Joe Galloway: Politicians Underestimate Iraq force
Joe Galloway:
Politicians Underestimate Iraq Force
About
the Author
Joseph L. Galloway is the senior military correspondent for Knight Ridder Newspapers and a nationally syndicated columnist.
One of America's preeminent war correspondents, with more than four decades as a reporter and writer, he recently concluded an assignment as a special consultant to Gen. Colin Powell at the State Department.
Galloway, a native of Refugio, Texas, spent 22 years as a foreign and war correspondent and bureau chief for United Press International, and nearly 20 years as a senior editor and senior writer for U.S. News & World Report magazine.
His overseas postings include tours in Japan, Vietnam, Indonesia, India, Singapore and three years as UPI bureau chief in Moscow in the former Soviet Union. During the course of 15 years of foreign postings Galloway served four tours as a war correspondent in Vietnam and also covered the 1971 India-Pakistan War and half a dozen other combat operations.
In 1990-1991 Galloway covered Desert Shield/Desert Storm, riding with the 24th Infantry Division (Mech) in the assault into Iraq.
General H. Norman Schwarzkopf has called Galloway "The finest combat correspondent of our generation -- a soldier's reporter and a soldier's friend."
On the eve of war in Iraq, it's instructive to revisit history -- the history of the only war the United States ever lost.
It was famously said of the Vietnam War's chief architect, Secretary of Defense Robert Strange McNamara, that he knew the cost of everything and the worth of nothing. McNamara knew that he and his Whiz Kids and their computers had a much better grip on the situation than any uniformed military commander.
He ignored both their advice and their deep-seated reluctance to being drawn into a quagmire that took the lives of 58,229 Americans and ended with a devastating American retreat.
Not since then have a secretary of defense and his closest civilian advisers demonstrated so thorough a contempt for the counsel of America's military leaders, who incidentally are the last generation still wearing the uniform to have served in Vietnam. The last who know the true price of failed and flawed political leadership in war.
If there is any small group that Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld and his closed circle of advisers -- none of whom have worn a uniform since Boy Scouts - ought to be listening to, it is the four-star generals and admirals of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
The evidence flowing out of Capitol Hill and the Pentagon is all to the contrary.
The last week of February, the Army chief of staff, Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, was summoned to testify before the Senate Armed Services Committee. Sen. Carl Levin, D-Mich., repeatedly pressed him to estimate the size of an occupation force after victory in Iraq.
Shinseki was reluctant to give a number, knowing that if he laid down a marker it would be engraved in stone. If he said that 75,000 American soldiers would be enough, then Gen. Tommy Franks, the U.S. Central Command boss, and Lt. Gen. David McKiernan, the land force commander, would be stuck with that number.
Pushed to the wall, Shinseki said his best estimate was "something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers." He added: "We're talking about a post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems."
Two days later, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, appearing before the House Budget Committee, bluntly rejected Shinseki's estimates as "wildly off the mark" and added that it was "not a good time to publish highly suspect numbers."
He went on to suggest that other models weren't valid because Iraq did not feature the same kind of ethnic tensions as, say, Afghanistan.
Say what?
This ancient land almost invented the concept of revenge and payback, and virtually every family and clan in Iraq has been brutally whipped and beaten into submission by Saddam Hussein's Baathist Party thugs. Then there is the fact that the minority Sunni Muslims have ruled and terrorized the Shiite majority and for generations repressed the Kurds, Turkomen and others. Iraq is not a big Switzerland, it is a big Lebanon.
It's a relief to know that there won't be any ethnic or tribal or religious tensions when the sun rises over liberated Iraq. A force the size of, say, the Texas Highway Patrol should be sufficient to keep the peace in a country the size of California, feed and house its refugees and rebuild what's been destroyed in the coming war, the last war, and the war before that one.
Secretary Rumsfeld said that in his opinion, General Shinseki "misspoke."
Shinseki tried to do the Army commanders responsible for what comes next - and Rumsfeld and his political lieutenants - a favor by leaving them room to deal with a much tougher reality, should that materialize. But in the Pentagon today, no good deed goes unpunished.
Secretary Rumsfeld said in his opinion the general had "misspoke."
Among the many jobs Shinseki has held in a career that spans 38 years since he graduated from West Point in 1965 is commander of the NATO Stabilization Force in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1997. He knows whereof he speaks.
Let's take a look at how many soldiers it takes or has taken to keep the peace in some of the world's leading trouble spots. The British Army in 1995 kept 19,000 troops in Northern Ireland to control a population of 1.6 million. That's one soldier for every 84 residents. If a similar ratio were applied to Iraq, the United States and its allies would need an occupation force of 285,000 troops.
In 1995, we had an international force of 60,000 to control the 4 million inhabitants of unhappy Bosnia. At that ratio, we would need 360,000 soldiers to occupy and control Iraq. In Kosovo, 50,000 soldiers now keep the peace among 2 million. Apply that formula to Iraq and you need an occupation force of 600,000.
What Shinseki was, in essence, saying was that unless a sizeable force of allies join us in Iraq, the peacekeeping effort there could employ virtually the entire deployable Army and Marine Corps.
Which, given the state of the world in which we live and the vagaries of North Korea's dear leader Kim Jong Il, not to mention Iraq's neighbors in Iran, is a truly scary scenario.
