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TechnoratiThis past week, both the House and the Senate debated and voted on legislation affecting the deployment of U.S. troops in Iraq. In the Senate, the issue was the length of time soldiers and Marines would have at home between deployments to the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan. In the House, Ike Skelton (D-MO) introduced a bill requiring the secretary of defense to begin withdrawing troops from Iraq within 120 days of the legislation becoming law and complete the drawdown to a "limited presence" - a heretofore unknown parameter - by April 1, 2008.
While each of these pieces of legislation would substantially change the current tactics and missions of U.S. forces, neither provides an answer to three vital questions:
- Will combat units configured as "quick reaction" forces be positioned in Iraq, on its periphery, or afloat in the Persian Gulf?
- If combat units are kept in Iraq, how many troops will remain, including combat support and training cadre?
- Where will these soldiers and civilian personnel be located if they are based in Iraq?
The current legislation raises as many questions as it answers. There is a simpler alternative.
Current Troop Levels
With the 29,600 extra troops (21,500 combat and another 8,100 combat support) that constitute the six month-old surge, U.S. military strength in Iraq stands at approximately 160,000. It is expected to stay at that level at least until October 1, 2007, the start of the new fiscal year, if not until next spring. The administration will come under increasingly heavy pressure from its congressional allies to "reduce" the total U.S. military presence in Iraq to its "pre-surge" total of 130,000 or risk a political and electoral firestorm in November 2008.
The administration will likely announce the first reductions between September 15- October 1, 2007 - that is, between the date it must send Congress a promised progress report by General David Petraeus and the start of the new fiscal year. Judging from the interim report released July 12 and defended by President Bush during an hour-long press conference, the mid-September report will be carefully parsed by everyone: Democrats, Republicans, the press, and perhaps the public as well.
Whatever the details of the troop drawdown announcement, there will not likely be a firm date by which all combat troops - let alone all military personnel other than the normal Marine Corps contingent stationed at U.S. embassies - are withdrawn from Iraq. The Pentagon will continue to pursue conflicting if not contradictory mission(s), only with fewer forces left "in-country."
In general terms, the residual force will assume a scaled-down version of missions assigned at one time or another. These include: training Iraqi army and police units; providing "force protection" capabilities for U.S. training personnel and installations; helping seal Iraq's borders to prevent arms and anti-U.S. and anti-Iraqi government fighters from entering Iraq; and carrying the fight to al-Qaeda-in Iraq. There will also be one new mission: providing a "quick reaction" capability for Iraqi government forces as needed.
The proposed legislation contains all sorts of caveats, exceptions, and restrictions, all of which the president can waive if he determines them detrimental to national security. What remains equally unclear is how reducing troop levels by 30,000 or 50,000 or 80,000 will substantially improve conditions in Iraq - the administration's proclaimed objective for continuing the occupation of the country. Even with the current troop surge, violence overall has not decreased. It has only shifted away from Baghdad and al-Anbar province to other parts of Iraq.
Fewer U.S. troops on urban patrols will produce fewer Iraqi and U.S. fatalities. Removing U.S. troops from vehicular roadblocks and checkpoints will save Iraqi lives (military sources concede that U.S. troops manning checkpoints or running convoy duty killed or wounded 429 Iraqis in the last 12 months). But these steps will not decrease the level of inter- and even intra-sectarian and ethnic violence that now ravages Iraq.
Another Private Matter
The proposed legislation also doesn't clarify the role of the other not-so-secret U.S. army in Iraq: the private contractors. Even with the surge in military troop strength to 160,000, the U.S., Iraqi, and other private contractors exceed at least by 20,000 those in uniform, according to U.S. government statistics. As reported by the Los Angeles Times, a breakdown of the total shows that, as of February 2007, companies under U.S. government contracts and thereby financed by U.S. taxpayer dollars employed 21,000 U.S. citizens, 43,000 foreign personnel, and 118,000 Iraqis. A reduction in military personnel should translate into reductions in the total number of contractors needed to feed soldiers and clean and repair bases, but just how many and from which category will not be determined until the Pentagon decides on redeployment.
The contractor picture is further complicated by the presence of a large number of individuals employed by private security firms under contract to the United States. The Pentagon estimates 6,000 such contractors while Central Command's database lists 10,800. Both totals are well below the private security company association's figure of 30,000 in Iraq. Any drawdown of U.S. troop strength probably will not affect private security contractors, many of whom protect Iraqis or U.S. executives living in or visiting Iraq in connection with rebuilding its infrastructure and institutions.
One sure way to cut through all the ambiguities and uncertainty would be to start withdrawing troops no later than October 1, 2007 and simply keep going until all armed forces - combat, combat support, and combat service support - have left Iraq. This would enable the Iraqi government to determine which American companies it wants to help rebuild the country and how many U.S. citizens it allows within its borders. But until Baghdad gets firm control over its economy - and no longer has to deal with occupation conditions - it will continue to struggle to achieve political coherence among its many ethnic and sectarian divisions and to re-emerge as a single sovereign state.
U.S. and coalition troops have little or no effect on the levels of intra- and inter-sectarian and ethnic violence, which are the main impediments to the political, constitutional, social, and economic regeneration of Iraq as a sovereign country. So there can be no reason for keeping even a "limited presence" of foreign military troops in Iraq. The logic of the remedy could not be clearer. The generals on the ground in Baghdad and the politicians in Washington admit that there is no military solution to the Iraq imbroglio. This argues in and of itself that there is no mission for U.S. troops. Without a mission, they should return home - no ifs, ands, or buts.
Dan Smith is a military affairs analyst for Foreign Policy In Focus, a retired U.S. Army colonel, and a senior fellow on military affairs at the Friends Committee on National Legislation. His blog is The Quakers' Colonel.
© 2007 Foreign Policy In Focus
7 Comments so far
Show AllSo many of our tax dollars are flowing into body shops that employ the mercenaries that they can afford to buy Cngress and keep the wars going and the revenue flowing.
An excellent piece.
At the crux of this discussion is the question of whether or not the public deliberations regarding troop levels that are initiated by the Executive Branch are in good faith, or if they are merely political tactics with no relationship to facts and realities on the ground, or to the objective and rational assessment of the impact of troop level changes on progress versus the cost of the progress.
At a macro level, it is difficult to argue that the sacrifice in lives and treasure has been worth it, unless the true benefit is not part of the official dialogue. Namely, the geopolitical advantage of controlling the world's most important resource, and profits for influential sectors of our economy that are intimately tied to the Executive Branch.
We have years of data to work with. It is probably possible to study the question of troop levels somewhat scientifically. This approach might result in some unpleasant conclusions. Specifically, the data might suggest that troop levels have a direct correlation with instability and violence in Iraq. If this is true, it might be possible that no troops is the best solution to overall violence in Iraq.
Certainly, no troops reduces US casualties instantly to zero. That is an indisputable benefit of complete withdrawal.
If troops are beneficial, why limit the increase to a small increment? It seems the logical course of action would be a temporary drawback to give weary troops a respite, and then a doubling of troops to really give the political apparatus a window of peace for political solutions to become possible.
I'm afraid the convention of debating small changes up and down only makes sense if it is in support of a purely political strategy aimed to advance the interests of politicians or businesspeople, and not to the benefit of the US or of Iraq.
I've been watching this build for the last 5 years. I hoped when we went in that somehow those in power knew something I didn't (I haven't access to classified data since '92). The unfortunate fact is they did not and they ignored the advice and counsel of their senior military advisors.
If you want a military victory in Iraq, then here is my back of the envelope estimate of what the cost is. (Remember cost/benefit analysis and doing those before you embark on a project.) You must start the draft yesterday (Remember that fun lottery draft with the two vats of birthdays and sequence numbers?) We must fight a holding action for two years while we build to the level of manpower and equipment necessary to re-invade Iraq. (We need somewhere between 250-450K soldiers. We can no longer afford to do this with the mercenaries we have been using. They are bankrupting us. They are one of the reasons this effort is costing us $10-12 Billion a month, all of which is going on the credit card and the bill will eventually come due on us taxpayers.) We will need to totally run Iraq for at least the next 20 years to try to boil the sectarianism out of them. That will cost us at least 4 or 5 times what we are spending now. And that course of action will breed resentment and continued conflict with only a small chance of success.
Part of my frustration is that our elected leadership is unwilling to portray the situation in the terms I've just described. The choice is not stay the surge vs. withdrawal. The choices are (1) keep doing what we're doing and lose later rather than sooner. (2) Commit to the military solution I just described, or (3) Try to find a way to get our troops out of the way and find leverage through economics, diplomacy and politics. Given that reality, I think most thinking, rational people would opt for #3.
I am not a defeatist. I am a realist. Sun Tzu said that the peak of war fighting skill is to be able to win without fighting. We need to better be able to explore such an approach.
If you liked Smith's article, then here's another you may like.
http://www.journalstar.com/articles/2007/07/18/opinion/columns/doc469b80...
"Why should the US taxpayer pay the private contractors for anything?"
Because Cheney was Halliburton's former CEO and he got his old company awarded some $26 BILLION in NO BID contracts 6 months before the Iraq invasion.
Our mercenaries in Iraq
The president relies on thousands of private soldiers with little oversight, a disturbing example of the military-industrial complex.
By Jeremy Scahill, JEREMY SCAHILL is a fellow at the Nation Institute and the author of the forthcoming "Blackwater: The Rise of the World's Most Powerful Mercenary Army."
January 25, 2007
AS PRESIDENT BUSH took the podium to deliver his State of the Union address Tuesday, there were five American families receiving news that has become all too common: Their loved ones had been killed in Iraq. But in this case, the slain were neither "civilians," as the news reports proclaimed, nor were they U.S. soldiers. They were highly trained mercenaries deployed to Iraq by a secretive private military company based in North Carolina — Blackwater USA.
The company made headlines in early 2004 when four of its troops were ambushed and burned in the Sunni hotbed of Fallouja — two charred, lifeless bodies left to dangle for hours from a bridge. That incident marked a turning point in the war, sparked multiple U.S. sieges of Fallouja and helped fuel the Iraqi resistance that haunts the occupation to this day.
Now, Blackwater is back in the news, providing a reminder of just how privatized the war has become. On Tuesday, one of the company's helicopters was brought down in one of Baghdad's most violent areas. The men who were killed were providing diplomatic security under Blackwater's $300-million State Department contract, which dates to 2003 and the company's initial no-bid contract to guard administrator L. Paul Bremer III in Iraq. Current U.S. Ambassador Zalmay Khalilzad, who is also protected by Blackwater, said he had gone to the morgue to view the men's bodies, asserting the circumstances of their deaths were unclear because of "the fog of war."
Bush made no mention of the downing of the helicopter during his State of the Union speech. But he did address the very issue that has made the war's privatization a linchpin of his Iraq policy — the need for more troops. The president called on Congress to authorize an increase of about 92,000 active-duty troops over the next five years. He then slipped in a mention of a major initiative that would represent a significant development in the U.S. disaster response/reconstruction/war machine: a Civilian Reserve Corps.
"Such a corps would function much like our military Reserve. It would ease the burden on the armed forces by allowing us to hire civilians with critical skills to serve on missions abroad when America needs them," Bush declared. This is precisely what the administration has already done, largely behind the backs of the American people and with little congressional input, with its revolution in military affairs. Bush and his political allies are using taxpayer dollars to run an outsourcing laboratory. Iraq is its Frankenstein monster.
Already, private contractors constitute the second-largest "force" in Iraq. At last count, there were about 100,000 contractors in Iraq, of which 48,000 work as private soldiers, according to a Government Accountability Office report. These soldiers have operated with almost no oversight or effective legal constraints and are an undeclared expansion of the scope of the occupation. Many of these contractors make up to $1,000 a day, far more than active-duty soldiers. What's more, these forces are politically expedient, as contractor deaths go uncounted in the official toll.
The president's proposed Civilian Reserve Corps was not his idea alone. A privatized version of it was floated two years ago by Erik Prince, the secretive, mega-millionaire, conservative owner of Blackwater USA and a man who for years has served as the Pied Piper of a campaign to repackage mercenaries as legitimate forces. In early 2005, Prince — a major bankroller of the president and his allies — pitched the idea at a military conference of a "contractor brigade" to supplement the official military. "There's consternation in the [Pentagon] about increasing the permanent size of the Army," Prince declared. Officials "want to add 30,000 people, and they talked about costs of anywhere from $3.6 billion to $4 billion to do that. Well, by my math, that comes out to about $135,000 per soldier." He added: "We could do it certainly cheaper."
And Prince is not just a man with an idea; he is a man with his own army. Blackwater began in 1996 with a private military training camp "to fulfill the anticipated demand for government outsourcing." Today, its contacts run from deep inside the military and intelligence agencies to the upper echelons of the White House. It has secured a status as the elite Praetorian Guard for the global war on terror, with the largest private military base in the world, a fleet of 20 aircraft and 20,000 soldiers at the ready.
From Iraq and Afghanistan to the hurricane-ravaged streets of New Orleans to meetings with Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger about responding to disasters in California, Blackwater now envisions itself as the FedEx of defense and homeland security operations. Such power in the hands of one company, run by a neo-crusader bankroller of the president, embodies the "military-industrial complex" President Eisenhower warned against in 1961.
Further privatizing the country's war machine — or inventing new back doors for military expansion with fancy names like the Civilian Reserve Corps — will represent a devastating blow to the future of American democracy
http://www.latimes.com/news/opinion/commentary/la-oe-scahill25jan25,0,44...
Email your senators and representatives to support impeachment of bush & chaney. Watch last Friday's Bill Moyers' Journal online. It was an education for me.
Why should the US taxpayer pay the private contractors for anything? Tony