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December 01, 2006

GWOT: GEN McCaffrey's Observations and the Way Forward

Early last month, GEN (Retired) Barry McCaffrey gave a presentation to the National Defense University during which he offered his assessment on several issues in the Global War on Terror. Inside the Ring has a synopsis of some of McCaffrey's points (last item), and the Army Times followed up on McCaffrey's recommendation to cut U.S. forces in Iraq by one-third.

McCaffrey warned as part of his presentation that we are breaking the Army, and that we need to trim the Iraq force to ten brigades by Christmas. Obviously the latter is not going to happen; if U.S. forces in Iraq draw down, it will not happen before mid to late 2007 at the earliest. This issue is a real one, though, and the problems will only continue to get worse as the administration continues to fight a war without asking for the necessary support for it.

My first instinct on hearing that the Army cannot send more troops to Iraq is to chuckle. We have less than one-third of the active force in Iraq at the moment. Obviously we have a lot more troops to send to Iraq, if we're willing to reduce the amount of time units are out of the combat zone. I know there are a nontrivial number of soldiers, like me, who have yet to reach the combat zone at all, beyond people who could be sent back for an additional tour. During World War II, after all, U.S. units left the country in 1942 and didn't return until late 1945 or 1946. Why is it necessary to pull units in and out of Iraq over and over again, rather than leaving them there until the job is done? The answer lies in the nature of the Iraq war. In World War II, units may have spent four years away from home, but those units were not in combat for more than a fraction of that period. The longest any U.S. Army unit spent in combat was 654 days by the 32d Infantry Division, and it was an outlier. Only six other divisions spent 500 or more days in combat over the course of the war, and only three others spent 400 or more. And because World War II was a conventional war, most units were rotated in and out of the line in order to provide them with the time needed to reconstitute their forces and recuperate from the horrors of the front line. In Iraq, that is a lot harder to do, because there is no front line from which units can be removed. Even in the Green Zone, attacks are not unknown, so work in Iraq, while not necessarily as stressful on a day-to-day basis as life in a combat unit in high-intensity conflict, inflicts are greater cumulative toll on soldiers because it is almost impossible for those soldiers to take breaks by coming off the line. A rotation policy, therefore, provides the only opportunity soldiers really have to decompress. Putting the entire Army into the fight at once is certainly a possibility, but it's one that would come at great cost, and that would break the Army in the short term. That is not to say it can be taken off the table completely, but it is an option that, if used, needs to be used only with the understanding of the damage it will cause.

Simply not putting the whole Army directly into the fight doesn't mean that the Army won't break eventually, however. There are soldiers who have already done two and three overseas tours, tours that take them away from their loved ones and which force them to see and do things that nobody would endure in a just world. The more times soldiers endure that, the harder it is to keep the force viable. It is difficult to ask people to accept spending one-third of their career separated from their loved ones, and the current rotation cycle is asking even more than that from soldiers, as some units are fortunate to get a year back on the ground before they're preparing to return to war. That is a recipe for divorce and damaged families, and it's something people will only put up with for a limited time before they decide to seek employment elsewhere. We see this even now, as promotion rates in the Army have skyrocketed as fewer and fewer people stick around to compete for higher ranks. Trimming the Army presence in Iraq to ten brigades will slow this process, but it is unlikely to halt entirely until the war is over.

This is not to say we must pull out of Iraq immediately, but it is important to keep in mind the price of continued involvement. Every new rotation will convince a few more soldiers that perhaps there are better careers in the world than the Army, and eventually we will reach a tipping point. We don't have to leave Iraq right now, but the longer we stay, the more work it will be putting our armed forces back together again.

I will return to address some of McCaffrey's other points at a later time.