http://fling93.com/blog/archives/foreign_affair/2005/rumsfeld_iraq_and_troop_levels.htmlPhil Carter
A couple of months ago, Paul Bremer made some remarks on troop levels. Phil Carter, a former Army officer and longtime writer on military affairs (and someone with a reputation of calling it as it is), had this reaction after Bremer quickly backtracked under pressure:
http://www.intel-dump.com/archives/archive_2004_10_00.shtml#1096961024Sorry Mr. Bremer — you had it right the first time. And don’t worry about the backlash — you’re in good company. I’m just glad you had the intellectual honesty to say what so many smart folks have been saying for nearly a year and a half: that we did a spectacular job of winning major combat operations, but failed to put the troops on the ground to secure the peace. This failure, driven in large part by bad judgment in the Office of the Secretary of Defense (see, e.g., the decision to rewrite the Army’s TPFDD and deployment orders before the war), continues to impede the ability of U.S. forces to establish a secure environment in Iraq.Unfortunately, this is anything but a new lesson. As Amb. James Dobbins writes in his RAND study America’s Role in Nation-Building: From Germany to Iraq,
http://www.rand.org/pubs/monograph_reports/MR1753/ we have learned this lesson over and over again during the small and large wars of the 20th Century — in Nazi Germany, Japan, Korea, Lebanon, Panama, Somalia, Haiti, Bosnia, Kosovo and Afghanistan. Winning the war is one thing; winning the peace is quite another. It quite often requires more troops and resources to effectively secure the peace than to win the war. Technology can only do so much to help win the peace.
Wolfowitz has claimed that it was not logical for the occupation to need more soldiers than were required to win the war. But while it might not seem intuitive (a better word to describe what he meant, because he didn’t actually make a logical argument), our recent experience has shown exactly that. Carter elaborates much more on that in this Washington Monthly piece from June 2003,
http://www.washingtonmonthly.com/features/2003/0306.carter.html discussing the examples of Bosnia, Kosovo, and Afghanistan.
SNIP