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

[Yoshie Furuhashi]

Michael Pollak posted a little more than a couple of weeks ago:
<snip>
>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.
<snip>
>Edward N. Luttwak is a senior fellow at the Center for Strategic and
>International Studies.
>
><http://mailman.lbo-talk.org/pipermail/lbo-talk/Week-of-Mon-20031103/026647.html>

Edward N. Luttwak's article above was among the most lucidly written 
on the subject of manpower shortage for the US occupation of Iraq. 
It's impossible to control Iraq (the population: 24,683,313 [July 
2003 est.], 
<http://www.cia.gov/cia/publications/factbook/geos/iz.html> ) with 
just 28,000 combat troops on patrol.

It is to the credit of the working class in the USA that the US 
government has not reinstated conscription yet.

Yoshie