I've always thought about soldiers in theater kind of like retail flooring space. You want as much as you can of the best quality possible. The question comes down to how much you can afford.
How many people should America have sent?
Hey all, I am no expert, but it seems to me that a number between 300,000 and 600,000 would have been much better (1-2 people for every 100 Iraqi's) of which maybe half of should have been ground troops. Please do not flame but explain why I am wrong if you feel that way.
This is an old article that might be of intrest from 2003.
http://www.globalpolicy.org/security...agoncontra.htm
I've always thought about soldiers in theater kind of like retail flooring space. You want as much as you can of the best quality possible. The question comes down to how much you can afford.
Sam Liles
Selil Blog
Don't forget to duck Secret Squirrel
The scholarship of teaching and learning results in equal hatred from latte leftists and cappuccino conservatives.
All opinions are mine and may or may not reflect those of my employer depending on the chance it might affect funding, politics, or the setting of the sun. As such these are my opinions you can get your own.
Zero. But if you insist, about 450,000-500,000 similar, per capita, to what we used in Bosnia. Followed by a quick draw down after about 1 year.
That was a big debate at the time. We had enough to topple the regime quickly. That plan went fine. Plan B after the fall of Baghdad was for the Iraqi police to take control of security. When Baghdad fell the police sort of went home and said to hell with this. There was no Plan C. And here we are today like monkeys throwing our own #### at each other.
Are there any correlations between the removal of a brutal dictatorship in Iraq and the self imposed removal of the russians in Sarajevo? Could we look at the general strife and rapid religious based conflict and anarchy and draw conclusions? What did it take to pacify in the Balkans?
Sam Liles
Selil Blog
Don't forget to duck Secret Squirrel
The scholarship of teaching and learning results in equal hatred from latte leftists and cappuccino conservatives.
All opinions are mine and may or may not reflect those of my employer depending on the chance it might affect funding, politics, or the setting of the sun. As such these are my opinions you can get your own.
Yes.Originally Posted by selil
Yes.
The Randall Knife Co.
I always felt that there wasn't enough of a road net to push supplies for 500,000 troops on a run from Kuwait to Baghdad. Frankly, I think they were lucky to be able to get as many in as they did.
My belief at that time was that the Ba'ath regime retained a significant chemical weapons stockpile and the capability to deploy it to neighboring countries. Waiting to build up 500,000 troops in theater and running a cautious, thorough invasion that seized full control of cities rather than bypassing them would have been a disaster - there'd've been mustard gas everywhere.
However, I believe that reinforcements should have followed on quite rapidly after the initial shock wore off. In a sense they were - 4th Infantry missed out on the initial invasion.
General Franks coined it as, "Catastrophic Success". In hindsight, they made the right decision for the mission. Bypassing the Fedayeen was a necessary evil due to the reasons you cited. Get inside the ring and fight from the inside out as quickly as possible. The problem was that the Executive Branch needed to believe that the Iraqi security forces would be available to fill the security void. They weren't available. This gave the insurgency the ability to set up house. The problem with the original plan, altered due to no 4th Infantry, was that it got us into Iraq to a fault. Later, it became an experiment with certain areas using their own tactics. Some successful and some not. Then came the eye-for-an-eye. Iraqi violence. Scores to settle. All the while the terrorists using their own tactics to create trouble. To this day there is still not enough troops to provide training, improvements to the already shattered infrastructure, security of the population and so forth. The answer from Washington? Make the Iraqi government hustle. Something that is a little different in their culture and an important tactic in our western culture.
Zero probably would have been the right choice in retrospect.
The problem is that for everyone who states that we needed more than the intial invasion - even Shinseki who stated 300-400K - the fact remains that we do not and did not have the capacity to sustain that 300-400K number for any length of time considering the global requirements for forces. Even if all the Reserve Component ground forces were mobilzed and activated for the duration, there would have been some real difficulty maintaining a consistent rotation of this many troops. The logistics and equipping problems would have been even more miserable.
Or trying to put Humpty Dumpty together again.
We went in with barely enough people to push him off the wall. Not enough to lift him down and set him securely on his feet, or even his knees.
Franks' admission
There is a telling statement in Tommy Franks' book where he comes out of a meeting at OSD and he and his Chief of Staff talk about how they dodged the bullet on PCR (Phase IV). Later Franks describes the message he sent to Wolfowitz where he said he would take care of the day of and Wolfowitz and Feith needed to take care of the day after.
Shinseki's "300,000" was a statement of the allied force needed to occupy the country. It was, at least in part, predicated on Jay Garner's planning for bringing back the Iraqi regular army which has been commented on elsewhere. The relevant point, IMO, is that the large numbers for occupation advocated by Shinseki could have been reduced in an orderly manner fairly quickly had the plan been implemented. But CENTCOM never took ownership of the plan crafted in Washington and neither did OSD. As a result, what Phase IV planning Franks did was clearly inadequate and ORHA planning was largely ignored by both CENTCOM & OSD.
Equally important, nobody except the OSD maligned GEN Shinseki seems to have given any thought to the number of troops needed for Phase IV.
Good discussion ... I met General Shinseki this last winter and all I could do was thank him for being honest about what we needed based on the Army's historical modeling of post-war pacekeeping ... like he said, 300,000 men and we would have been home by now. I blame Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz and any officer that supported that tripe. This was a invasion, not a waltz in peacekeeping mission.
I believe Franks and Rumsfeld referred to the post-war chaos as being a component of a brilliantly executed war plan that resulted in "catastrophic success" when they did not provide or even plan for internal security in OEF-IV. It was a term of spin, not of planning. Let me also note that the Fedayeen weren't bypassed, they were the front line forces we fought in the war. It was the Saddam Fed, irregular pockets of Baathist supporters and two thousand Syrian "mercenaries" and pan-Arab volunteers that we were fighting for three weeks. The Army didn't show up, the Special Republican Guard deployed to the field, abandoned their positons and some fought in small pockets.
It was the Saddam Fedayeen that fought the US/UK Army and Marines directly from Zubayr to Naseriyah to Baghdad to Tikrit and rather well for a 4th line force that was assigned a guerilla/regime security role behind the air force, army, and SRG. They gave us as many losses as we took in the entirety of Desert Storm and then fell back to their homes to start their insurgency after Baghdad was captured. Saddam had a post-war resistance plan and prepared for it ... we did not.
Good answer on both. Here's where the larger number comes in, and why the Army should have kept pushing it -- it would have made the issues you raise quite obvious, and would have put into doubt the idea that we could keep even 150K deployed to Iraq for any length of time without putting a lot of stress on the system.
Buckwheat
As you already know but I want to clarify. We didn't stop for the Fedayeen. And yes we did leave a lot of them behind on the way to Baghdad. Franks was informed about this at the time. He made the decision to keep going.
BTW, welcome to the SWC.
The puddling Fedayeen or road to Baghdad
If you read Franks' book, they did develop a way to dealing with the Fedayeen that did not get much notice at the time, but was pretty effective. The intel guys noticed that they would gather around either Baath party headquarters or some other government building between attacks. When the puddling was at it maximum, they would bomb and destroy the gathering. The bombings were usually reported as targeting only the buildings so the significance of the attacks was never apparent to the media or to the Iraqis who continued the pattern even after the reports.
People beat up on Franks for his phase IV plan or lack there of, but it needs to be noted that Gen. Abizaid was put in charge of implementing it and could have changed it. Instead he very strongly recommended the small foot print strategy and still believed in it when he left Centcom.
On one night during OIF I, 200-400 trucks and 50 helicopters left Baghdad heading east and south, and just...disappeared. Looking at the V Corps Sitmap, I noticed that there were US units spread out all over hell and back along the MSR, and no screening force. I'm assuming those were the Saddam Fed that didn't stage attacks on the meateaters.
I also remember during the months immediately after the invasion that "bad guys" were continuously staging ineffective attacks on the various FOBs, and we weren't really aggressively patrolling against them. I seem to recall remarking to my SGM that "it's almost as if we were helping train an insurgency."
According to Franks
Hi Merv--
According to Franks' book. his Phase IV plan was minimal because, as I noted above, OSD decided to take care of "the day after." My beef with GEN Franks is not that he didn't really have a plan but that he did not insist that he was responsible for all of Phase IV. Instead, as he makes clear in his book, he was happy to have dodged that bullet and pleased that OSD had taken the responsibility. That, I think, is the essence of his message to Wolfowitz - you guys at OSD claimed the responsibility, now you have to exercise it.
If Abizaid is to blame, then I would put the onus on him for not anticipating the looting and chaos of the early part of Phase IV - the time when responsibility still belonged without doubt to CENTCOM - and not planning for the obvious (see Panama and Haiti in particular for recent examples) and not acting quickly to carry out the legal obligations of an occupier (which we were from the moment any Iraqi soil came under Coalition control.
Cheers
JohnT
So the rat in the woodpile said "Could we blame the lack of troops on many of the concepts of 'Transformation'?"
There would seem to be a cognitive dissonance in the application of knowledge and the reality of the requirements.
I'm no expert at ground troop operations beyond being an old trigger puller but from a systems perspective it would seem 1) More troops equate to less time on the ground; 2) More troops equate to higher risk in the logistics train; 3) More troops equate to better protection and pacification; 4) Less troops are easier to support; 5) There seems to be a thread of something I'll call inertia when moving troops that increases exponentially(?) with the number (volume) of troops.
So if I've got that right the troop composition and number (volume) balances on an edge of to many and you can't support or protect them and to few and you can't accomplish the mission and that balance is highly dynamic.
If I got all of that right then the only way to be successful would seem to have a highly dynamic and flexible troop allocation strategy and that seems nearly impossible as a projection of national power world wide or more directly into a desert with no real infrastructure.
Sam Liles
Selil Blog
Don't forget to duck Secret Squirrel
The scholarship of teaching and learning results in equal hatred from latte leftists and cappuccino conservatives.
All opinions are mine and may or may not reflect those of my employer depending on the chance it might affect funding, politics, or the setting of the sun. As such these are my opinions you can get your own.
I think it's even simpler than all of what you stated selil:
There weren't and aren't enough troops to make the 300-400K requirement last for more than 2 years at most.
Not unless you change your assumptions.
We are a volunteer military at war, not a Nation at war. The Arsenal of Democracy remains functioning an bankers' hours. And a 1:1 dwell, at one time, meant 1 war won:1 trip home.
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