An Army of Lots More Than One
KAGAN, FREDERICK
An Army of Lots More Than One Our military is too small for the jobs it has to do. BY FREDERICK KAGAN THE ARMED FORCES of the United States are too small to support the missions required of them...
...We have already seen how chaos and civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s provided the breeding ground for terrorists and a haven for the bases where they trained...
...The more forces we maintain in Iraq, the fewer we have available to face other potential enemies...
...Within months the U.S...
...Only soldiers and marines can accomplish these tasks, and, given the size and complexity of the country, only in fairly large numbers...
...But the current deployment is the equivalent of more than five divisions (the 101st Airborne, 4th Infantry, and 1st Armored divisions, two brigades of the 3rd Infantry Division, the 2nd and 3rd Armored Cavalry regiments, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and elements of the 1st Infantry and 10th Mountain divisions...
...BY FREDERICK KAGAN THE ARMED FORCES of the United States are too small to support the missions required of them in the post-9/11 world...
...Given the normal requirement to have two units at home for every one deployed, the 11-division-equivalent U.S...
...Army, 370,000 are already deployed around the world...
...forces are reduced or withdrawn too soon, similar conditions in Iraq will nurture the al Qaeda operatives of the future...
...It is not merely that soldiers in Iraq are under strain from having to be peacekeepers and warfighters simultaneously and from coming under periodic attack at the hands of the populations they are trying to police, or that morale in those units will deteriorate as their deployments extend with no clear end in sight...
...Nor can we look to our allies to help us...
...Army that could take the field as a unit without our hurriedly withdrawing important elements from Iraq, Bosnia, Kosovo, or Afghanistan and sending them to war without the opportunity to retrain them...
...This will not be accomplished, however, without the prolonged deployment of significant numbers of American ground forces...
...General Shinseki, the recently retired Army chief of staff, warns us to "beware the 12-division strategy for a 10-division army"—and even he understates the problem...
...Expanding the armed forces to match the missions they must perform is an urgent task...
...The problem is that we cannot maintain such a large force in Iraq for a year without seriously damaging the Army and harming our ability to pursue other critical objectives...
...Units engaged in peacekeeping (if it can be called that) in Iraq are not training for war...
...military in Afghanistan and Iraq, two numbers may help drive it home: Of the 495,000 troops in the U.S...
...The current military structure was designed in the 1990s when all the talk was of a "strategic pause" and a prolonged period of peace...
...Army could support a three-and-two-thirds division commitment to Iraq indefi-nitely—at the cost of having no forces available for operations anywhere else in the world...
...The British are already maintaining half of their deployable forces there...
...Virtually none of the European states has the command, control, and communications facilities required for the job, let alone the strategic transportation capabilities needed to get forces to Iraq and sustain them there...
...The destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq has always been rightly seen as only the first step in a reorientation of America's security policy toward the Middle East...
...The second will do great harm to the Army...
...In addition, more than 200,000 reservists and members of the National Guard have been called up to support the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the home front...
...That is an unacceptable situation...
...Some of these troops have been deployed for more than a year, many of them earning a fraction of their civilian pay...
...All of the European states have cut their armed forces so dramatically over the past decade that they are not capable of deploying large forces to Iraq...
...The first choice is unacceptable because it may well compromise our ability to achieve our objectives in Iraq...
...If that assertion seems counterintuitive given the impressive performance of the U.S...
...Furthermore, states like France and Germany that vigorously opposed the war have demonstrated an equal unwillingness to support the peace we have imposed on Iraq...
...leadership will face a difficult choice: reduce the commitment to Iraq regardless of whether the country is ready for such a reduction, or extend the deployment of many of these units indefinitely...
...Smart weapons cannot keep peace...
...It is time to stop pretending that the United States can prosecute a war on terror, conduct peacekeeping operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, Kosovo, and Bosnia, and maintain the security of the homeland without a substantial increase in the size of the armed forces...
...Given the unrest and political chaos that currently engulf Iraq, it is hard to imagine that the United States will be able to withdraw any significant portion of its 146,000 troops from that country in less than a year without compromising our vital objectives...
...in the first place—the proliferation of Iraqi weapons to terrorist organiza-tions—if we do not finish what we have begun by establishing a stable and peaceful regime in Iraq...
...The imminence of Saddam's development of weapons of mass destruction posed a clear and present danger to the United States and its citizens at home and abroad...
...The threats, to be sure, will be different...
...If the United States proves to have eliminated the Baathist regime in Iraq only to replace it with chaos and violence, we clearly will have failed to enhance our security...
...Right now there is hardly a single division in the U.S...
...Chaos in Iraq will pose a less obvious threat, but the danger to Americans will be no less substantial...
...What pause there was has vanished, and it is not peace that now looks likely to be prolonged...
...If U.S...
...In truth, the armed forces need an increase in size of at least 25 percent...
...The U.S.-led attack could end up bringing about the very threat that prompted it Frederick Kagan is a military historian and the coauthor o/While America Sleeps...
...There is reason to fear that the hardship on them and their families may damage recruiting for the Guard...
...In many of the situations we now face, using troops on the ground is nonnegotiable, and America has too few of them...
...They cannot get schools and hospitals running, or keep electricity and water flowing, or keep hostile neighbors from attacking one another, or provide a police presence to deter looters and criminals, or hunt down and capture individual terrorists, interrogate them, and learn from them the nature of the organizations to which they belong, or find traces of a WMD program hidden carefully in a country the size of California...
Vol. 8 • July 2003 • No. 42
