Quote Originally Posted by SethB View Post
Without an excess of words or examples, my general theory would be that you need a certain amount of troops for an action. So you decide how much combat power you needs (tanks, guns and troops) to get the mission done.

Then you decide how much support they need to operate at the required level.

Then you trim away the excess.

Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work that way, although I'm not yet well educated enough to speculate about the reasons.

Comments?
Didn't work so well in Iraq. In warfare, it is truly better to have than to want and not have. The anchoring bias also comes into play as well.

In Iraq, the number of baseline troops become 135K. Why? Because that was the starting number for the occupation (and it soon was because that was what was sustainable indefinitely, or at least for a long time). Any more than 135K became an increase in the occupation from the Iraqi perspective (bad) or a sign of failure on the domestic side (bad).

Had the initial year long deployment consisted of all troops on the TPFDL for OIF (I), then the baseline would have been different and I think many folks would argue that you would have had enough force to actually secure more of the country and made it harder for the insurgency to form. It's open to debate at the Cobra II levels, but if you went it with "Desert Crossing" #s, then I think its a safer bet to claim that things could have turned out different.

I'm not looking to rehash a Fiasco like debate over Iraq, but I do think it's a ready example of where just enough is too fragile a process to 'Oops, not enough."