A new study by the Army's Center of Military History has found that the U.S. military would have to commit 300,000 peacekeeping troops in Afghanistan and 100,000 in Iraq if it were to occupy and reconstruct those nations on the scale that occurred in Japan and Germany after World War II.
The study was requested by the Army's director of transformation in May as part of a force structure review undertaken in light of significant new troop demands in Afghanistan, ongoing peacekeeping commitments in the Balkans and potential peacekeeping duties in Iraq.
Although no one inside or outside the Pentagon is proposing anything close to post-World War II occupation forces in either Afghanistan or Iraq, Army officers say the study underscores the extent of new long-term force commitments the United States could be required to make.
One Army officer said the study was only one of many "data points" being analyzed. But the officer added: "One fact is that where we go, we tend to stay, and the list is increasing."
The officer noted that there are 10 active duty divisions in the Army now, compared with 18 at the time of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. As a result, because of the existing commitments in Korea, Afghanistan and the Balkans, an invasion of Iraq at the same level as in the Gulf War would essentially require the rest of the Army. "Any expansion in the number of these enduring commitments will certainly add to the [strains] on an all-volunteer force," the officer said.
The study is based on the number of troops deployed in 16 occupations during the 20th century, from the Philippines in the early 1900s to Iraq after the Persian Gulf War. With that data, historians created a mathematical model that factors in population, demographics and other "collateral" issues, such as the need for emergency humanitarian relief, to determine how many forces would be needed to occupy Afghanistan and Iraq, administer them on an interim basis and rebuild them from the ground up.
"All we have done is applied the math from the model that we developed out of the 16 [earlier occupations] and projected it forward," said one Army historian, acknowledging that the estimates of 300,000 troops for Afghanistan and 100,000 for Iraq created a certain "angst" among some Army leaders.
Afghanistan has 29 million people and was assumed in the study to be lacking all forms of infrastructure, rife with tribal violence and in need of significant humanitarian aid. By contrast, Iraq, with 18.5 million people, was seen as partly modernized, with oil wealth, "robust" infrastructure in some areas and a significant middle class.
The Army historian noted that the nation's strategic objective at the moment is to stabilize Afghanistan, not to occupy it. The 8,000 U.S. troops scattered across the country and 5,000 international peacekeepers in Kabul may be adequate, the historian said.
But critics of the Bush administration's reluctance to engage in "nation building" and its refusal to use U.S. forces in a peacekeeping role in Afghanistan say the 300,000-troop estimate underscores the inadequacy of the International Security Assistance Force (ISAF), whose mission is confined to Kabul, the Afghan capital.
William J. Durch, a peacekeeping specialist at the Henry L. Stimson Center, a Washington think tank, said it is easy to dismiss the 300,000-troop estimate as overblown, but he said that 600,000 peacekeepers would be needed were Afghanistan to have the same peacekeeper-to-population ratio as existed initially in Kosovo.
Durch also noted that Scott Feil, a retired Army colonel now with the Association of the U.S. Army's Project on the Role of American Military Power, recently testified on Capitol Hill that 75,000 constabulary forces would be needed in Iraq after any invasion contemplated by the Bush administration, an estimate not that different from the Army history center's.
The administration has recently dropped its opposition to expansion of the ISAF beyond Kabul and called on its coalition partners to contribute troops. But Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and his deputies have ruled out the use of U.S. forces as peacekeepers, saying they are too busy fighting the war on terrorism.
Durch has developed his own "light" and "medium" options for enlarging the ISAF and expanding its mission beyond Kabul to providing security in regional cities, at airports, at border crossings and on major roadways.
The "light" option would expand the force from 5,000 to 18,000 and would cost $2 billion to $4 billion a year. The "medium" option, which would cover those cities and arteries at the same force-to-terrain ratio as currently exists in Kabul, would require 30,000 to 40,000 troops and cost $4.1 billion to $4.5 billion a year.
Both options assume that U.S. forces now in Afghanistan would provide a rapid reaction capability to reinforce the peacekeepers in the event they came under heavy attack as well as significant helicopter airlift and resupply capabilities. "I think if we anted that up and still had all the [U.S. forces] in town, we would have some major levers for pressing some of our allies to contribute troops," Durch said.
But as long as Pentagon officials continue to act as though peacekeeping is beneath U.S. forces, said Ivo H. Daalder, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, "why would the French or the Brits or the Germans contribute? They don't want to be second-class citizens."
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