"Beware the twelve-division strategy for a ten-division Army" (Jun 2003).
On Sunday Jerome a Paris posted a diary (Kristol: send 50,000 more soldiers to Baghdad to save Bush's legacy, http://www.dailykos.com/...) about Robert Kagan's and William Kristol's comments in the Monday (November 13, 2006) issue of the Financial Times.
We also have Senator John McCain going around making statements about how he believes that we need an additional "100,000 more" ("What's St. McCain's Iraq war plan again?" http://www.crooksandliars.com/...). At least he acknowledged that finding additional manpower "is an enormous strain."
It looks like we have a little hypocrisy here. Now we have Republicans throwing out statements about what they think should be done to solve the crisis in Iraq, but not really providing any realistic solutions.
One of my positions about this "50,000 more soldiers" comment is that this shows how little the American ruling class and punditocracy actually know about the Armed Forces, in particular the Army and the Marine Corps, and the current state of these services after 3-1/2 years in Iraq (or 5+ years when you include our actions in Afghanistan).
I want to get the facts out to this community about what "50,000 more soldiers" really means. Since my professional experiences are with the Army, I will only discuss Army organizations. If there is interest, I will gladly add a more detailed breakout of how these tactical organizations are structured.
First, we need to know what kind of "50,000 more soldiers." Are they speaking about front line combat troops, or just some pundit's SWAG (scientific wild-ass guess) number?
If they are talking about the latter, then we need 2 to 2-1/2 more divisions. The modern day infantry division (not an armored or mechanized infantry division) has approximately 20,000 soldiers assigned to it. The armored or mechanized infantry division has approximately 22,000 soldiers total.
If they are talking about "50,000 more soldiers" as purely front line combat troops, then they are actually speaking about an even larger force. At every level of tactical organization above company level, the ratio of combat soldiers to support soldiers varies between approximately 5/1 to 4/1. On the lower side of the scale (4/1 ratio of combat soldiers to support soldiers) is the armored or mechanized infantry units, since there is a greater need for technical specialists to maintain the tanks, infantry fighting vehicles, and armored personnel carriers use by the units.
Additionally, the higher the level in tactical organization you go (above company level to battalion, then brigade, and then division levels), the larger the headquarters and the support requirements. Every brigade has a support battalion (approximately 400 solders) assigned to perform levels of maintenance that cannot be accomplished at the battalion level. Every brigade has a signal unit (usually a company of approximately 80 soldiers) attached to it to ensure that it can communicate with all of its subordinate units spread out across its area of operations. At the division level, the same is true, however many of the division's support units are parted out to the subordinate brigades as their "slice" of the division's resources. The division's signal and military intelligence battalions, and military police company are typical of this.
What I have described so far is based on the active Army structure, where with a few exceptions the force structure is organized on the division model. In the Army National Guard, the majority of the units are based on the brigade, or brigade combat team (BCT) organization. These brigades are ready structured with the majority of the support "slices" needed to operate/fight, and their soldier counts are accordingly larger (3,300-4,000 total soldiers per brigade).
My experiences with U.S. Marine Corps units lead me to believe that their organizations tend to have higher ratios of combat troops to support troops. Marine Corp units are structured on the assumption that they will be in operations in one location for shorter periods of time.
Secondly, as you assemble groups of units, no matter what level, you have to organize them under a command-and-control (C2) headquarters. To just say that the solution is to send companies or battalions to Baghdad to plus up the count an additional "50,000 more soldiers" is ludicrous at best. This would quickly create an unmanageable burden on the existing C2 structure, endangering the soldiers across all the units involved and allowing for a greater chance for already tense situations to get out of control.
Lastly, you have to train units as teams. Units at brigade level and lower require many resources to adequately prepare to fight as a team. Although this is undoubtedly subject to debate, I believe time is the most important of these resources. It takes an existing active duty Army brigade at least 6-8 months of intense training to develop as a coordinated team ready for combat, and that can only be accomplished after the subordinate units have prepared themselves to a sufficient level to successfully perform as directed by the brigade headquarters. The more "unknown" units you attach to the brigade, the longer the training period required for the organization to be truly ready to perform in combat.
There has already been a lot of discussion about where will these soldiers, or units will come from. In Chris Matthews' discussion of this topic with Senator McCain, Matthews quoted General (Ret.) Barry McCaffrey's assessment of how the existing active Army brigades are already committed ("What's St. McCain's Iraq war plan again?" http://www.crooksandliars.com/...). On NPR's All Things Considered program on Tuesday, November 14, 2006, a segment ("Pentagon Eyes Longer Tours for Guardsmen" http://www.npr.org/...) was dedicated to how all of the Army National Guard's 31 brigades have either all already been deployed to, or are currently deployed to either Iraq or Afghanistan once, requiring the Pentagon to decide if it will start a second round of deployments.
So I guess it come down to this: What "50,000 more soldiers," or "100,000 more" are these people talking about, and exactly when do you expect to have these soldiers in Baghdad?