Wednesday, November 05, 2003

Op-Ed Contributor: So Few Soldiers, So Much to Do:
"The Bush administration's reaction to the deaths of 16 American soldiers in the downing of a helicopter on Sunday morning was the same as it was to the suicide bombings at police stations and the Red Cross headquarters in Baghdad a week earlier — and the same as it has been to every other setback the coalition has faced: insistence that there is no need for more American troops beyond the 133,000 now in Iraq."

It is part of any president's job to inspire confidence under pressure, but given the true number of troops in Iraq — actual armed soldiers doing a soldier's job — President Bush might just as well have said that there is no need for any American troops in Iraq. Because zero is the exact number of soldiers actually present at many sites that should be secured 24 hours a day.

Such is the arithmetic of an ultra-modern army. The support echelon is so large that out of the 133,000 American men and women in Iraq, no more than 56,000 are combat-trained troops available for security duties. As for the rest, there are many command posts where soldiers operate computers not guns, there are many specialized units charged with reconstruction and civil duties, and even in the actual combat formations there is a large noncombat element. The 101st Airborne Division has 270 helicopters, which alone require more than 1,000 technicians. The Fourth Infantry Division has the usual panoply of artillery, aviation and antiaircraft units that are needed in war but have little role in peacekeeping and security duties.

And even the finest soldiers must sleep and eat. Thus the number of troops on patrol at any one time is no more than 28,000 — to oversee frontiers terrorists are trying to cross, to patrol rural terrain including vast oil fields, to control inter-city roads, and to protect American and coalition facilities. Even if so few could do so much, it still leaves the question of how to police the squares, streets and alleys of Baghdad, with its six million inhabitants, not to mention Mosul with 1.7 million, Kirkuk with 800,000, and Sunni towns like Falluja, with its quarter-million restive residents.

In fact, the 28,000 American troops are now so thinly spread that they cannot reliably protect even themselves; the helicopter shot down on Sunday was taking off from an area that had not been secured, because doing so would have required hundreds of soldiers. For comparison, there are 39,000 police officers in New York City alone — and they at least know the languages of most of the inhabitants, few of whom are likely to be armed Baathist or Islamist fanatics.…

http://www.nytimes.com/2003/11/04/opinion/04LUTT.html

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