- Just over a year after the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks,
the Bush administration published its new National Security Strategy Policy,
giving prominent place to unilateral, preventive wars - followed by the
dismantling of the leadership and governing structures in targeted countries.
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- What this radical new doctrine failed to acknowledge,
describe or discuss was our preparation for the consequences.
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- Left unsaid is that we would bear the heavy new burdens
of protracted occupation and state building on a massive scale after these
preventive wars. Instead, the new doctrine reads more like a vision statement
than a strategic plan. It fails to address how to achieve the administration's
stated objectives in light of real world constraints: acceptable costs
and consequences.
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- Euphoria over the capture of Saddam Hussein notwithstanding,
a year after the publishing of the NSSP, our military faces long-term occupation
duty in not one, but two, countries. In Afghanistan, about 9,000 U.S. troops
are attempting to guarantee the survival of a new government, train the
new Afghan army and fight resurgent Taliban and al-Qaida units increasingly
emboldened since their defeat in 2001.
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- More than 150,000 coalition soldiers (87 percent American)
now occupy Iraq - about six soldiers for every 1,000 Iraqis. That is a
very low ratio by historic standards. Occupations forces facing concerted
resistance often require about 20 troops per thousand, so if insurgency
in Iraq continues to intensify, suppressing it may eventually require 300,000
troops or more.
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- Yet the Bush administration neither planned for such
a large-scale, long-serving occupation force, nor did it instruct our military
to train troops for occupation duty, a task very different from battlefield
combat.
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- Maintaining public order, guarding civilian reconstruction
activities and rooting out insurgents - all while respecting the rights
of civilians - require specific training that has been given to only a
small portion of our troops in Iraq. To this administration, such training
is uncomfortably close to that needed for peacekeeping operations - a role
Bush officials disdain.
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- Our total deployable ground forces (Army and Marines)
number about 400,000 active duty men and women and another 500,000 reservists.
Together these numbers are more than enough to fight America's wars of
short duration such as the 1991 war with Iraq.
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- But when policy choices result in long occupations, such
totals quickly become insufficient - a result of the dismal math of force
rotations. It takes four troop units on active duty to sustain deployment
of one active unit in the field for multiple years, and it takes nine reserve
units to sustain deployment of one reserve unit.
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- A four- or five-year occupation of Iraq by 65,000 regular
and 35,000 reserve troops - a realistic possibility - will require a rotation
base of 260,000 active troops (65 percent of our deployable active ground
forces) and 315,000 reserve troops (63 percent of our deployable reserve
ground forces.) This illustration does not properly capture the full effect
of our broader "war on terror" on our reservists.
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- Currently, more than 130,000 reserve ground troops are
serving in homeland security roles, "back filling" for active-duty
soldiers elsewhere abroad and deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. For the
reservists, this level of mobilization is already more than twice the long-term
sustainable rate.
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- If another war begins, President Bush will still be able
to mobilize plenty of military power. It is occupations that are the problem.
If occupation of Iraq stretches into years and the "war on terrorism"
widens even further, Army Reserve and National Guard units will be called
to active service again and again - an activation rate far higher than
the norm expected by our citizen soldiers, their families and their communities.
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- The Bush administration plans to start drawing down U.S.
troops in Iraq next spring, but history suggests a different course is
as likely. After WWII, U.S. forces occupied Germany for 10 years and Japan
for seven.
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- So far, Congress and the American people are only dimly
aware of a critical decision just ahead due to the new Iraq war: either
we invest in larger armies trained and ready for long occupation duty,
or we jettison the Bush administration's radical doctrine of preventive
wars and regime change.
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- - Charles Knight is co-director of the Project on Defense
Alternatives in Cambridge, Mass. Marcus Corbin is director of the Military
Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information in Washington. Contact
the authors at Global Beat Syndicate, 418 Lafayette Street, Suite 554,
New York, N.Y. © 2004 Tallahassee Democrat and wire service sources.
All Rights Reserved.
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- http://www.tallahassee.com/mld/democrat/news/opinion/7609112.htm
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