thedrifter
04-19-06, 03:14 PM
April 19, 2006
Bucking opinion trend, Pentagon says too many troops took part in Iraq operation
By Gordon Trowbridge
Times staff writer
From think-tank analysts to angry retired generals to Capitol Hill lawmakers, it has become nearly universal conventional wisdom that the U.S. invasion force that conquered Iraq in 2003 lacked the manpower to secure the country after Saddam’s fall.
But the Pentagon’s civilian policymakers have learned a much different lesson. According to a senior civilian who played a crucial role in developing the just-released Quadrennial Defense Review, the problem with Operation Iraqi Freedom was not too few U.S. troops, but too many.
“You could have adopted a radically different concept of operations,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “You could have trained free forces in various parts of Iraq and over time they could have gained greater control of the country.
“We’ve heard a lot of calls with people saying they would like to have seen a much larger force, especially for stability tasks. ... What is in some ways just as interesting … is what if we had gone in with a much smaller force, but from the get-go leveraged the capabilities of the Iraqis?”
People with ties to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had pushed such a plan in the months before the invasion, but military planners ultimately rejected it as unrealistic, and the defense official said the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction made such an approach impractical.
But the concept fits neatly with Rumsfeld’s push to use precision, speed and information technology to reduce the manpower requirements of warfare. And it’s more than just an argument over theory or past history; the less-is-more concept is crucial to the QDR’s recommendations against increasing the size of U.S. ground forces, which analysts and politicians across the political spectrum have advocated.
To a number of experts, it illustrates the thinking of a Pentagon leadership that seems unwilling or unable to abandon previously held opinions in the face of new evidence.
“Do they actually understand what is going on?” asks retired Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes, who has served in Iraq and written extensively on counterinsurgency and the future of warfare. “They still don’t get it. They’re staying with their faith more than with reality. That’s the part that scares me.”
Castor oil or ice cream
Criticism of the 2003 invasion force as too small and of the decision after Saddam’s fall to cancel deployment of additional troops for security is perhaps the most stinging criticism of the Rumsfeld Pentagon.
“There is a period of time where there is a security vacuum,” said Michele Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “What you need is a larger force for an initial period, so you don’t allow widespread looting and chaos and disorder. … If you go in bigger, you can come out faster.”
But it is not surprising that defense leaders would suggest that a model so successful in Afghanistan could have worked in Iraq as well, said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“You’ve got a group of people in [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] who powerfully believe in small, fast, light, high-tech,” Biddle said.
When such planners must choose between using a massive, traditional invasion force or one that relies on special operations forces and high-tech weapons, “one of them looks like castor oil, and the other is an ice cream cone,” Biddle said.
“The preferred model of warfare for Rumsfeld and company is Afghanistan,” Flournoy said. “That’s what they want all campaigns to look like.”
In many situations, Flournoy said, such an “indirect” approach is preferable. But applying it to Iraq, she suggested, ignores several facts.
A campaign light on U.S. troops could succeed in a situation where an existing government needs support against an insurgency, she said, or, in a case such as Afghanistan, when an established insurgent fighting force opposes a weak central government.
Neither condition existed in Iraq in 2003. While exile leaders such as Ahmed Chalabi claimed to have thousands of freedom fighters at their disposal, their actual capabilities were much more modest.
“It’s one thing to say you’re going to install these guys in the government ministries,” Flournoy said. “But to say they had viable security forces — that borders on fantasy.”
Biddle, who has been deeply critical of the current push to expand Iraqi security forces, said relying on indigenous troops would only have exacerbated the religious and ethnic tensions now threatening to tear Iraq apart. Any native anti-Saddam force would overwhelmingly have consisted of Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds opposing Saddam’s Sunni Muslim-dominated regime — giving those groups an early start on the rivalry now causing much of the bloodshed in Iraq.
And both point out that even a large indigenous force likely would have lacked the manpower to guard Iraq’s border, patrol its dense urban areas, round up the massive ammunition stockpiles that have fueled the insurgency or secure suspected nuclear, chemical and biological sites.
“It’s sort of hard to see,” Biddle said, “how you get anything other than chaos.”
Words vs. actions
Perhaps more important than the argument over what already has happened in Iraq is the debate over the future size and shape of the military, and strategies for future operations.
Iraq has been held up as Exhibit A in the case for a larger Army and Marine Corps. Many outside analysts and retired officers say the strains of the past three years make clear the ground forces simply aren’t large enough to carry out the nation’s strategy.
But the senior Pentagon civilian said concepts such as the different approach to the Iraq invasion were crucial to the QDR, which attempts to lay out a long-range strategy.
“It’s not one-size-fits-all,” the official said. “But we increasingly see, especially in complex situations where we need to defeat military forces as well as the broader challenge of stability and establishing legitimate governance, that we have to think about some very different approaches.”
This led to the QDR’s conclusion that while the size of the U.S. military is about right, the available personnel should be shifted away from traditional heavy formations to boost such capabilities as special operations, civil affairs and support functions, the official said.
“People haven’t grasped the point that it’s a big admission on our part that the mix of forces and capabilities we’ve got is wrong and we need to change that,” the official said.
Such reorganizations have won widespread support. The question is whether they alone are enough. Even as the administration argues it isn’t using a one-size-fits-all approach, its refusal to consider larger ground forces leaves the U.S. military too small to cope with situations requiring heavy forces.
“Do you want to count on the assumption that you’ll always have some indigenous force that’s up to handling the job with more modest support from special ops?” Flournoy said. “I’m not willing to count on it. … I think it’s a prudent hedge to have ground forces that are able to do that.”
Hammes, the retired Marine colonel, said this is especially true if, as the QDR contends, the military must take on counterinsurgency as a core mission.
The primary requirement for counterinsurgency “is security, which is manpower-intensive,” said Hammes, whose book, “The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century,” has made him one of the country’s leading experts on fighting insurgents.
As far as the plans Rumsfeld and his senior aides have for the U.S. military, “There’s a great deal of tension between what they’re saying and what they’re doing,” Hammes said.
“It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Ellie
Bucking opinion trend, Pentagon says too many troops took part in Iraq operation
By Gordon Trowbridge
Times staff writer
From think-tank analysts to angry retired generals to Capitol Hill lawmakers, it has become nearly universal conventional wisdom that the U.S. invasion force that conquered Iraq in 2003 lacked the manpower to secure the country after Saddam’s fall.
But the Pentagon’s civilian policymakers have learned a much different lesson. According to a senior civilian who played a crucial role in developing the just-released Quadrennial Defense Review, the problem with Operation Iraqi Freedom was not too few U.S. troops, but too many.
“You could have adopted a radically different concept of operations,” said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity. “You could have trained free forces in various parts of Iraq and over time they could have gained greater control of the country.
“We’ve heard a lot of calls with people saying they would like to have seen a much larger force, especially for stability tasks. ... What is in some ways just as interesting … is what if we had gone in with a much smaller force, but from the get-go leveraged the capabilities of the Iraqis?”
People with ties to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld had pushed such a plan in the months before the invasion, but military planners ultimately rejected it as unrealistic, and the defense official said the assumption that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction made such an approach impractical.
But the concept fits neatly with Rumsfeld’s push to use precision, speed and information technology to reduce the manpower requirements of warfare. And it’s more than just an argument over theory or past history; the less-is-more concept is crucial to the QDR’s recommendations against increasing the size of U.S. ground forces, which analysts and politicians across the political spectrum have advocated.
To a number of experts, it illustrates the thinking of a Pentagon leadership that seems unwilling or unable to abandon previously held opinions in the face of new evidence.
“Do they actually understand what is going on?” asks retired Marine Col. Thomas X. Hammes, who has served in Iraq and written extensively on counterinsurgency and the future of warfare. “They still don’t get it. They’re staying with their faith more than with reality. That’s the part that scares me.”
Castor oil or ice cream
Criticism of the 2003 invasion force as too small and of the decision after Saddam’s fall to cancel deployment of additional troops for security is perhaps the most stinging criticism of the Rumsfeld Pentagon.
“There is a period of time where there is a security vacuum,” said Michele Flournoy of the Center for Strategic and International Studies. “What you need is a larger force for an initial period, so you don’t allow widespread looting and chaos and disorder. … If you go in bigger, you can come out faster.”
But it is not surprising that defense leaders would suggest that a model so successful in Afghanistan could have worked in Iraq as well, said Stephen Biddle, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
“You’ve got a group of people in [the Office of the Secretary of Defense] who powerfully believe in small, fast, light, high-tech,” Biddle said.
When such planners must choose between using a massive, traditional invasion force or one that relies on special operations forces and high-tech weapons, “one of them looks like castor oil, and the other is an ice cream cone,” Biddle said.
“The preferred model of warfare for Rumsfeld and company is Afghanistan,” Flournoy said. “That’s what they want all campaigns to look like.”
In many situations, Flournoy said, such an “indirect” approach is preferable. But applying it to Iraq, she suggested, ignores several facts.
A campaign light on U.S. troops could succeed in a situation where an existing government needs support against an insurgency, she said, or, in a case such as Afghanistan, when an established insurgent fighting force opposes a weak central government.
Neither condition existed in Iraq in 2003. While exile leaders such as Ahmed Chalabi claimed to have thousands of freedom fighters at their disposal, their actual capabilities were much more modest.
“It’s one thing to say you’re going to install these guys in the government ministries,” Flournoy said. “But to say they had viable security forces — that borders on fantasy.”
Biddle, who has been deeply critical of the current push to expand Iraqi security forces, said relying on indigenous troops would only have exacerbated the religious and ethnic tensions now threatening to tear Iraq apart. Any native anti-Saddam force would overwhelmingly have consisted of Shiite Muslims and ethnic Kurds opposing Saddam’s Sunni Muslim-dominated regime — giving those groups an early start on the rivalry now causing much of the bloodshed in Iraq.
And both point out that even a large indigenous force likely would have lacked the manpower to guard Iraq’s border, patrol its dense urban areas, round up the massive ammunition stockpiles that have fueled the insurgency or secure suspected nuclear, chemical and biological sites.
“It’s sort of hard to see,” Biddle said, “how you get anything other than chaos.”
Words vs. actions
Perhaps more important than the argument over what already has happened in Iraq is the debate over the future size and shape of the military, and strategies for future operations.
Iraq has been held up as Exhibit A in the case for a larger Army and Marine Corps. Many outside analysts and retired officers say the strains of the past three years make clear the ground forces simply aren’t large enough to carry out the nation’s strategy.
But the senior Pentagon civilian said concepts such as the different approach to the Iraq invasion were crucial to the QDR, which attempts to lay out a long-range strategy.
“It’s not one-size-fits-all,” the official said. “But we increasingly see, especially in complex situations where we need to defeat military forces as well as the broader challenge of stability and establishing legitimate governance, that we have to think about some very different approaches.”
This led to the QDR’s conclusion that while the size of the U.S. military is about right, the available personnel should be shifted away from traditional heavy formations to boost such capabilities as special operations, civil affairs and support functions, the official said.
“People haven’t grasped the point that it’s a big admission on our part that the mix of forces and capabilities we’ve got is wrong and we need to change that,” the official said.
Such reorganizations have won widespread support. The question is whether they alone are enough. Even as the administration argues it isn’t using a one-size-fits-all approach, its refusal to consider larger ground forces leaves the U.S. military too small to cope with situations requiring heavy forces.
“Do you want to count on the assumption that you’ll always have some indigenous force that’s up to handling the job with more modest support from special ops?” Flournoy said. “I’m not willing to count on it. … I think it’s a prudent hedge to have ground forces that are able to do that.”
Hammes, the retired Marine colonel, said this is especially true if, as the QDR contends, the military must take on counterinsurgency as a core mission.
The primary requirement for counterinsurgency “is security, which is manpower-intensive,” said Hammes, whose book, “The Sling and the Stone: On War in the 21st Century,” has made him one of the country’s leading experts on fighting insurgents.
As far as the plans Rumsfeld and his senior aides have for the U.S. military, “There’s a great deal of tension between what they’re saying and what they’re doing,” Hammes said.
“It just doesn’t make any sense.”
Ellie