Troops on the ground
Bill in Frankfurt
by the troops on the ground.
Bill in Frankfurt
==================================
So Few Soldiers, So Much to Do
By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK
Published: November 4, 2003
The Bush administration's reaction to the deaths of 16 American soldiers in
the downing of a helicopter on Sunday morning was the same as it was to the
suicide bombings at police stations and the Red Cross headquarters in
Baghdad a week earlier - and the same as it has been to every other setback
the coalition has faced: insistence that there is no need for more American
troops beyond the 133,000 now in Iraq.
It is part of any president's job to inspire confidence under pressure, but
given the true number of troops in Iraq - actual armed soldiers doing a
soldier's job - President Bush might just as well have said that there is no
need for any American troops in Iraq. Because zero is the exact number of
soldiers actually present at many sites that should be secured 24 hours a
day.
Such is the arithmetic of an ultra-modern army. The support echelon is so
large that out of the 133,000 American men and women in Iraq, no more than
56,000 are combat-trained troops available for security duties. As for the
rest, there are many command posts where soldiers operate computers not
guns, there are many specialized units charged with reconstruction and civil
duties, and even in the actual combat formations there is a large noncombat
element. The 101st Airborne Division has 270 helicopters, which alone
require more than 1,000 technicians. The Fourth Infantry Division has the
usual panoply of artillery, aviation and antiaircraft units that are needed
in war but have little role in peacekeeping and security duties.
And even the finest soldiers must sleep and eat. Thus the number of troops
on patrol at any one time is no more than 28,000 - to oversee frontiers
terrorists are trying to cross, to patrol rural terrain including vast oil
fields, to control inter-city roads, and to protect American and coalition
facilities. Even if so few could do so much, it still leaves the question of
how to police the squares, streets and alleys of Baghdad, with its six
million inhabitants, not to mention Mosul with 1.7 million, Kirkuk with
800,000, and Sunni towns like Falluja, with its quarter-million restive
residents.
In fact, the 28,000 American troops are now so thinly spread that they
cannot reliably protect even themselves; the helicopter shot down on Sunday
was taking off from an area that had not been secured, because doing so
would have required hundreds of soldiers. For comparison, there are 39,000
police officers in New York City alone - and they at least know the
languages of most of the inhabitants, few of whom are likely to be armed
Baathist or Islamist fanatics.
Given the numbers in Iraq, it is impossible for American soldiers to contain
even ordinary armed robberies, which abound because of the deeply rooted
culture of tribal raiding (even the urban populations include many newly
settled Bedouin, Kurdish and Turkmen nomads whose greatest pride was the
razzia, the mounted raid). In the end, it would take several times the
present level of combat troops to have any hope of enforcing order. The
former Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric Shinseki, spoke of "several hundred
thousand" troops before the invasion, only to be publicly ridiculed by the
civilian chiefs. I doubt he takes much pleasure in being proved right.
Yet President Bush continues to push the sovereign remedy of cobbling
together various Iraqi police forces and an army very quickly; Secretary of
Defense Donald Rumsfeld bragged yesterday that more than 100,000 Iraqi
security officers had been trained. Assuming this hurried program allows for
decent background checks - imagine criminal thugs and Saddam Hussein
loyalists operating in police uniforms - it might help here and there,
against the petty thieves. But it's hard to imagine these lightly armed,
lightly trained forces taking on well-armed robbers, let alone Baath militia
holdouts, Sunni guerrillas, suicide bombers and Islamist terrorists slipping
in from Syria and Jordan.
Edward N. Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and
International Studies.
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04LUTT.html?th