Long Or Short

Kevin Drum and Phil Carter discuss length of combat tours and counterinsurgency, and conclude that there's no answer. As Kevin says "Short tours don't give you enough time to learn the ground and the people, but long tours eat up the troops. There's no good middle ground."

Carter's suggestion to try to make sure to re-deploy people back to the same place they'd deployed to previously does seem like one step in the direction of a middle ground. Another necessary step would, I think, be to make sure that we're very leery as a matter of national strategy from getting involved in these kind of situations rather than deluded ourselves into thinking that some doctrinal improvements suddenly make the impossible possible. Last simply a sense of scale -- there's a whole lot of different kinds of things that can fall under the counterinsurgency or stability operations heading many of which are much less giant, manpower intensive, and infeasible than what's happening in Iraq. I hear different things, for example, about the merits of our ongoing counterinsurgency assistance to Colombia but it's certainly not creating some unbearable strain on our military. Simply avoiding situations that require hundreds of thousands of American soldiers for a years-long mission seems like the most important piece of the puzzle.

Comments

I think the British Army in Iraq had occasional home visits for the soldiers.

Posted by ndm | April 14, 2008 1:11 PM

"Simply avoiding situations that require hundreds of thousands of American soldiers for a years-long mission seems like the most important piece of the puzzle. "

That's all well and good, and it is obviously wise to avoid wars of choice. But its certainly feasible that we will be involved in wars of necessity in the near future that will pose the same problem in terms of manpower.

Historically most nations have gotten around this problem by being brutal and bloodthirsty. Its actually not that important to learn the ground and the people if you kill and destroy without remorse. But attempting to win hearts and minds in a hostile area is not easy, and the issues we face in Iraq attest to that.

Posted by sd | April 14, 2008 1:15 PM

Actually, there's another, better option: ROBOT ARMY!!!

Posted by Galen | April 14, 2008 1:18 PM

Rethink whatever you're planning to do in a foreign country if it will eventually render dependable pizza delivery impractical.

Posted by steve duncan | April 14, 2008 1:25 PM

A lot of people have tried to make this point since before the invasion, itself:

Effective security requires a lot more boots on the ground.

There's a basic tradeoff in any kind of policing operation. With enough presence, and observation, security can be obtained gently. If you don't have enough men, you have to turn to swift and ruthless violence in reprisal. If the Americans had put 500,000 troops into Iraq at the beginning, and kept the Iraqi Army intact, the Americans would not be attacking a crowded slum with air-launched missiles, and the American soldiers would not be dressed up like Ninja turtles.

Not enough people have made this point:

An effective reconstruction is the only way to end the insurgency. Every Iraqi I have heard from says exactly what few Americans ever say: electricity.

Iraq does not have a functioning economy, and it will not have a functioning economy until something is done about electricity, water and sewage.

The average age in Iraq is 19 or less, unemployment (if it could be measured) is around 50%, at least one-third of the population is barely subsisting (literally near starvation) -- these are the roots of insurgency. If insurgent is the only paying job, everyone wants to be an insurgent; that's why paying (or even just promising) the Sunni Sons of Iraq a modest stipend is effective in the short-term.

But, talking vaguely of political reconciliation is nonsense. When there are other political and economic institutions functioning, and an actual economy absorbing people's time and ambition, Iraq will be reasonably peaceful. But, even if there were not religious and tribal enmities going back hundreds of years, in the economic and demographic conditions of Iraq, the Iraqis would have to invent them for the occasion.

If, in addition to waiting for this mirage of political reconciliation, we are not spending $80+ billion rebuilding the country's infrastructure (and we are emphatically not) then we are wasting our time.

Posted by Bruce Wilder | April 14, 2008 1:30 PM

I think Bruce Wilder is essentially correct, but the horse has already left the barn in terms of what we might have accomplished with half a million GI's and a re-structured Iraqi army in 2003-4.

Iraq is no longer, or at least not for much longer, a Big Army project. We need smaller, much more professional forces on the model of the Marines' provincial reconstruction teams in Vietnam who are embedded with indigenous forces and over time learn the language, culture, and develop relationships with local leaders. These folks will be in for the long haul. They will need to be supported with "the cavalry" in the form of airpower and rapid reaction forces, but that doesn't require big numbers. We should not be parading around Iraq in huge convoys of National Guards and constructing giant, Burger King-style FOBs.

Posted by Robert Powell | April 14, 2008 2:18 PM

If the Americans had put 500,000 troops into Iraq at the beginning

But of course, we never had 500,000 troops for Iraq, not at the beginning of the war, and not now. Calling for enough troops to do the job was the same as calling for no war. And since, for some reason, that answer was not acceptable . . .

Posted by rea | April 14, 2008 2:25 PM

"Short tours don't give you enough time to learn the ground and the people, but long tours eat up the troops. There's no good middle ground."

Reduce the number of troops and everything becomes more feasible. Successful counter-insurgency requires culture and language skills uncommon among U.S. troops, but very common among the affected population (the Iraqis). So you send in relatively few people with the right skills to partner with the locals (basically the original conception of Special Forces).

The strategy is not without limitations, but it's better then current.

Posted by bjcefola | April 14, 2008 3:55 PM

Kenneth Pollack recommended 250,000 to 300,000 troops. He thought allies could be persuaded to supply much of the occupation force once the invasion was done.

It's remarkable that many liberals were supposedly convinced to support the invasion by The Threatening Storm, but apparently didn't take to heart the book's recommendations for reconstruction. No one, including Pollack himself, raised an alarm when the Bush administration indicated it would use a much smaller force, and otherwise for the most part refused to publicly discuss plans for the occupation.

I love this quote: 'The rebuilding of Iraq cannot be an afterthought to a policy of regime change. Instead, it must be a central element in U.S. preparations.' (The Threatening Storm, p. 387)

Posted by David Tomlin | April 14, 2008 4:17 PM

The solution would be to go to the Sadrists, the Badrists, the Kurds, and the Sunnis, and explain to them that they're all in the US Army now.

Then you station the Kurds in Anbar, the Sunnis in Kurdistan, the Baghdadis in Basrah and the Basrahis in Baghdad.

That's essentially what the British did in the subcontinent and the rest of Asia, including Iraq, and it worked well enough for a number of years.

Posted by Greg | April 14, 2008 4:39 PM

This business of arguing over the petty details of a major fuckup is why I really can't take some of these "pundits" seriously.

You don't do COIN. It's that fucking simple. You can't win that game.

"it worked well enough for a number of years."

The operative phrase being "for a number of years."

Then what happened?

And that was back in the days when insurgencies were run by people with flintlocks or whatever - not AK-47's, command-detonated shaped charge IEDs, and surface-to-air missiles, coordinated by cell phones and the Internet.

You simply can't do that shit any more.

Posted by Richard Steven Hack | April 14, 2008 5:25 PM

Don't overthink this

The troops aren't going to be learning the language no matter whether their tours are 2 days or 20 years at a stretch. If they don't know the language, they won't know squat about the situation no matter how long they're there. The British administrators who had to scurry onto the last boat out of India in 1947 still didn't know squat about that country, after the British had been there for centuries.

The troops aren't going to be learning the language because there are only 10-20 Americans in our whole country who have anything at all to say to Iraqis, or any interest in hearing from them, about their politics. And all 20 of those people knew perfectly well how badly the invasion and occupation were going to turn out, and were and are 100% against it. You can't do the work of understanding something unless you're interested in it and respect it, and imagine it has something to teach you. But the whole project of invading Iraq to tear down its governing arrangements, however dubious, in order to substitute something that Americans dreamed up in total ignorance of Iraq, is based solidly on the assumption that Iraq has nothing of value to teach anyone, even about Iraq.

Our troops are there to blow things up. You don't need to know squat about "local conditions" in order to blow things up. In fact, it helps if you don't know too much. It's a positive hindrance to develop any sort of respect for the things you need to blow up.

Posted by Glen Tomkins | April 14, 2008 9:47 PM