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Time Magazine: Why We Don't Have Enough Troops in Iraq:

It's the glimmers of hope that make the realities in Iraq so heartbreaking. Residents of Ur say that with the Strykers around, sectarian murders have all but disappeared. Neighbors emerge from their homes to chat and allow their sons and daughters to play in the street. But the Iraqis and Americans know that such sanity won't last. Though 12,000 U.S. and Iraqi troops have moved to the capital to try to defuse sectarian violence, the level of killing across the city remains as high as ever. That's because the U.S. doesn't have enough troops to maintain the peace in the areas they've secured, instead relying on Iraqi units who have yet to prove they can impose order. In Ghazaliyah, a west Baghdad neighborhood the 172nd Strykers cleared weeks earlier, violence has already gone back up to previous levels. For all the progress made in Ur, the troops know the cycle is bound to repeat itself there too. "We leave," says Sergeant First Class Joshua Brown, as his Stryker pulls out of Ur city, "and it turns into f------ Somalia."

New York Times: Military Hones a New Strategy on Insurgency:

The United States Army and Marines are finishing work on a new counterinsurgency doctrine that draws on the hard-learned lessons from Iraq and makes the welfare and protection of civilians a bedrock element of military strategy.
...
"The Army will use this manual to change its entire culture as it transitions to irregular warfare," said Jack Keane, a retired four-star general who served in 2003 as the acting chief of staff of the Army. "But the Army does not have nearly enough resources, particularly in terms of people, to meet its global responsibilities while making such a significant commitment to irregular warfare."
...
The spirit of the document is captured in nine paradoxes that reflect the nimbleness required to win the support of the people and isolate insurgents from their potential base of support - a task so complex that military officers refer to it as the graduate level of war.
...
The limited number of forces was also a constraint. To mass enough troops to storm Falluja, an insurgent stronghold, in 2004, American commanders drew troops from Haditha, another town in western Iraq. Insurgents took advantage of the Americans' limited numbers to attack the police there. Iraqi policemen were executed, dealing a severe setback to efforts to build a local force.

Frank G. Hoffman, a retired Marine infantry officer who works as a research fellow at an agency at the Marine base at Quantico, Va., said that in 2005, the Marines sometimes lacked sufficient forces to safeguard civilians. As a result, while these forces were often effective "in neutralizing an identifiable foe, they could not stay and work with the population the way the classical counterinsurgency would suggest."

Read the whole thing.

Via the PD, which features additional commentary.

Posted by Bill at October 5, 2006 09:47 AM | TrackBack (1)

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