The open undermining of the Army's chief of staff is illustrative of Rumsfeld's relations with him and other Army leaders, which were strained to the point that some active and former top Army officials grumbled that the secretary of defense was at war with the Army. In mid-2002, Rumsfeld's office leaked the name of his nominee to replace Shinseki -- 14 months before the chief's tenure was to end. When Shinseki did leave as scheduled in June 2003, no one from the Office of the Secretary of Defense attended his retirement ceremony. If they had, they would have heard his farewell warning: "Beware the 12-division strategy for the 10-division Army."

But Shinseki was not alone in his Iraq forecasts. He had history on his side. Traditionally, as Rand Corp. military scholar James Quinlivan noted in the summer of 2003, "successful strategies for population security and control have required force ratios either as large as or larger than 20 security personnel (troops and police combined) per thousand inhabitants." That would compute to about 480,000 troops in 23 million-strong Iraq.

In 1996, the United States and its allies sent a force of 60,000 into Bosnia, which had 2.6 million people. And Iraq "isn't just a larger Bosnia, it's Bosnia logarithmically complicated," says Stephen Cimbala, an expert on the military at the University of Pennsylvania.

Also predictable -- and predicted -- was the fact that Iraqis would react with something less than jubilation and docility to their "liberators." In April 2002, the State Department began working on a "Future of Iraq Project," which warned of widespread looting and violent resistance. But the Pentagon ignored the predictions.

Indeed, Marine Gen. Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, testified to the House Armed Services Committee last November that postwar planning at the Pentagon was delayed for fear that it might indicate that the most telegraphed punch in military history was indeed coming. "We did not want to do anything that would prejudge or somehow preordain that there was definitely going to be a war," Pace told the committee, presumably with a straight face. (Of course, we now know that this consideration did not prevent the planning for the war itself from starting in late 2001.)

While the swift battle proved that a smaller force could quickly conquer, the aftermath showed that some missions still require sheer manpower. "In a current force or transformed force, it doesn't take much to seize ground, to seize key terrain," says Dan Goure, a former Defense Department official who worked on Bush's defense transition team and is now a senior analyst at the libertarian Lexington Institute. "It still takes a lot of people to occupy. And we are in an occupation, and figure to be in an occupation for a long time."

Van Riper and his fellow critics argue that a larger U.S. force could have provided security for average Iraqis more quickly and secured the Sunni Triangle. "What they weren't able to do was capitalize on that success," Van Riper says. "This is operations and tactics 101. You need to be able to exploit success and you need a reserve."

Shinseki, in a rare public appearance at the University of Georgia on April 16, recalled his experiences dealing with similar situations in Bosnia. Faced with guerrilla resistance, he said, he went on the offensive both militarily and in other areas such as humanitarian assistance, infrastructure repair and engaging the leaders of the different ethnic groups. "These activities were designed to put our unknown adversaries, unseen adversaries, on the back foot, denying them freedom to act," he said. "To generate this kind of offensive action takes people. [It] takes people both in numbers and a wide range of skills and capabilities to enable us to have at least one more option than our adversary."

But Rumsfeld prevailed in the planning for the war and its aftermath. And it was his belief that more from less would work as well with the occupation as it did with the military conquest. His faith was bolstered by neoconservatives' insistence that the U.S. forces would be greeted as liberators; that once Saddam was toppled a democratic Iraq would immediately take its place; and that the allied troops and newly minted Iraqi security forces would bear their share of the burden.

The strategy went awry from the start, however, as Iraqis looted government offices unprotected by U.S. troops. Private militias like Muqtada al-Sadr's Mahdi Army were left to instill a sense of order in Baghdad. As images of the chaos in the city reached international audiences, Rumsfeld dismissed public concerns, saying, "Freedom is untidy."

But the concerns were legitimate. Speaking at the University of Georgia, Shinseki said that for troops trying to keep peace in a country after a war, there is a "footrace" to establish a safe and secure environment before someone else fills the power vacuum.

"You have a finite period of time [after] the end of major hostilities in which you have to take control, to protect the population because there are lots of others who will fill that void; and if you don't do it, others will step in, and you have to contend with them," he said. "How well that was linked to the military phase I think is what we're facing today. [It was] obviously not as well linked as we would like and perhaps not linked at all."

The looting eventually faded, but it was emblematic of deeper problems in store for the United States and its allies. With an insufficient number of troops in country, Iraqi opposition -- hard-line Baathists, disaffected youth without employment or other prospects and Islamic jihadists slipping across porous borders -- was able to rally and grow.

"That invasion was mounted on the belief by the Department of Defense and the secretary of defense in particular that the United States could fight a lightning war and get out before the repercussions of that war were felt. Well, clearly that wasn't the case," says Bob Killebrew, a retired Army colonel who writes and lectures on military issues. "The low strength in Iraq has given the bad guys the breathing space they needed to mount the kinds of challenges we face today."

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