The US administration pledges to 'stay the course' in Iraq for at least four more years, but how it will maintain troop numbers has come into question.
By Carmen Gentile
ISN Security Watch, 17 October 2006
The US military appears capable of sustaining current troop levels in Iraq for the next couple of years, though the quality of the force fielded could suffer in the long run, according to several military and defense experts.
Both the Army and the Marines met their recruiting goals for the last year. The Army, however, admitted lowering standards for enlistment in 2005 by no longer requiring applicants to be high school graduates, a minimum requirement for previous admittance.
“Now they [the Army] say having a degree is not that big a deal,” said one analyst who just returned from the front lines of the Iraq war. “Well, it used to be a big deal.”
Over the last two months, the Pentagon has increased the force level in Iraq to around 142,000 in the wake of increasing violence between warring Sunni and Shi'ite insurgent factions, hoping to avoid the outbreak of a full-blown civil war.
That increase coincided with a sharp rise in the number of US military personnel wounded in Iraq, where 776 troops were hurt in September, the highest number since forces launched an assault to take over Falluja in November 2004 and the fourth largest total since the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, according to Pentagon records.
Last week, the US Army announced it planned to maintain troop levels in Iraq through 2010, but warned against reading too much into the decision, saying troop levels could be adjusted according to conditions on the ground.
“This is not a prediction that things are going poorly or better,” General Peter J Shoomaker, Army chief of staff, told reporters. “It’s just that I have to have enough ammo in the magazine that I can continue to shoot as long as they want us to shoot.”
Top military officials had expressed hope last year that they might reduce force levels to around 100,000 by the end of 2006, well before recent efforts to control the escalating violence in Baghdad and the restive western province of Anbar.
Now it appears the Army is set to once again extend the stay of some soldiers beyond the standard 12-month deployment and is speeding up the arrival of thousands more troops. The decision marks the second time in two months that the military has moved to extend a particular brigade’s stay in Iraq - a sign some experts said of a shortage of combat-ready forces.
"There's no question but that any time there's a war, the forces of the countries involved are asked to do a great deal," said Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld when questioned about extended troop deployments.
"From time to time, there may be units that will be asked to increase the number of days in-country from what had been anticipated. On the other hand, we're also bringing you some other units in earlier, which is another way of dealing with that issue [of continuing violence].”
Troop morale comes into question
Prolonging deployments and repeated tours of duty - some troops are on their third go around in Iraq - could have an adverse effect on soldiers, said some analysts. Coupled with the rising toll of those killed and wounded in action, morale among some troops in Iraq is waning.
The Defense Department reported that some 20,000 US soldiers had been wounded in Iraq, with about half of them returning to active duty. The death toll since the beginning of the war has topped 2,750.
But Michael Fumento, an analyst with the conservative Hudson Institute in Washington, DC, said morale among soldiers engaging the enemy on a regular basis had improved.
“They see the enemy, engage the enemy, capture and kill the enemy,” Fumento, who just recently returned from Iraq where he was embedded with US forces in Ramadi, told ISN Security Watch. “It’s part of their lives to go to a foreign country for up to a year and engage the enemy. That’s where you see high morale.”
Fumento did note that morale was lower among reserve soldiers who remained on base for most of their deployment.
“The biggest concern is the morale of the [national] guard and reserves,” he said of soldiers who could be asked to remain in Iraq beyond their scheduled deployment.
“They didn’t intend to be professional soldiers. They wanted to be citizen soldiers. That’s where you are going to find morale problems.”
General Shoomaker noted last week that both the National Guard and Reserve would be relied upon in the coming months to keep the force level at 140,000 or more, raising questions as to whether those soldiers could be asked to take on more combat responsibilities previously relegated to enlisted soldiers and whether they were equipped to do so.
“The whole reserves system could collapse at some point if they continue to extend the deployment of the reserves," said Charles Knight, co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives at the Commonwealth Institute, a think tank in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
“I’m not going to be at all surprised if we start hearing stories about poor troop quality coming out of Iraq,” Knight told ISN Security Watch.
As of September, the Commonwealth Institute reported, there were some 60,000 American reservists overseas, with the vast majority of them being deployed in Iraq and Afghanistan. These part-time civilian soldiers accounted for more than one-third of US troops fighting in the war on terror, making their morale a major concern among military leaders who depend on their effectiveness in crucial support roles on both fronts.
Recruitment policy changes considered
Fumento said recent reports that the US military was struggling to recruit new soldiers was a “gross exaggeration” by many news outlets, though admitted it seemed highly unlikely that the US could increase troop levels in Iraq if needed.
“We can sustain [troop levels], but we can’t expand on what we already have [...] and it’s pretty clear that we need more troops on the ground in Iraq,” he said.
Other analysts, like Michael O’Hanlon at the left-leaning Brookings Institution in Washington, DC, agreed with Fumento’s assessment.
“I doubt we could increase troop levels unless we radically change the policy” for recruitment, O’Hanlon told ISN Security Watch.
One possible change O’Hanlon hypothesized was the recruitment of immigrants to serve in the military upon the condition of receiving citizenship for their service.
That remains highly unlikely though, he noted, considering the current controversy surrounding the immigration issue in the US.
For now, the Pentagon appears confident it can fulfill its troop level ambitions for Iraq, at least until the end of the Bush administration in 2008, and maintain the same quality of force while on the ground.
Others expressed doubts about the Pentagon’s professed confidence in the US fighting force in Iraq.
“I really think the next president is going to have a hell of a mess on his hands,” predicted Knight, who foreshadowed that next year’s recruitment goals would likely not be met unless standards were lowered even further.
Others, like Fumento, counter that argument by noting that the retainment level of US troops - those who re-enlist - has been in the rise in recent years.
“Retaining troops is much more important that recruiting new soldiers,” he said, noting the time and money it takes to train a new soldier versus the cost of retaining the services of a combat tested serviceman makes the latter the more economical choice.
Whether that also means the quality of US troops embroiled in increasing violence in Iraq remains the same is another question.
Carmen Gentile is a senior international correspondent for ISN Security Watch. He has reported from Iraq, Afghanistan and Bolivia for ISN Security Watch, and Haiti, Venezuela and elsewhere for Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Washington Times and others.
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Citation: Carmen Gentile. "Iraq troop levels come into question," ISN Security Watch, 17 October 2006.
Original URL: http://www.isn.ethz.ch/news/sw/details.cfm?id=16799
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