy secretary of defense repudiated his testimony. In time, however, his judgment was vindicated.
One, I'm fully on board criticisms that Rumsfeld was wrong to minimize the need for American Army troops in general. That trend predated his tenure and planning for the war. And I certainly argued against it, such as in this paper years before the war.
Two, if you click through the link in that quote, Shinseki actually said we'd need "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers" to provide security.
Three, it is easy to twist that statement to a specific because I'm sure Shinseki was simply stating the general rule that you need security forces totaling 2% of the target population to pacify them. Iraq had a population of 25 million. Hence 500,000 if you assume the entire population is the target. Shinseki may have assumed a smaller population to control. Or he simply wanted to show the scale without specifics.
Four, assuming a fully resisting population, as the 500K number assumes, was wrong. The Kurds at 5 million welcomed the invasion. The Shias welcomed the overthrow of Saddam and only a minority were a pro-Iran threat. Only the 5 million Sunni Arabs were the prime source of resistance.
During the war I consistently noted how many troops were needed based on my estimates of what was required to pacify or protect those different broad groups.
Five, General Shinseki's comment was used to argue we needed 500,000 American troops. Absolutely wrong. Whatever the number needed actually was, we needed that total number of American, Coalition, and Iraqi forces to win. Analysts arguing we had too few troops to win consistently refused to see all the troops fighting the insurgents.
And six, we did win. Despite the fact that America never had anywhere close to 500,000 troops in Iraq--even if you count contractors who replaced American troops (funny enough I forgot I knew that)--before we left, as Obama and Biden proclaimed victory. Look at the chart above. Where did American troop strength get to even 200,000 in Iraq, let alone several hundred thousand or even 500,000?
So the analysts who said we needed 500,000 American troops were completely wrong. And they still make that mistake all this time later.
So kudos to Shinseki for publicly giving his honest view when his political superiors found it inconvenient. We do need that desperately. But don't twist Shinseki's view.
