What I find most unbelievable is the fact that the Pentagon ignored key military doctrine: when you decide to go to war, apply swift and decisive force, don't start with a small amount of battalions and build from there. Go in and take care of the situation quick using overwhelming man power to establish effective control of an area. The mistake we made in Vietnam was starting with out with a small force in the country and building it up until there were hundreds of thousands of troops fighting an insurgency in the jungles of Southeast Asia. The mistake we made in Iraq was assuming that we could secure the country with only a couple thousand troops, while carpet-bombing the Iraqi government into submission. In terms of doing the latter, we were successful, but long-range missiles cannot secure the situation on the ground; preventing looting and civil disorder requires a large force. Technology has its limitations. You need manpower to secure key targets on the ground once the enemy is subdued: if you don't, you'll lose control of the situation afterwards, and regaining will be a very difficult task. It's very simple!

That's why I've said that we lost effective control of the situation on the ground in May 2003. We were able to pressure Saddam out of power, but a small force was completely unable to secure large parts of the country. We lost control at that point and never regained it. To suggest that we should continue to increase our force strength in Iraq is a sign of desperation on our part. 20,000 extra troops at this point isn't enough to secure the country. To suggest that extra American troops can pacify the country at this point is laughable: the only time we could have done that was 4 years ago at the beginning of the war. But that doesn't mean that we should pull out immediately; that would be extremely irresponsible on our part. The result will be a civil war that can explode into a regional war. There is also a good possibility that Iraqi society might experience a wide level of ethnic genocide should this happen.

The best solution at this point is to try and prop up the Iraqi government and military. Their army especially needs some work. In that respect we've failed in training the new army. When we disbanded the Iraqi army, many of the generals went into the insurgency and only now are beginning to get reintegrated. In short, their army lacks real leadership and expertise. As such our military training specialists need to redesign their manuals to provide more detailed training for the Iraqi army to make up for that lack of experience. The Americans at this point are backing them up in major operations because many of them don't know how to handle basic strategic situations. One of my concerns here with putting in 20,000 extra troops is the possibility that we may infantilize the Iraqi army by allowing them to fight behind American troops, rather than letting them do the fighting themselves. They need to start taking care of their own country, for were not going to around forever to do it for them! Due to their inexperience, these young troops flee at the sight of gunfire. But we have issues on our side too: our trainers themselves don't have enough cultural or language training themselves to deal with the local armed forces. It can be done, but we need strong leadership at all levels of the army to provide the tactical and social resources needed to prop up their army. Once we have an effective, legitimate fighting force, we can start pulling out quick.

The best troop allocation and deployment for our troops in this mess is the good old USA.

They can't be too bad if they haven't called my ass back yet.

. . .and we still don't care and we let this administration get away with it.

We went to war in Iraq undermanned and we are still undermanned. Donald Rumsfeld deserves most of the blame for this tactical error.

Maybe Rumsfeld knows what he's doing with the current troop levels in Iraq - but most military experts and historians seem to think that the size of Iraq makes a 130K occupying army ill equipped to keep the insurgency subdued. The continued successes of the insurgency would seem to support this position.