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