[lbo-talk] Luttwak: Far fewer troops than meet the eye; too few to succeed

Michael Pollak mpollak at panix.com
Tue Nov 4 12:32:25 PST 2003


New York Times

November 4, 2003

So Few Soldiers, So Much to Do

By EDWARD N. LUTTWAK

C HEVY CHASE, Md.

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.

Copyright 2003 The New York Times Company



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