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April 09, 2004

Expansion Time

I am a fan of Donald Rumsfeld in some areas. He came to speak at Fort Carson last year and did a great job of fielding questions from soldiers about real issues, demonstrating a wry sense of humor and some good common sense that impressed me. But these days it's hard for me to look at him and not see echoes of another Secretary of Defense: Robert McNamara.

McNamara, for those who don't remember, was SecDef for Kennedy and Johnson. Former President of the Ford Motor Company, McNamara brought a new style to the Pentagon, what he called "active role" management philosophy. He wanted to use metrics to assess effectiveness at the DoD. Not a bad idea on its face, but McNamara managed to execute it about as poorly as possible. McNamara was the man who brought us body counts, because he figured there was a limit to how many people North Vietnam could throw into the fight, so all we needed to do was kill enough of them and we'd win the war. Probably true, but as anyone who recalls Vietnam knows, it was a disaster. But McNamara was a systems guy, and systems guys establish systems and then sit back and watch them work.

So is Rumsfeld a systems guy? Before the Iraq war, Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki warned that it would require several hundred thousand troops to properly garrison Iraq after the war. For this action, Rumsfeld effectively pushed Shinseki out the door, and the war went forward with only minimal forces (which did a superb job, but the war was won a razor-thin margin). But Rumsfeld appears convinced that he can and must do everything with less, and that we can overcome manpower limitations with better systems.

Now we're facing some small uprisings in Iraq (I say small because a large uprising would almost certainly force our troops into small enclaves with little ability to take offensive action in a country of 25 million Iraqis), and the Coalition needs more troops to suppress the insurgency. Shinseki, unsurprisingly, is now being viewed much more favorably by people these days.

It is possible that we can handle the insurgency without increasing the end strength of the Army, just as the Coalition was able to defeat Iraq's armed forces with barely two divisions of ground troops. But doing so comes with a cost in additional loss of life, both Coalition and Iraqi, more time required to do the job, and more time for politicians to lose their nerve and quit before the work is done.

And what about other trouble spots around the globe? If North Korea flared up right now, how effectively could we respond? Virtually every active duty unit in the Army is in one of three states: getting ready to go to Iraq, recovering from having been in Iraq, or in Iraq now. Our margin for error is as close to non-existent as I think it's ever been, and there is no reason to believe that things will get any better in the short term.

Which means it's time we looked seriously at expanding the size of the Army by a few divisions. Yes, the Army is now talking about asking for a temporary increase in end strength, but they're not looking to make it permanent. We need to do so. Two more light divisions would give the Army precisely the flexibility it needs to handle the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan without overstressing the Reserves. The Army is already looking to restructure its forces, moving from a division-oriented force to a brigade-oriented force. This is a good start, but I'm not convinced that moving the pieces around actually gives us any more pieces to work with.

Counterinsurgency warfare requires bodies. The more people we can put in Iraq, the less trouble we'll get. Insurgents try to strike where conventional forces are weak. The fewer people we put in Iraq, the more we appear weak, and the more we invite attack. But we simply can't afford to put many more people into Iraq right now because we don't have them. That's a bad situation for us to be in, and it needs to be remedied.

It won't be cheap: an additional 50,000 soldiers will cost billions of dollars a year. And it won't necessarily be easy, although the Army seems to be doing a much better job of recruiting than I would have believed, and an appeal to people's patriotism by the President could well gather us the volunteers we'd need. But increasing the Army's size will also require time, and it's possible that we're running out. It's time for this administration to make a tough call and admit that they need some more resources to accomplish the missions ahead.

Posted at April 9, 2004 10:41 AM

Andrew Olmsted

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Comments

Andrew,

The problem with GEN Shinseki is that he was wrong about almost everything else. When it came time to discuss Iraq, he had long since blown his credibility. He wanted deploy large numbers of conventional troops to Afghanistan, was the big proponent of the Stryker (which by all accounts is doing well in Iraq, but is still massively overpriced and gold-plated) and decided the way to fix Army morale issues caused high op-tempo by giving Soldiers a new hat.

There is also the report of his meeting with Rumsfeld where he is supposed to have told Rumsfeld to forget about transformation of the Army, in exchange for which Shinseki would make him "look good on the Hill." See Jed Babbin in NRO.

At any rate, Shinseki had screwed the pooch so often and with such vigor that by the time he got something right, no one had any reason to listen tom him. And that's even assuming he did get this right - we don't have the historical perspective to make that a definitive statment yet.

Posted by: Dirk Mothaar at April 9, 2004 03:18 PM

Dirk,

I don't care about Shinseki's various transgressions. I brought him up here because the available evidence suggests that, in this case, he was right. What on Earth makes you think I care about the guy otherwise? I'm not trying to throw blame around here or ask why we didn't listen to him then. My interest is in addressing what I perceive as a problem. And since the Army is looking at extending tours of people already in Iraq, and sending units back to Iraq in short order, it would appear that I'm not alone in that assessment.

Posted by: Andrew at April 9, 2004 03:27 PM

Mental note - do not look at the comments at Castle Argghhh! while typing a comment here, else your post will vanish.

The short version of what I lost:

First, this has happened before - 3d ID was extended in July or August of last year to fix a temporary problem. 1st AD is now being extended, but also to fix a temporary problem and I'm not sure additional RA units would help at this point, if they were not already primed to go. That was the issue with 3d ID last year as well - there were new units on the way, but 3d ID was already in theater and the troops were needed right then. This seems to be very similar.

Second, I think the CoS brief at Castle Argghhh! looks promising as a way to field more useful troops with roughly the same end strength (149 new MP units! No Finance Corps! HR Command cut in half!), so I think the issue has been recognized and is being handled.

Finally, I would still love to see 7th and 24th IDs as full-fledged Regular Army divisions again, but I'm not holding my breath.

Posted by: Dirk Mothaar at April 9, 2004 05:18 PM

According to this article, they're not just talking about keeping a few of the people already there in place. They're talking about sending additional forces to further bolster our troop strength. It's a contingency plan, and it may well not happen, but the fact that we've got to think about turning around a unit that just got back and sending them into Iraq again suggests to me that two additional divisions (7th ID and 2AD) would be a Godsend.

Posted by: Andrew at April 9, 2004 05:36 PM

Yes, even if two more divisions already existed, we couldn't just beam them over there at a moment's notice.

I think the biggest gain, big-picture-wise, of a few more regular Army divisions would be the reduced strain on the NG and Reserves. The RA, despite casualties and long deployments, still seems to be doing fine reenlistment-wise. I think it's the NG and Reserves that are going to be the hardest hit, and I completely understand why.

They shouldn't have to be mobilized for 1-year shifts unless this is the Big One. It isn't, but they're asked to contribute and sacrifice as if it is. Like that sign in that truck said: "One weekend a month - My ass!"

We've got a great military, and they're all doing a wonderful job. They're moaning right now, but I'll bet most of the 1AD re-ups anyway. Griping is an inalienable right of any soldier. It's the NG and Reserves that might lost a lot of good folks before this is all over.

Posted by: murdoc at April 9, 2004 06:05 PM

I've talked about this in the past, and one of the arguments I've made for getting two divisions moving now is that it will take a great deal of time to get them spun up. They won't be a quick fix, but if we started putting them together now, they would be available in 12-24 months, at which time we could start reducing the OPTEMPO of the reserves, who will desperate need it by then.

Posted by: Andrew at April 9, 2004 06:19 PM

For the record, all Moveable Type comment windows are fungible; if you open one at one blog, and then click on one on another MT blog, the window will load the new one; you can, however, return to the previous with a simple "backwards" command in your browser of choice. (In most it's an "alt-left arrow.")

Posted by: Gary Farber at April 11, 2004 11:29 AM