WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 — Military planners and White House budget analysts have been asked to provide President Bush with options for increasing American forces in Iraq by 20,000 or more. The request indicates that the option of a major "surge" in troop strength is gaining ground as part of a White House strategy review, senior administration officials said Friday.
Discussion of increasing the number of American troops, at least temporarily, has coursed through Washington for two months, as a possible way to reverse the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. But the decision to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff to specify where the additional forces could be found among overstretched Army, Marine and National Guard units, and to seek a cost estimate from the White House Office of Management and Budget, signifies a turn in the debate.
Officials said that the options being considered included the deployment of upwards of 50,000 additional troops, but that the political, training and recruiting obstacles to an increase larger than 20,000 to 30,000 troops would be prohibitive.
At present, only about 17,000 American soldiers are actively involved in the effort to secure Baghdad, so even the low end of the proposals being considered by military and budget officials could more than double the size of that force. If adopted, such an increase would be a major departure from the current strategy advocated by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., which has stressed stepping up the training of Iraqi forces and handing off to them as soon as possible.
The details of the plan under study by the White House are not known, but in most scenarios the troop increase would be accomplished in large part by accelerating some scheduled deployments while delaying the departure of units in Iraq.
President Bush has made no final decision, the White House said. Gordon Johndroe, the National Security Council spokesman, said that no memorandums outlining the options for increasing troop strength had gone to the president. But one senior official said the subject was discussed at length on Wednesday during Mr. Bush's briefing at the Pentagon, and the president has reportedly asked detailed questions that some officials have interpreted as suggesting that he is strongly leaning in that direction.
American military officials said Friday night that the Pentagon was planning to send the Second Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division to Kuwait in January. The brigade, based at Fort Bragg, N.C., would serve as a reserve that commanders in Iraq could draw on.
American military commanders have been operating without such a reserve since the Marine unit that had been on call was dispatched to Anbar Province in western Iraq. The Army brigade could become an element of a larger troop deployment to Iraq if the White House decided to increase troops there.
That option has been central to a broader debate in Washington. Advocates of a troop increase say the aim would be to reverse the slide toward an all-out civil war and give the new Iraqi government more time to consolidate control, while training of Iraqis is stepped up.
At the same time, American and Iraqi forces would try to tamp down strife in neighborhoods that contain Shiites and Sunnis, and slow insurgent attacks. To be effective, proponents say, these tactics would need to be married to a broader political and economic strategy to generate employment in Baghdad and stabilize Iraq.
Critics of a surge approach have argued that any American troop increase would lead to more American casualties and merely put off the day when the Iraqis need to assume responsibility for their own security.
There is also concern that the military benefits would be short-lived unless the higher troop levels were sustained for a long period, adding to the strain on American forces. Alternatively, critics say, if the surge in troop levels was too brief, adversaries could simply wait for the reinforcements to leave.
Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, said during a visit to Baghdad this week that American military commanders were discussing the possibility of adding as many as 10 more combat brigades — a maximum of about 35,000 troops — to establish some of control while Iraq's divided political leaders seek solutions to the mounting violence.
On Friday, however, one administration official said that additional work was needed to fit a troop increase into the larger strategy, as well as on technical aspects about how the operation would be carried out. "There has not been a full articulation of what we would want the surge to accomplish," he said.
Strikingly, the surge proposal has not been actively promoted by the top commander in Iraq. General Casey, the senior American commander in Baghdad, has emphasized faster training of Iraqi security forces, an effort that would be supported in part by converting existing combat forces into trainers.
Gen. John P. Abizaid, the top American commander in the Middle East, has said that the advantages of a surge in troop levels would be temporary, and that it might dissuade Iraqis from doing more to provide for their own security.
Some of the chiefs of the services that would supply forces for the surge have spoken about it in hedged terms. "We would not surge without a purpose," Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army chief of staff, told reporters on Thursday. "And that purpose should be measurable."
But Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, who is assuming day-to-day command of American troops in Iraq from Lt. Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, is said to be sympathetic to the idea.
The surge proposal has also gained greater support among recently retired officers who served in Iraq, particularly if carried out as part of a broader political and economic strategy.
Two retired Army veterans who served in the unit that took control of the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005 — Col. Joel Armstrong and Maj. Daniel Dwyer — helped draft a new study issued Thursday by the American Enterprise Institute that called for sending an additional four or five combat brigades, or some 14,000 to 17,500 troops, to Baghdad.
The study determined that the military could sustain a surge of that level, but that it would require sending several Army brigades back to Iraq a couple of months early and extending the customary yearlong Army tour to 15 months.
In its report last week, the bipartisan Iraq Study Group rejected the idea of a "substantial" force increase on the order of 100,000 to 200,000 troops, saying that those levels were not "available for a sustained deployment" and would feed fears in Iraq that the United States was planning a long-term occupation.
"We could, however, support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad," the report added, "or to speed up the training and equipping mission, if the U.S. commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective."
Bush Speaks With Maliki
WASHINGTON, Dec. 15 — President Bush held a videoconference with the Iraqi prime minister, Nuri Kamal al-Maliki, on Friday, the eve of a Baghdad conference aimed at cooling sectarian violence.
At the conference, Kurdish, Shiite and Sunni Arab politicians are expected to discuss a reconciliation plan that includes possible amnesty for insurgent fighters and proposals to curb militia violence.
White House officials said Mr. Bush spoke by secure video with Mr. Maliki for roughly half an hour.
Gordon Johndroe, a spokesman for the National Security Council, said Mr. Maliki talked about his desire "for a larger core of Iraqi political leaders to come together for the common objective of stabilizing Iraq." The Bush administration has been encouraging Mr. Maliki to rely less on the radical Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr.
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