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Sunday, Nov 8, 2009
On April 15, Rumsfeld admitted that the administration had miscalculated how the occupation would play out: "If you had said to me a year ago, 'Describe the situation you'll be in today one year later,' I don't know many people who would have described it -- I would not have -- described it the way it happens to be today."
Of course, as a practical matter, admitting that occupying Iraq would have required much larger numbers of troops would have crippled Bush's drive to war. Military theory holds that for every operation, the Army should have three units: one preparing to deploy to the operation, one executing it and one recovering from it. With active and reserve components taken together, the U.S. Army is a little over a million strong. An occupation force of several hundred thousand would have required the entire Army.
Even with an occupation force between 100,000 and 135,000, the Army is being pushed to the breaking point. "When a military force is wholly committed to a fight and can't maneuver or can't withdraw or can't add any more force to the fight, we say they are decisively engaged," says Killebrew. "The United States is close to being decisively engaged in Iraq, unless we call up more troops."
How bad is it? This week, the Associated Press noted that all or parts of nine of the Armys 10 active divisions are either in Iraq or have just returned from a 12-month stint there. The sole exception is the 3rd Infantry Division that led the charge from Kuwait to Baghdad, which has already been warned that it may have to return as soon as November.
"There's never been anything close to this much demand on the all-volunteer military in its 30-year history," says Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution. "Even in wartime, with conscription, we didn't send people overseas on two tours of duty. Certainly in Vietnam, if you did your one tour, you were done."
The 25th Infantry Division, based in Hawaii as a backup to forces in Korea, has been deployed to Iraq and Afghanistan. Already, 40 percent of the troops in Iraq are reserves who have been called from their civilian lives to spend a year, minimum, in Iraq, a percentage that is not likely to change in coming years.
A study by the Congressional Budget Office released last November found that without significant Reserve call-ups, "the active Army would be unable to sustain an occupation force of the present size [150,000] beyond March 2004 if it chose not to keep individual units deployed to Iraq for longer than one year without relief." The CBO estimated that the active Army could sustain between 38,000 and 64,000 troops in Iraq indefinitely with help from Reserve support units.
The problem is aggravated by the Army's structure: The same small percentage of specialized reservists -- military police and civil affairs specialists -- gets called upon more frequently than other reservists. And despite assurances that duty in Iraq would be capped at no more than a year at a time, commanders recently informed 20,000 soldiers that their stay would be extended by three months, possibly as many as four. While the Pentagon had hoped to lower the level of occupying troops from around 135,000 to around 100,000, part of that plan was predicated on handing off more responsibility to new Iraqi security forces, units that have not proved reliable in taking on their own countrymen.
"We used to talk about 'operational tempo,' in the sense of how hard is it to do the normal pace-time training cycles -- for example, for all the Army's brigades, if we had to have two or three deployed over in the Balkans, and what effect does that have on our ability to engage in this or that scenario," says Owen Cote of MIT's Security Studies Program. "Now the entire active and reserve Army exists solely ... to sustain this occupation of Iraq. There essentially is no 'op-tempo' outside of Iraq. The Army can't do anything else right now, except under really extreme circumstances."
The extraordinary strain being placed on the Army in both morale and physical wear and tear -- as well as the need to bring units back to Iraq -- creates a ripple effect that threatens training and maintenance.
"You can expect over time a slow erosion of U.S. power," Killebrew says. "It will be because we lose the ability to train and maintain the force that we have [in Iraq] now. People wear out and so does equipment. And it's wearing out now."
The result has been unusually long deployments for active and reserve soldiers alike. These deployments -- and the Pentagon's inability to give soldiers a reliable date on which they can count on seeing their family -- have badly corroded morale both at home and on the front lines.
It is a situation that threatens to break the all-volunteer Army. "What's going to happen is, people aren't going to reenlist in the numbers that you would like," says Lawrence Korb, a Reagan-era defense official who is now a senior fellow at the liberal Center for American Progress. While studies by the Rand Corp. have shown a correlation between deployment and increased retention, those same studies also indicate that repeated tours diminish the effect, eventually turning it negative.
