Iraq II: It's the Numbers, Stupid

Smoke rises over Baghdad from fierce fighting against insurgents. More here.

I’ve bloviated endlessly about how commanders failed to learn the primary lesson of the Vietnam War – that troops must be indoctrinated in and trained to fight counterinsurgency war – and how that that particular chicken has come home to roost in a major way in Iraq. <>

Now comes Fred Kaplan in a peerless Slate commentary to perform the coup de’grace on the subject. As Josh Marshall notes at Talking Points Memo:

"One of the ironies of the current situation is that in the early months of the occupation, Lt. Gen. David Petraeus, who's slated to take over in Iraq, was the general on the ground who all the sharpest people on military affairs thought was the one guy in charge over there who really understood what kind of a battle he was engaged in. In short, counter-insurgency, or rather, heading off an insurgency by prioritizing real reconstruction and hearts-and-minds work rather than kicking people's doors down.

"He spent last year co-authoring the Army's new counterinsurgency field manual. But look at what the manual says. Counter-insurgency operations require at least 20 combat troops per 1000 people in a given area. And look closely. That's not just military personnel, but combat troops.

"Kaplan runs through the numbers. But the key points are that you'd need 120,000 combat troops to mount real counter-insurgency operations just in Baghdad. We currently have 70,000 combat troops in the whole country. So concentrate all U.S. combat personnel in Iraq into Baghdad. Then add 20,000 more 'surge' combat troops. That leaves you 30,000 short of the number the Army thinks you'd need just in Baghdad.

" . . . We're living in the wreckage of the president's lies. And this is just one more of them."

Photo by Khalid Mohammed/The Associated Press