http://michaelyon-online.com/media/pdf/vox/MCT_9_6_06.pdf

The problem with Iraq no one seems to grasp or identify is that there are THREE insurgencies happening right now, and those are the local nationals dabbling by themselves. The Shiites want the government power for themselves and seem to flip between a protracted popular campaign and a military focus strategy to gain their objectives. The Sunnis want to keep the power for themselves, even if it means to engage in battles with either the Shiites or Kurds. They are using an urban warfare strategy to attack the government with terror attacks in urban areas to keep their preservation of political power. The Kurds are secessionists who are using a protracted popular strategy to gain the upper hand in the areas they control.

These different local nationalists are using different strategies and types of insurgencies to meet their desired goals. With the “insurgency�, as defined by most people here in the states, there is no differentiation between the groups; and there is no one magical potion to solve the problems on the ground. A three-month window is a clearly defined benchmark of getting the people together to come up with a solution, but with the downward spiral of the “insurgency� since April 2004, three months is not going to really solve the problem that 30 months have not.

I do not have a problem with the benchmark, but it is doomed to failure. I agree at some point the US will need to decide to “pee or get off the pot� – the three-month marker is the “get off the pot� answer.

Afghanistan, with the good news of the various Afghani and Pakistani extremist Islamists and AQ forces being routed these last few weeks, is still in precarious situation. The various Islamists groups cannot transform from a guerilla force to a conventional force to stand up to the Coalition, and this may cause their leadership to conduct more guerrilla and terrorist attacks in the future. I agree with you wholeheartedly that more needs to be done about Afghanistan, but it seems this administration has done everything but wash their hands of the situation. On 1 SEPT 2006, the McClatchy paper had broken a story about the truce between Musharraf’s government and the extremists; but it turns out the same paper had an article published on 16 AUG 2006 with some additional information not covered on the blogosphere (that I had seen). You read the story and tell me how you interpret the article – http://www.realcities.com/mld/krwashington/news/columnists/jonathan_s_landay/15289315.htm

Should the US send in more troops to Afghanistan? Probably, but it needs to be comprised of light units. The focus should be 10th MTN, 82nd AB, and 101st AB. Supporting units should be military police, engineers, civil affairs, and air support units. The 1CAV, 4ID, and such should not be sent there as a division. This is saying, only certain units are desirable for their deployment to Afghanistan.

As for the rest of the world, we are in trouble. Sudan, Somalia, North Korea, Pakistan, Lebanon, and Venezuela are only the known hot spots at this time. It looks as if a UN force will be sent to Sudan soon. Somalia has had their extremists take control of the country with each passing day. So forth about the other countries mentioned. We are getting pretty stretched out with deployments and if a problem were to arise requiring forces to be sent to one of these other countries, then we are going to be in a world of hurt.

Now that has been said, a careful observation needs to done to see the state of the military. Sometime around 2 AUG 2006, LTG Blum spoke to Congress asking for $21B to help repair and replace equipment for the 34 National Guard brigades. Sometime around 22 JULY 2006, GEN Schoomaker told congressional staffers “the Army cannot repair vital equipment fast enough because supplement budget requests have been too little, too late.â€Â? The US Army estimated a need of $17B to repair and replace equipment in 2007 alone. The US Army estimated there was a $56B shortfall in the budget before hostilities began in Iraq – “In order to field the force that took Baghdad, Army leaders had to move troops and equipment from various units to cover the shortfalls. The ongoing rotations of troops in and out of Iraq, along with increased wear and tear of equipment has created what Schoomaker called ‘a slope of diminishing returns.’” I have not seen what the US Marines are requiring.

Though it would be great to form new units, the money is not available to do so because we cannot provide the equipment to our forces already available to us. Speaking of people entering the armed forces, pundits love to show the recruiting numbers are being met but do not break down how the rules are being bent to get people in the military: Category IV personnel, stop gap, call-ups, 42-year olds, recruits in less than satisfactory physical condition, and so forth. The National Guard units are about to meet their federal requirements of being called up for two years – so what happens when 34 brigades are no longer available to be called up? Granted this has already been taken care of with new requirements to be implemented in ’07. In April the Pentagon had created an order to call back recent retirees under the age of 55 back into the service (seems to be geared for certain occupations in the medical field).

My suggestions:

1. Replace Secretary Rumsfeld.
2. Move funds away from R&D to personnel and equipment required now. It does not help to win the “next� war if we are bloodied and bruised in this one.
3. Stop Congress from removing O&M funds to pay for their pork barrel projects back home. Stop the administration from using O&M funds to build a part of the border fence between Mexico and US. The O&M funds are for our troops and not to help the politicians to send “love� back home.
4. Muzzle the neo-conservative cheerleaders (Kristol, Krautherhammer, Lewis, Podheretz, and so forth). The intellectual giants of the movement have gotten us mired in Iraq. They are using the same worn-out arguments to move into Iran and it is only going to cause more problems – and their agenda is suspect to whose interests they really have. Kristol and Lowery had penned a doozie of an OP-ED last week – too bad they have no earthly idea how to tip a boot full of water when the instructions are on the boot heel.
5. Increase taxes to pay for the repair and replacement of existing equipment, more soldiers, and the new equipment for the soldiers.
6. Increase the troop levels, even by the use of the draft. Use the draft more or less to add more troops in infantry, military police, and engineers. Once additional troops are trained, place them in existing battalions and brigades to help strengthen them and enable them to do more missions without creating a longer logistical tail. What I am saying is to add another infantry and MP company to each battalion; or may be even add a battalion to each brigade. This is just an incremental step. May be the solution is to form brand new brigades and divisions, but that means more strain on existing infrastructure to house the soldiers. We should add more soldiers, but at some point the extra soldiers are going to cause additional barracks, dining halls, HQ facilities for various sized units, TAC shops, and so forth to be built.
7. Place a strong leash on private contractors doing business in a war zone. Get those contracts ironed out before government people administrating the contracts are put through the ringers because of loopholes. Have contractors be paid for the work they are contracted to do – no more weaseling money to do some of the work.
8. Phase out the use of private security firms. This is job duty is inherently government work, and the US Government is getting into a bidding war with itself to get professional soldiers to the war zone. The private security firms are going to pick military folks to do the work, and this is causing the US to pay large bonuses to keep the soldiers in the military it has trained.
9. Make the contractors accountable. Why has it taken nearly three years for the training of various local national units to this state? Why is the focus on the American soldiers to “hold the peace� when more Iraqi Army, Iraqi Police, and Iraqi Civilian Defense Corps are being trained? What is the problem that IA/IP/ICDC not taking the lead?
10. In Iraq, set up bench markers that are not relative to the political events of the day. What are the strategic goals of the government? Other than destroying the insurgency and finding a government friendly to the US. Is there even a strategy to defeat the insurgency – other than “bring’em on�?
11. Have fewer units in Iraq by bringing more Iraqi units on line. Add a few more units to Afghanistan. But there should probably be two units at the home station training and reconstituting with each unit out in one of the war zones. The military folks and their families have carried the burden of taking the war to the extremists – and to have undue strain caused by long and multiple deployments is too much when people back home carry on as if nothing is happening.

Just my jumbled thoughts …

“The most glaring injustice in the notoriously unjust lands between the Balkan Mountains and the Himalayas is the absence of an independent Kurdish state. There are between 27 million and 36 million Kurds living in
contiguous regions in the Middle East (the figures are imprecise because no state has ever allowed an honest census). Greater than the population of present-day Iraq, even the lower figure makes the Kurds the world’s largest ethnic group without a state of its own. Worse, Kurds have been oppressed by every government controlling the hills and mountains where they’ve lived since Xenophon’s day.

The U.S. and its coalition partners missed a glorious chance to begin to correct this injustice after Baghdad’s fall. A Frankenstein’s monster of a state sewn together from ill-fitting parts, Iraq should have been divided into three smaller states immediately. We failed from cowardice and lack of vision, bullying Iraq’s Kurds into supporting the new Iraqi government â€â€? which they do wistfully as a quid pro quo for our good will. But were a free plebiscite to be held, make no mistake: Nearly 100 percent of Iraq’s Kurds would vote for independence.

As would the long-suffering Kurds of Turkey, who have endured decades of violent military oppression and a decades-long demotion to “mountain Turks” in an effort to eradicate their identity. While the Kurdish plight at Ankara’s hands has eased somewhat over the past decade, the repression recently intensified again and the eastern fifth of Turkey should be viewed as occupied territory. As for the Kurds of Syria and Iran, they, too, would rush to join an independent Kurdistan if they could. The refusal by the world’s legitimate democracies to champion Kurdish independence is a human-rights sin of omission far worse than the clumsy, minor sins of commission that routinely excite our media. And by the way: A Free Kurdistan, stretching from Diyarbakir through Tabriz, would be the most pro-Western state between Bulgaria and Japan.

A just alignment in the region would leave Iraq’s three Sunni-majority provinces as a truncated state that might eventually choose to unify with a Syria that loses its littoral to a Mediterranean-oriented Greater Lebanon: Phoenecia reborn. The Shia south of old Iraq would form the basis of an Arab Shia State rimming much of the Persian Gulf. Jordan would retain its current territory, with some southward expansion at Saudi expense. For its part, the unnatural state of Saudi Arabia would suffer as great a dismantling as Pakistan.

A root cause of the broad stagnation in the Muslim world is the Saudi royal family’s treatment of Mecca and Medina as their fiefdom. With Islam’s holiest shrines under the police-state control of one of the world’s most bigoted and oppressive regimes â€â€? a regime that commands vast, unearned oil wealth â€â€? the Saudis have been able to project their Wahhabi vision of a disciplinarian, intolerant faith far beyond their borders. The rise of the Saudis to wealth and, consequently, influence has been the worst thing to happen to the Muslim world as a whole since the time of the Prophet, and the worst thing to happen to Arabs since the Ottoman (if not the Mongol) conquest.”

These paragraphs preceding are not the entire article, but they may suffice to dispute, or at least question, your very reasonable ideals (more like pipedreams). One question, simply put, would be, “Do we really want to awaken a military rising out of our well-provisioned allies in Turkey and Saudi Arabia?” I think not, though it is a local matter (read: Armageddon). The EU and NATO forces be damned, indeed, the solutions are not in our headlights yet. But, then, another question rises: “Are you looking at this from Ararat, or from Everest?”

From the higher point (by nearly six times) Kurds do not need our permission, certainly not our good will. And any further threat or restriction upon the Holiest sites in Islam (Mecca/Medina) would put us in a bad place. (How do you spell f-a-t-w-a ?)

Also, from Everest, China is patient, but teeming with its own military solutions, and it has been years since the last “yellow peril.” They need a jihad (read this more properly as a ‘raison d’etre’) and they need some cheap energy alternatives like any kind of kerosene just to keep their lights from flickering any more than they do already. They have a labor shortage because they cannot get their guys together as a team to turn a millstone anymore. The Chinese people have high hopes for their own betterment, and they may buy some power from Kim if they can’t get us to build that damn pipeline from our fiefdom to theirs. Who wants dirty oil anyway?

So where on dear Mother Earth is there a solution? Moreover, to return to your first question, about what the Democrats might propose, the simplest of questions remains, courtesy of Newt Gingrich: “Had enough?” That slogan alone should suffice to get a more moderate cadre of majority egotists 12 years of consolidation and downsizing here at home. Maybe an indictment or two of our own in the Hague….certainly an impeachment.

I never said I had faith in insurgents. And actually faith in insurgency is more associated with Don Rumsfeld’s theories of war. (See: Afghanistan.) But I’m not ptoposing that an insurgency has to win, to overthrow the Mullahs, I’m suggesting that it can be very effective leverage. In just the way that we cringe lest Iran unleash Hezbollah again, or push the Mahdi army harder in IRaq, we can use an insurgency to delegitimize the Mullahs and force them to play defense.

You’re absolutely right that a Democrat would have trouble increasing the size of the military — unless he ran on it and used it as a club agaisnt the Right. Let’s not forget our history: for 8 years the Right cried that our army was too small. Too small, they said, even to handle Bosnia. Once in power what did the Right do? Start trying to cut the military. Rumsfeld was stopped from cutting two divisions, thank God, but the Right is now pretending we have plenty of force to fight a series of wars with the same army they once described as hollow.

Back-door drafts, widespread mobilization of the Guard, and lowering enlistment standards are not the way to deal with our needs for a long-running war. We need a bigger army.

I wasn’t sure I believed in a deadline until I started working it out in the post. But the more I thought about it I came to the conclusion there’s a disconnect between the seperate issues of standing up and army on the one hand, and political will on the other. The more important is political will, and if the Iraqis don’t have that the size or competence of their army is pretty much irrelevant.

I remember times when people in India (some still do) thought this two party setup is the US is so good. For outsiders, when things were going well, it appeared really nice and romantic. Now people are slowly realising that multi party democracy and co-alition governments are not so bad (despite their disadvantages: slow to decision making etc). US really needs a new party with fresh out of the box thinking. But does not look like a near term possibility.

Making war by proxy is still making war, so you are proposing that we make war on Iran, but in a way that is almost certain to fail. Too many liberals have convinced themselves that “insurgents” are ten feet tall, bullet-proof, and unbeatable. In fact, although insurgent forces can be difficult to defeat, they do get defeated more than 90% of the time. For every successful rebellion in history there are thousands of failed ones. What will we do when our proxies get creamed – disown them? We don’t need any more secret wars, IMO.

You want a bigger army. The one we have is bigger than anybody’s except China. Since we don’t plan to fight a land war with China, a bigger army requires a lot of justification. I can’t wait to see your hypothetical future Democratic president squeeze that one out – without any help from neocons, mind you. This president will not only have to get himself elected with the help of the anti-war crowd, but will need the support of liberal democrats who have opposed higher defense spending for decades.

The call for more troops is politically expedient now, as a point against Bush, but once that issue ceases to be politically useful you will find that Democratic enthusiasm for a bigger military is narrow indeed.

A draft would be even more ludicrous. Will the Democratic president who re-installs the draft have bigger balls than Lyndon Johnson or Harry Truman? I seriously doubt it, and she’s going to need them to deal with the utter rebellious rage that will send the Democratic party right back to 1968, which is not where any sane person wants to be.

The question of Israel is also going to be a problem for the next Dem C-in-C. A massive anti-Israel contingent has mobilized on the left, and they’ve already inflicted damage. The next Democratic president will probably have his hands tied when it comes to supporting Israel, and if he tries to broker another alleged peace plan it will probably be even more miserable than the failed Oslo accords.

In short, you’re trying to use the wrong tools for the job you want to do.

You make me seriously consider things that I wouldn’t have before — such as forcing the hands of the Iraqis in a short time frame. I’m relatively hawkish — but so are you. Of course, I think your ideas would need a fair amount of “tweaking” by the “experts” but just for some dude out there — it’s pretty impressive.