Less than 5 Iraqi Units can Fight Insurgents Alone

[sabra]

http://www.menewsline.com/stories/2005/august/08_25_1.html

LESS THAN 5 IRAQI UNITS CAN FIGHT INSURGENTS ALONE


BAGHDAD -- The United States has determined that fewer than five Iraqi military battalions were capable of fighting Sunni insurgents alone.

U.S. officials said the battalions came from special forces units in the Iraq Army. They said the units were deemed Level 1, or capable of completely independent combat operations.

U.S. coalition commander Gen. George Casey said "less than a handful" of Iraqi battalions were at Readiness Level 1, or totally independent of coalition forces. In an interview to the U.S. Army publication "The Advisor," Casey outlined for the first time the readiness level of Iraqi troops.

"You don't build an army overnight," Casey said. "They're not going to be independent for a while. But we purposely set it up that way so we could get them into the lead in operating independently sooner, so they will learn faster."

This isn't looking good :-(

[Kipling]

1. Well, thank god there's no insurgency and it's in its final throes anyway!

[saigon68]

13. THEY WILL NEVER BUILD AN ARMY

The "natives" are not christians

Only thugs and hoodlums who are paid $2000.00 a day will fight for the CRUSADERS.

[Roland99]

2. Do we have any numbers on attrition? Both killed and deserters?

[FloridaPat]

3. Overnight? He's had 3 years. Of course, if they weren't killing their own

people, they might have a lot more. It should be rather hard to find a large number of criminal minds that enjoy killing innocent people. Our troops have to be under orders to do that.

[Oerdin]

4. Everyone knew this.

When I was in Iraq we'd all laugh when we heard Rumsfield's latest pronouncements of how many hundreds of thousands of "Iraqi Security Forces" that had been trained. None of them had any heart and they'd run at the first sign of trouble. Many of their leaders were taking bribes from insurgents to look the other way and not interupt insurgents. We'd go on raids and mostly the ICDC (later renamed Iraqi National Guard when the ICDC earned such a bad name) would just stand there; we couldn't use them inside houses because the guys were so poorly paid they'd steal from the houses we were searching. Other then a few elite Shi'a and Kurdish units you just couldn't trust the ING.

[sabra]

6. thank you for an insiders perspective post!

I would imagine many here would be interested to hear your side of what's going "over there".

peace.

[mikeytherat]

5. I thought all of the insurgents were FOREIGNERS???

In just the past few days, though, I have seen several "news" stories with "Sunni insurgents" placed prominently.

New selling point for the Iraqi constitution debacle?

mikey_the_rat

[rodeodance]

7. looks like we canNOT 'stand down" anytime in the near future!!

[obxhead]

8. whaaaaaaa?

"The United States has determined that fewer than five Iraqi military battalions were capable of fighting Sunni insurgents alone."

So are we fighting Sunni's or insurgents? Their slipping.

[keopeli]

9. I seem to remember Rice said there were 120K Iraq troops 8 months ago...

Rice estimated the number of Iraqi security forces at more than 120,000. "We think that, among those people, there clearly continue to be questions about on-duty time, that is, people who don't report for duty. And so this is being looked at," she said. Sen. Joe Biden, D-Del., who asked her about the Iraqi security forces, said that from his trips there he sensed the number was much lower. "If you speak to the folks on the ground, they don't think there's more than 4,000 actually trained Iraqi forces," he said.

http://www.latimes.com/news/nationworld/politics/wire/sns-ap-rice-highlights,1,4809882.story?coll=sns-ap-politics-headlines

[Javaman]

10. overnight = 3 years

welcome to cmdr cuckoo bananas* world.

so by that thinking, morons* vacation time would equal 1005 years...

335 days x 3 years = 1005 years.

[gizmo1979]

11. That should be enough to

at least handle baghdad.A battalion is fairly large.

[NobleCynic]

12. Actually, 4 battalions might not be enough to handle Baghdad

A battalion is between 300 and 1000 soldiers. 4 battalions would then equate to anywhere between 1200 and 4000 men. Baghdad has a population of roughly 6 million people. For comparison purposes New York City has about 8 million people and roughly 40,000 police officers. Even accounting for local police departments in Baghdad (which are of questionable value), it might not be enough to insure security.

[eridani]

14. And those 5 are Kurdish Peshmerga, right?

Can't blame them for looking for payback, but this is NOT the way to prevent civil war.