By Eric Schmitt
The New York Times, 04 February 2005
Washington - Fewer than 30 percent of the 136,000 Iraqi security forces whom the Pentagon has said were trained and equipped are fully capable of conducting a broad range of independent missions in Iraq, and Iraqi Army units are suffering severe troop shortages, two top Pentagon officials told a Senate panel on Thursday.
General Richard Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, acknowledged that only about 40,000 of Iraq’s security forces “can go anywhere and do anything,” but he said that the remaining troops could also be useful.
He also said that American military commanders now suspected that the 79,000 Iraqi police officers and other Iraqi Ministry forces on official government rolls might not be as capable as Iraqi officials have asserted.
Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz told senators that Iraqi Army units had absentee rates of up to 40 percent at any given time because many new Iraqi soldiers had failed to return to duty after going home on leave.
At the hearing of the Senate Armed Services Committee, Senator Susan Collins, a Maine Republican, read an e-mail message from a Marine colonel who said Iraqi commanders in his area inflated their official troop levels and pocketed the extra budgeted monies. In one Iraq unit of 134 soldiers that the colonel noted, she said, 37 troops returned after being paid and going on leave.
“It’s a different culture and it’s difficult for us to understand,” Myers said when asked to explain the problems, saying that the various Iraqi security units had different training standards and that Collins’s example of corrupt Iraqi conduct was not widespread.
Taken together, however, the information at the hearing revealed new details of problems plaguing the fledgling Iraqi security forces and underscored the immense challenge the Bush administration faces in helping to whip the Iraqis into fighting form to secure their own country and allow the 150,000 U.S. forces there to leave eventually.
The disclosures also appeared to support the suspicions of many Democrats, who have accused the Pentagon of playing fast and loose with the number of Iraqi forces that are truly capable for missions in the violence-racked country. “We should stop exaggerating the number of Iraqi forces that have already been fully trained and capable, and willing to take on the insurgency,” said Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, the panel’s ranking Democrat.
Wolfowitz and Myers, in the first appearance by Pentagon officials since the elections on Sunday in Iraq, said Iraqi forces performed admirably in protecting thousands of polling sites.
Asked about the numbers debate at a Pentagon briefing later in the day, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld warned not to rely on figures themselves, which he and other administration officials have regularly cited, and focus instead on the improving ability of those forces.
While the defense officials insisted that Iraqi security forces were rapidly becoming more capable with more experience and training, Wolfowitz and Myers acknowledged that they still lacked an effective method of measuring the ability of Iraqi units, the kind of detailed standards under which U.S. forces are graded.
“We have to move to a way where we can start tracking their capability,” Myers said.
Wolfowitz and Myers declined to give a schedule for a withdrawal of American forces, saying that would be based on security conditions on the ground and the performance of Iraqi forces rather than a strict timetable. Wolfowitz said that about 15,000 troops added for election security would leave in the coming weeks, as scheduled, and that 135,000 forces would probably remain through the end of this year.
But some Democrats bridled at the administration’s reluctance to set an exit schedule. “How long are we going to be there?” boomed Senator Edward Kennedy, a Massachusetts Democrat.
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Citation: Eric Schmitt. “Iraq Security Forces Only 30% Trained,” The New York Times, 04 February 2005.
Original URL: http://www.iht.com/articles/2005/02/03/news/military.html
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