EXPERT ANALYSIS: Iraq or Bust
16 August 2006 7:43 am by Taylor Marsh
Iraq or Bust
Expert Analysis by Charles V. Peña
A prominent group of U.S. defense experts, chaired by former Secretary of Defense
William J. Perry and including retired Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman General
John Shalikashvili, has issued a clarion call that “two-thirds of the
Army's operating force, active and reserve, is now reporting as unready.”
General H. Steven Blum, chief of the National Guard Bureau, has also acknowledged
that more than two-thirds of the Army National Guard's 34 brigades are not
combat ready. Apparently, the active duty Army claims to be in better shape
but is suffering from the same problem. One Army official admits that active
duty Army units serving in a war zone are 100 percent combat ready, but not
other units. Other data reported to the House Armed Services Committee implies
units deployed to Iraq are also in low readiness. According to Army Chief of
Staff General Peter Schoomaker, the primary problem is a funding shortfall resulting
in an inability to repair or replace equipment as it is being used up in conflict.
Schoomaker’s assertion implies that if the equipment problem can be fixed,
the U.S. Army can prevail in Iraq. But even if current equipment shortfalls
can be remedied (General Schoomaker believes the Army needs more than $17 billion
in 2007 and General Blum thinks it could cost as much as $21 billion for the
Army National Guard), the real problem in Iraq is not just equipment; it includes
manpower and perhaps a bit more.
Earlier this year, military and Pentagon officials hinted that they hoped U.S.
troop deployments in Iraq would drop to 100,000 by the end of this year. But
now, the plan is to increase troop levels to roughly 135,000 boots on the ground.
However, it is not possible to keep 135,000 troops deployed in Iraq (or anywhere
else) indefinitely. The ones in Iraq and elsewhere must eventually be relieved
by fresh troops, since excessively long or too frequent periods of time away
from home creates the risk that soldiers will decide against a military career.
For a professional volunteer military force to be able to retain soldiers over
time, the rule of thumb for active duty units is a 3:1 rotation ratio (meaning
three units are needed to keep one unit fielded). So keeping 135,000 troops
in Iraq requires an additional 270,000 for rotation or a total of 405,000 soldiers.
This number is precariously close to the total size of the active duty Army,
about 500,000 troops. Moreover, the U.S. Army has another 64,000 troops deployed
elsewhere overseas that requires a total of 192,000 troops to sustain it. So
when you do the math, the Army is about 100,000 soldiers shy of being able to
keep up the current deployments. (Of course, if we were fighting a war of national
survival – such as World War II – troop rotation would not be an
issue. We would field as many troops for as long as necessary until victory
was achieved. But Iraq and virtually all other U.S. foreign military deployments
have nothing to do with national survival.)
Moreover, using the National Guard and Reserves to fill the gap is not the
answer. As of the beginning of August, a total of nearly 90,000 members of the
Army Reserve and National Guard have been mobilized (that number has been as
high as 163,000), and as much as 40 percent of the force in Iraq has consisted
of Guard and Reserve. In the past four years, more National Guard and Reserve
soldiers have been called to active duty than were cumulatively mobilized since
the Cuban Missile Crisis (including for the Vietnam War, the Cuban refugee crisis,
Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo, and Desert Storm). Plus there is a ripple effect rotation
ratio problem for the Reserves and National Guard. Because these are part-time
soldiers, the rotation ratio believed to keep them enlisted is between 7:1 and
9:1. Using 8:1 as an average, the current mobilization requires a total force
of 720,000 citizen soldiers – which pretty much accounts for all of the
Army Reserve and National Guard force.
The solution applied to the rotation problem caused by Iraq has been twofold.
First, deployments have been extended to keep troops in Iraq for longer than
normal. Recently, the Defense Department announced that the deployment of the
Army's 172nd Stryker Brigade Combat Team – more than 3,500 troops –
will continue for as long as an extra four months in an effort to boost security
in Baghdad. Second, the Iraq mission has forced the military to resort to the
use of “stop-loss” orders to prevent soldiers from leaving the military
when their terms of enlistment expire. In November 2003, the Army issued stop-loss
orders for the 110,000 soldiers whose units were preparing to go to Iraq and
Afghanistan. In January 2004, stop-loss orders were issued covering 160,000
Army soldiers who were returning from Iraq, Afghanistan, and other deployments.
And in January 2006, the Army stop-loss program forced 50,000 soldiers into
extended duty. But extending deployments and stop-loss are like the little Dutch
boy trying to plug all the holes in the dike with his fingers. There are only
two real solutions. One is to increase the size of the Army, but this is problematic
given that the Army is barely meeting recruiting goals to maintain its current
end strength. But even if the Army could be expanded, 135,000 troops in Iraq
are not enough.
According to conventional wisdom, the force ratio required for imposing stability
and security is 20 troops per 1,000 inhabitants, which is what the British –
often acknowledged as the most experienced practitioners of such operations
– deployed for more than a decade in Malaysia and more than 25 years in
Northern Ireland. With a population of nearly 25 million people, to meet the
same standard in Iraq would require a force of 500,000 troops for perhaps a
decade or longer. Paradoxically, however, a large American ground force in Iraq
would just make the problem worse – confirming that the United States
is an occupying power and increasing support for the insurgency. Worse yet,
a larger military contingent in Iraq removes any shred of doubt from the case
made by the radical Islamists that the West is invading Islam, which only encourages
the Muslim world (regardless of their sympathies towards al-Qaeda) to unite
against the United States. So if military victory in Iraq is a quixotic quest,
that leaves the second choice, which is to withdraw U.S. troops from Iraq before
the Army goes bust.
Charles V. Peña is an adviser on the Straus Military
Reform Project of the Center for Defense Information, and a senior fellow with
the Coalition for a Realistic Foreign Policy. He is the author of the new publication
Winning the Un-War: A New Strategy for the War on Terrorism (Potomac Books,
2006). His current article “Flying
the Unfriendly Skies” for Antiwar.com
discusses the foiled London plot.
