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Rumsfeld, Iraq, and Troop Levels

Back on my snarky comment post touching upon Rumsfeld and troop levels, Donna from Pajama Pundits posted an excellent comment several weeks ago. I apologize for the incredible lateness of this response. I started writing it up, and then got caught up in other things, and then this started growing into a project all of its own. Hopefully this was worth the wait — not that I actually think anybody was holding their breath for this post, or anything.

Recap

For a quick recap, Gregory Djerejian wrote a post (one of many) criticizing Rumsfeld, specifically on how he refuses to increase the number of troops in Iraq to the necessary level to ensure security and provide the best hope for a successful occupation. One of the commenters on that post kept asking what possible reason could Rumsfeld have for not increasing troop levels if it’s such a no-brainer.

Those of you familiar with my Case Against Bush post already know that my response was that Rumsfeld and Bush simply don’t care all that much what actually happens in Iraq. After all, it matches the pattern of other policies, and as I responded to him, the most striking example is the tax cut:

Recall [Bush] proposed [the tax cut] during an economic boom, using supply-side arguments to counter critics warning about it being inflationary. And indeed, it’s designed as a supply-side tax cut, focusing on the higher tax brackets who are more likely to invest the savings to spur production. When the recession hit, he marketed the same tax cut as a Keynesian recession-fighter — yet spurring supply is counter-productive when you have a CapEx recession due to excess inventories. A clear case where Bush obviously didn’t really care about the actual real-world consequences of the policy. He merely picked whatever theory was convenient at the time to sell the policy that he wanted (and there are huge parallels to how he used intelligence to sell the war rather than to determine if war was the right decision).

Indeed, I have yet to hear a better explanation of why Bush would pass a supply-side tax cut to fight a CapEx recession. And in addition to explaining that case, it also explains many Bush administration policies like the steel tariffs, subsidy-laden farm bill, and Medicare reform. It also would explain the low troop levels — as well as the reason why Rumsfeld still has his job despite Abu Ghraib.

One obvious reason Bush and Rumsfeld might not want to increase troop levels is cost. Outside of a draft (and Thorley Winston has an excellent comment at Winds of Change explaining why a draft is a ridiculous idea), increasing the size of a volunteer army requires increasing the incentives to volunteer, which means an increase in pay, not just to new recruits, but to everybody already enlisted. Such a cost would probably require drastic measures, such as rolling back Bush’s tax cuts or Medicare reform. But these policies were prioritized higher than success in Iraq — just like Iraq was prioritized higher than dealing (militarily or otherwise) with more immediate and graver threats, like North Korea, Iran, and Al Qaeda.

And this is where Donna came in. She made a number of points, so I’ll address them individually, not necessarily in the order she made them.

Media clowns?

In her comment, she said, “nobody in the Bush administration can do anything — good or bad — without being criticized mercilessly for it.” Personally, I think that says more about Bush than the media, as I don’t recall his father or Reagan getting nearly this much criticism from conservatives and nonpartisans. She continued:

The media clowns looking for somebody, anybody, especially a Republican, to criticize Bush so they can immediately rush to air with “nanananabooboo… gotcha” silences (and sickens) reasonable voices on both sides.

While I certainly think bloggers are making the traditional media increasingly irrelevant, I’ve never believed in media bias, since supply will react to meet demand in a free market. But regardless of all that, Greg Djerejian is certainly no clown, and neither is Dan Drezner (furthermore, Djerejian supported Bush). Indeed, both are prime examples of reasonable voices — the rare kind of voices that call things as they see ’em, rather than to further a partisan agenda. And like Phil Carter, the kind of voices that are well respected by both sides, and examples that every blogger should aspire towards.

In fact, this “calls ’em as it sees ’em” quality can be said of most of the conservatives that they cited. Recall that I said:

…there’ve been quite a few critics of Rumsfeld from the right lately, including Senators John McCain and Chuck Hagel, which is not that new, nor surprising. But now it’s also coming from the likes of Senator Trent Lott, Senator Norm Coleman, Senator Susan Collins, Norman Schwarzkopf, Joe Scarborough, Thomas Donnelly, and the editor of The Weekly Standard, William Kristol (links via Djerejian here and here and also via Dan Drezner, another long-time conservative critic of Rumsfeld).

I hardly think Djerejian or Drezner are silencing reasonable voices here (especially since they both have open comments with surprisingly reasonable discussions for blogs so highly-trafficked). Indeed, Bush’s insistence on keeping Rumsfeld fits the pattern I’ve been pointing out. After all, it’s one thing to ignore criticism from liberals, which can be motivated by partisanship (although I always urge people not to discount anything out of hand). But from your own party? Especially from straight-shooting conservatives who are very likely saying these things because they believe them. Ignoring such criticism pretty much fits the pattern of an administration that doesn’t particularly care about real-world results, and is hardly surprising since they’ve also ignored the advice of their own people.

So I think claims about Rumsfeld’s competence are definitely worth looking into.

Troop levels in Iraq

Donna also said:

I don’t see where a massive increase in numbers would accomplish very much.
…
Would it not turn world opinion against us even more? Would it not demoralize, perhaps even alienate the peaceful majority of Iraqis who now support our presence there? Would it not look like we really were into ‘empire building’? Would it not likely incite more hostility from… say, Iran?

This is really the crux of the issue, and something that I haven’t had much of a handle on. In regards to world opinion and the hearts and minds of Iraqis, this is certainly a valid concern. Of course, it could have been addressed by merely avoiding the invasion in the first place. This was a perfectly viable option, as Iraq was known to be a non-immediate secondary threat, with a nuclear program well behind that of Iran and North Korea (especially since they did not have their own nuclear power plants and thus were not capable of creating weapons-grade fissile material).

At the very least, the invasion and occupation should have used a much broader multi-national force (as in first Gulf War) to allay the inevitable suspicions of empire building. The obvious mistake was the Bush administrations refusal to trust the UN inspections team just because they didn’t give results that Bush wanted (which also fits the pattern). Of course, after our going to war over the objections of possible allies and with mostly allies whose own electorates opposed the war, like Britain, Australia, and Spain (which may have helped lead to the Spanish Bombings), and after the disbanding of the Iraqi army, that avenue is now closed.

So at this point, the only way to get more troops in Iraq is via more American troops. Why would we want that? Well, the best thing we can do to win the hearts and minds of Iraqis is to ensure their security, and to make their lives better than they were under Saddam. And this is so important that you need to do it even if you don’t have a broad enough coalition to prevent anti-U.S. resentment. It would also have helped greatly to prioritize the security of Iraqis over that of Americans, but that required a lot more troops, or else we wouldn’t have had to create the Green Zone in the first place.

But I’m no military expert, so I did a bit of poking around. Here’s some of what I’ve found.

Phil Carter

A couple of months ago, Paul Bremer made some remarks on troop levels. Phil Carter, a former Army officer and longtime writer on military affairs (and someone with a reputation of calling it as it is), had this reaction after Bremer quickly backtracked under pressure:

Sorry Mr. Bremer — you had it right the first time. And don’t worry about the backlash — you’re in good company. I’m just glad you had the intellectual honesty to say what so many smart folks have been saying for nearly a year and a half: that we did a spectacular job of winning major combat operations, but failed to put the troops on the ground to secure the peace. This failure, driven in large part by bad judgment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (see, e.g., the decision to rewrite the Army’s TPFDD and deployment orders before the war), continues to impede the ability of U.S. forces to establish a secure environment in Iraq.

Unfortunately, this is anything but a new lesson. As Amb. James Dobbins writes in his RAND study America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq, we have learned this lesson over and over again during the small and large wars of the 20th Century — in Nazi Germany, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Winning the war is one thing; winning the peace is quite another. It quite often requires more troops and resources to effectively secure the peace than to win the war. Technology can only do so much to help win the peace.

Wolfowitz has claimed that it was not logical for the occupation to need more soldiers than were required to win the war. But while it might not seem intuitive (a better word to describe what he meant, because he didn’t actually make a logical argument), our recent experience has shown exactly that. Carter elaborates much more on that in this Washington Monthly piece from June 2003, discussing the examples of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan. Here’s what he says about Bosnia:

In Bosnia, America won its war with a combination of muscular diplomacy, air power, and covertly armed Bosnian-Muslim and Croat proxy armies on the ground. That mix of tools brought about the Dayton Accords in the fall of 1995. But when it came to making that treaty work, America had to send in its heaviest armor divisions, putting a Bradley fighting vehicle on nearly every street corner to enforce the peace. NATO initially sent 60,000 soldiers into Bosnia, and almost eight years after Dayton, America still has several thousand soldiers on the ground in Bosnia, as part of a 13,000-soldier NATO force. Winning hearts and minds took a backseat to overawing malcontent factions with an overwhelming and, for all intents and purposes, enduring show of force.

Later on, Carter explains why it takes so much more:

First, the simple question of keeping order: “It’s frustrating; we do not have the personnel or the training to be policemen,” Army civil affairs Maj. Jack Nales told The Washington Post in Baghdad. In one encounter, Nales had to explain the lack of order to civilians. “I’m sorry the police agencies and judicial system isn’t [sic] here. I’m sorry we don’t have enough soldiers to help you.”

Second, only a few soldiers — civil affairs specialists, military police, and medical and engineering units, mostly — are specially equipped for the actual work of nation-building. The vast majority of the rest provide security for these lightly armed units. An engineering platoon of 40 soldiers might need an entire company of infantry (120 men) for security, depending on the terrain. A lack of security entails cutting the number of nation-building missions. If only three infantry companies are available, then only three missions can be undertaken at any one time — essentially the problem in Iraq today.

Third, without a secure environment, no one else can do their job. Weapons investigators are hamstrung if they are constantly getting shot at or inspecting sites whose security evaporates the moment they leave. Oil crews and aid workers don’t want to be shot on the job any more than soldiers do, and security concerns have slowed progress on every project in Iraq — from opening the port at Umm Qasr to reopening the oil fields at Kirkuk.

The whole piece is definitely worth reading.

The Belmont Club

In addition, Djerejian recently linked to a post by wretchard at The Belmont Club, where a reader provides four links to pieces on troop strengths in occupations, including a table showing the ratio of troops to population in past occupations. Djerejian notes that the table “showcases that Iraq is on the low end (particularly where one faces a significant insurgency).”

Also cited by both wretchard and Djerejian is a Stephen Budiansky piece in the Washington Post:

When Germany surrendered in May 1945, … Army plans called for an occupation force of some 400,000 in the American zone for the first 18 months — or one U.S. soldier for every 40 Germans.

When NATO forces went into Kosovo in 1999, they followed the same proven formula: 50,000 troops for a population of 2 million, one soldier for every 40 inhabitants. A recent Rand Corp. study by military analyst James Quinlivan concluded that the bare minimum ratio to provide security for the inhabitants of an occupied territory, let alone deal with an active insurgency, is one to 50.

In Iraq today, coalition forces number about 160,000, or one for every 160 Iraqis.

Which is a pretty stark contrast. Now, wretchard isn’t as harsh on Rumsfeld as Djerejian is, pointing out that the recipe for success is not nearly as simple as merely adding more troops1 — but he doesn’t seem to dispute the assessment that more troops were needed as a prerequisite for a successful occupation.

James Dobbins

Similar arguments are made by James Dobbins (mentioned earlier by Carter), who is the Director of the International Security and Defense Policy Center at RAND. From a Fred Kaplan article in Slate:

Dobbins was Bush’s special envoy to post-Taliban Afghanistan. Through the 1990s, under Presidents Clinton and (the first) Bush, Dobbins oversaw postwar reconstruction in Kosovo, Bosnia, Haiti, and Somalia. Now a policy director at the Washington office of the Rand Corp., he has co-authored a book, America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq…, which concludes — based on research done mainly before Gulf War II got under way — that nearly everything this administration has said and done about postwar Iraq is wrong.

One pertinent lesson Dobbins uncovered is that the key ingredient — the “most important determinant,” as he puts it — of successful democratic nation-building in a country after wartime is not the country’s history of Westernization, middle-class values, or experience with democracy, but rather the “level of effort” made by the foreign nation-builders, as measured in their troops, time, and money.

To see just how wrong Wolfowitz was, look at Dobbins’ account of how many troops have been needed to create stability in previous postwar occupations. Kosovo is widely considered the most successful exercise in recent nation-building. Dobbins calculates that establishing a Kosovo-level occupation-force in Iraq (in terms of troops per capita) would require 526,000 troops through the year 2005. A Bosnia-level occupation would require 258,000 troops — which could be reduced to 145,000 by 2008. Yet there are currently only about 150,000 foreign (mainly American) troops in Iraq — about the same as the number that fought the war.
…
Bringing in more troops and at least some police after the war would also have meant fewer American and Iraqi casualties. Dobbins is categorical on this point: “The highest levels of casualties have occurred in the operations with the lowest levels of U.S. troops.” In fact, he adds, “Only when the number of stabilization troops has been low in comparison to the population” — such as in Somalia, Afghanistan, and now Iraq — “have U.S. forces suffered or inflicted significant casualties.” By contrast, in Germany, Japan, Bosnia, and Kosovo — where troop levels were high — Americans suffered no postwar combat deaths.

And this was written before the war, long before we knew there would be an insurgency of this size or scope.

So as far as I can tell, many experts have made a strong case before and during the occupation that we needed many more troops, and I haven’t really seen much in the way of explaining why this might be wrong — beyond Wolfowitz’s overly simplistic “logic.”

The time factor

Of course, we can’t simply just add more troops, because as Donna wrote in her comment, increasing troop levels isn’t just a question of cost, since “well-trained units possessing special skills (military police, for example) aren’t available in instant mix stored on a shelf until needed.” This is clearly true. It obviously takes time to build up an army and train them, and it takes time to groom officers.

But the thing is, we’ve had time. I think one of Rumsfeld and/or Bush’s key mistakes is that we haven’t made effective use of our available time and resources (the very point I make in the Opportunity cost and threat prioritization section of my Bush post). Recall, General Eric Shinseki came up with his troop estimate almost two years ago in February of 2003, before the invasion. We’ve had plenty of time to take the necessary steps to ensure sufficient troop levels by now. But Bush and Rumsfeld still have not done anything along these lines.

In fact, I find a strong parallel between Shinseki and Bush’s first chief economic advisor, Lawrence Lindsey. Before the war, Congress kept pressing the Bush administration for some estimate as to the cost of the Iraq invasion and occupation, and they kept getting stonewalled. Finally, Lindsey broke ranks and projected a cost of $100 billion to $200 billion. The White House angrily responded that this was way too high, and Bush soon fired Lindsey. Of course, his estimate, like Shinseki’s, has proven startlingly accurate.

While hindsight is 20/20, and there was no way of knowing at the time which estimate would be right or wrong, what I find very telling is how their projections were dealt with. A reasonable and sensible reaction would be to point out why these estimates were wrong and to provide better estimates along with an explanation of why they were better. Better yet would be to create contingency plans in case they turned out to be right (as it seems they have). Instead, what the Bush administration did was to simply downplay and ignore them. And indeed, such an approach fits the behavior expected of an administration that doesn’t particularly care about the actual real-world results, which was the case I was making — a case that Bush himself strengthens whenever he refuses to hold anybody accountable for such obvious mistakes, and instead gets rid of people who tell him things he doesn’t want to hear.

War of choice

And the thing is, time is really no excuse. Donna also said, “Rumsfeld was right, you go to war with the army you have.” But this is only true if you are the country being invaded. But Iraq did not invade the United States; we invaded them (and if you’re going to talk about 9/11, I’ve already discussed that here). Everything was done according to our timetable.

So if we did not have an army capable of dealing with the invasion and the occupation, we should merely have postponed the invasion until we did have that army, just like we did with the D-Day invasion of Normandy in World War II. Russia had been asking for second front since 1942, but we didn’t have the necessary military forces or landing craft to pull it off. Thus we delayed the invasion until 1944, when we finally did have the forces needed for the invasion to succeed. After all, you don’t bring a knife to a gunfight.

And the global situation was much more dire then. Even if Iraq was trying to develop nuclear weapons (and the Duelfer report confirmed that they weren’t), we still knew that the level of threat that Iraq posed to us and the world did not rival that of Iran or North Korea — let alone Nazi Germany. This means that the window of opportunity was much wider than the Bush administration depicted. So if we don’t have enough troops, the reason is not lack of time, but lack of planning (or, according to James Fallows, because all of the planning was willfully ignored).

Is it too late?

All that being said, there’s still the question of what we can do now. Because of the time factor, any increase in enlistment is not likely to bear results in time to make a difference. So, I suppose one could make the argument that the damage is done, it’s too late to add troops, and we have already lost the war for the hearts and minds of Iraqis. The same James Dobbins from above makes that exact case in a must-read piece from Foreign Affairs:

Keeping U.S. troops in Iraq will only provoke fiercer and more widespread resistance, but withdrawing them too soon could spark a civil war. The second administration of George W. Bush seems to be left with the choice between making things worse slowly or quickly.

The beginning of wisdom is to recognize that the ongoing war in Iraq is not one that the United States can win. As a result of its initial miscalculations, misdirected planning, and inadequate preparation, Washington has lost the Iraqi people’s confidence and consent, and it is unlikely to win them back. Every day that Americans shell Iraqi cities they lose further ground on the central front of Iraqi opinion.

While this is a very dark assessment, he does offer some hope:

The war can still be won — but only by moderate Iraqis and only if they concentrate their efforts on gaining the cooperation of neighboring states, securing the support of the broader international community, and quickly reducing their dependence on the United States.

But basically he’s saying that we’re stuck between a rock and a hard place because we’ve squandered our chances by not having enough troops on the ground while we still had a chance to win over hearts and minds.

In addition, Andrew Sullivan reports that Stratfor (a private intelligence agency) echoes this assessment. From their report (subscription required):

The issue facing the Bush administration is simple. It can continue to fight the war as it has, hoping that a miracle will bring successes in 2005 that didn’t happen in 2004. Alternatively, it can accept the reality that the guerrilla force is now self-sustaining and sufficiently large not to flicker out and face the fact that a U.S. conventional force of less than 150,000 is not likely to suppress the guerrillas. More to the point, it can recognize these facts: 1. The United States cannot re-engineer Iraq because the guerrillas will infiltrate every institution it creates. 2. That the United States by itself lacks the intelligence capabilities to fight an effective counterinsurgency. 3. That exposing U.S. forces to security responsibilities in this environment generates casualties without bringing the United States closer to the goal. 4. That the strain on the U.S. force is undermining its ability to react to opportunities and threats in the rest of the region. And that, therefore, this phase of the Iraq campaign must be halted as soon as possible.

Link via Dave Schuler of The Glittering Eye found via Praktike’s del.icio.us links on Iraq, which he started cuz of my post on del.icio.us CommentBlogging, to be ridiculously self-referential.

These perceptions match the view from the ground according to The Economist, a center-right publication that supported the war. Now they paint a grim picture:

…the insurgency…has deepened and spread almost every month since the occupation began. In mid-2003, Donald Rumsfeld, America’s defence secretary, felt able to dismiss the insurgents as “a few dead-enders”. Shortly after, official estimates put their number at 5,000 men, including many foreign Islamic extremists. That figure has been revised to 20,000, including perhaps 2,000 foreigners, not counting the thousands of hostile fighters American and British troops have killed; these are the crudest of estimates.

It seems so long ago when conservatives were trying their darnedest to spin the situation in Iraq to make it look like the insurgency was about to be crushed. It was always just around the corner. Most notable was Steven den Beste, and most spectacularly, Samizdata, which made the bubble-like mistake of drawing a straight-line projection from a two-month sample — while ignoring the previous months in order to get the trend they wanted.

Which is why I try not to get into the predictions game. I know I don’t know enough to make accurate ones, and as this seems to be true for most others as well, the typical reason they try is for partisan spin. So instead, I merely try my best to figure out what’s been going on. The article (which is another must-read) goes on:

Barely six months ago, Mosul was one of the most tranquil spots in Iraq. Now it is one of the most violent, and least policed. It may be no coincidence that, until last January, around 20,000 American troops were billeted in and around the city and led by a most dynamic commander. With troops urgently required elsewhere, they were replaced by 8,500 soldiers, around 700 of whom were diverted to Fallujah and Baghdad.

Thus harried, American commanders have abandoned the pretence of winning the love of Iraqis ahead of the scheduled vote. “Our broad intent is to keep pressure on the insurgents as we head into elections,” says General Casey. “This is not about winning hearts and minds; we’re not going to do that here in Iraq. It’s about giving Iraqis the opportunity to govern themselves.”

That could be possible if Iraqis would only accept the opportunity America is offering—which is not the case in Ramadi, for example. Though the city has more than 4,000 police, they refuse to work alongside American forces. According to the marines, the police’s sole act of co-operation is to collect wounded insurgents from their base. For most of the past four months, Anbar has had no provincial administration, since the governor resigned after his children were kidnapped. Elsewhere, America’s forces are incapable of giving Iraqis the security they crave because, quite simply, there aren’t enough of them.

Emphasis mine. It’s definitely not a good sign for the military to be giving up on the war for the hearts and minds of Iraqis.

And let me supply one last assessment. Dana Priest at The Washington Post reports that Iraq is now the new breeding ground for terrorists

Iraq has replaced Afghanistan as the training ground for the next generation of “professionalized” terrorists, according to a report released yesterday by the National Intelligence Council, the CIA director’s think tank.

Iraq provides terrorists with “a training ground, a recruitment ground, the opportunity for enhancing technical skills,” said David B. Low, the national intelligence officer for transnational threats. “There is even, under the best scenario, over time, the likelihood that some of the jihadists who are not killed there will, in a sense, go home, wherever home is, and will therefore disperse to various other countries.”

In other words, while the war in Afghanistan helped fight terrorism and make us more safe, it seems that the war in Iraq is now likely to make us less safe in the future. This, after costing hundreds of billions of tax dollars, tying up much of our military’s resources, costing the lives of more than one thousand American soldiers and countless Iraqi civilians, and disrupting the lives of many, many more American and Iraqi families. This is exactly why war should only be used as a last resort.

But yes, it could very well be that the war has already failed. What can we do now? As Dobbins suggests, we should try to minimize the damage as much as we can. But most importantly, we need to hold those responsible for it accountable as best as we can. Yes, our options are much more severely limited now because we’ve squandered our best opportunity. Just like we did in Iraq.

¹ That Belmont Club post is the last in a series of three posts by wretchard on troop levels. Here is the first one and here is the second, the main points being that all occupations are different situations, that military effectiveness is not solely dependent upon troop levels, and that we might not have had the military capabilities needed for occupying Iraq. None of which argues whether we have enough troops or not, but just that it’s important to keep in mind that the situation is more complicated than just a simple numbers game. After all, you can supply plenty of troops and still lose if you deploy them poorly or fail to equip them properly. But of course, this doesn’t mean that numbers aren’t an important part of the equation. Return.

January 18, 2005 10:24 PM in Foreign Affairs, Politics | Permalink