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« A Stain on the Army | Main | On Assumptions » February 15, 2007Troop AvailabilityMatt Yglesias is a smart guy, but I see he's one of the many who doesn't understand the military much, if at all. In a piece about Rudy Giuliani Matt notes that Giulani stated that he would have sent 100,000-130,000 additional troops to Iraq beyond what President Bush used for the invasion "even though no such volume of additional troops was available." Really, Matt? And you know this from, perhaps, your extensive military experience? From intense study of doctrine and policy? Nope. He just knows it because 'everyone' knows that. I don't mean to be cruel to Matt (not that he'd care), but this kind of thing really frustrates me, especially coming from a guy who likes to talk about how 'reality-based' he is. The U.S. Army alone could have supplied an additional 130,000 troops to the Iraq war in 2003 and still had troops to spare. This isn't complicated, it's just addition and subtraction. We used about 130,000 troops in Operation Iraqi Freedom. Double that and you're at 260,000 troops. There are a bit more than 500,000 troops in the Active Army, and about 1.2 million in the Army as a whole. It doesn't seem too hard to figure out that 260,000 is less than either of those numbers, and that doesn't even include additional Marine forces that could have been used as well. Maybe Matt meant something else when he said the troops weren't available. Perhaps he was saying that high a number of troops would have been politically unfeasible. That's questionable, as we used more than that in Desert Storm, but at least some argument can be made for that. No argument can defend Matt's casual claim that an additional 130,000 troops were not available. That's sloppy at best. Posted at February 15, 2007 12:10 PM
Comment policyI apologize for only allowing authenticated commenters, but comment spam overwhelms the site if I don't use those measures to prevent it. I reserve the right to delete any comment, although generally comments will only be deleted due to use of profanity or personal attacks on people. I have no objection to vigorous argument, but when name-calling begins, I'm putting a stop to it. In the immortal words of Eugene Levy, "People, people, let's stop this before somebody says something untrue!" If you want to call people names, I recommend you get your own blog. Trackback PingsTrackBack URL for this entry: CommentsReally, Matt? And you know this from, perhaps, your extensive military experience? From intense study of doctrine and policy? Nope. He just knows it because 'everyone' knows that. This is the kind of thing that I don't know anything about, but assumed it was true because I've been reading it since 2003. My understanding for why people say it was that we had a set of reasonably hard committments that take up a portion of the Army: Afghanistan, Korea, and so forth ('so forth' meaning that I don't know what they are, but I'm blindly guessing there must be something), and that the combination of those requirements and training and rotation requirements made a larger force in Iraq impractical. Is that way off base, or are you talking about the difference between impractical and impossible: that we could have sent a larger force by pulling the Army out of all its other committments, and abandoning training requirements and so forth? Myself, I don't have the knowledge to tell at all. Posted by: LizardBreath Blech. I should have trimmed that verbiage. In 2003, we had a commitment of two brigades in Korea, one of which we have since brought back to the U.S. by way of Iraq. We had committed just shy of a division to the Balkans, but that was being handled by the National Guard. Other than that, the entire force was generally available: say 400,000 troops. And again, don't forget the Marines. Now, that would have meant that rotation would have been impossible short of general mobilization unless we could cut down the number of boots on the ground very quickly, and it would have left the cupboard relatively bare for other missions. It would have been a calculated risk. But it was not impossible, nor really even impractical. We would be much better off today, in my opinion, had we sent everyone up front, as we could have avoided a lot of the problems caused by our inability to secure the country once we arrived. Posted by: Andrew Eh, it's a blog -- if you weren't looking back on your posts and thinking 'I could have put that better', it wouldn't be the Internet. But if that's what you meant (that is, if I understand you correctly, that while we could have put that many troops in the field, but couldn't have kept them there for a sustained period of time because there wouldn't be anyone else to replace them with when it came time to rotate fresh troops in), then I think Yglesias's statement looks a little better -- he said 'impossible', and you're saying 'absolutely possible for a short burst, although not sustainable in the long run'. That starts to look less like ignorance, and more like you're talking about different things. Posted by: LizardBreath It still would not have been impossible, at least not physically. We sent troops to Europe for three-plus years. We could have sent troops to Iraq for more than a year at a time. Posted by: Andrew Post a commentThanks for signing in, . Now you can comment. (sign out) (If you haven't left a comment here before, you may need to be approved by the site owner before your comment will appear. Until then, it won't appear on the entry. Thanks for waiting.) |
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