Well...

From my perspective (and I've sat through Kilcullen so I think I know his mindset wrt slide), I've started to form the opinion that Shinseki's call for larger force numbers wouldn't have made a difference. This runs totally counter to what I've opined in the past, and as painful as it is for me to retract my opinion, it's been an interesting ride .

I think we would have be able to smother areas with forces and make ourselves happy that we "had things on lockdown", but the reality is that we would have simply provided more targets, pissed off more people, and prolonged things.

We weren't ready for Phase IV execution, for a number of reasons we have beaten to death here. And since I believe we are just finally getting to a point where we are effectively understanding and employing COIN, we would have been woefully miserable at it five years ago, but would have just had more forces plodding around and breaking more pottery.