Surging the Surge

[Nbadan]

Double the Troops, Four Times the estimated WH cost....

Breaking: Double the Troops in "Surge"


President Bush and his new military chiefs have been saying for nearly a month that they would "surge" an additional 21,500 troops to Iraq, in a last, grand push to quell the violence in Baghdad and in Anbar Province. But a new study by the non-partisan Congressional Budget Office says the real troop increase could be as high as 48,000 -- more than double the number the President initially said.

....

To reflect some of the uncertainty about the number of support troops, CBO developed its estimates on the basis of two alternative assumptions. In one scenario, CBO assumed that additional support troops would be deployed in the same proportion to combat troops that currently exists in Iraq. That approach would require about 28,000 support troops in addition to the 20,000 combat troops—a total of 48,000. CBO also presents an alternative scenario that would include a smaller number of support personnel—about 3,000 per combat brigade—totaling about 15,000 support personnel and bringing the total additional forces to about 35,000.

According to the study, the costs for the "surge" would also be dramatically different than the President says. While the White House has estimated a troop escalation would require about $5.6 billion in additional funding, the CBO believes that figure could be as high as $27 billion.

If DoD deployed a total of 48,000 troops, and sustained that level for four months, costs would be about $13 billion higher than for the current force levels, CBO estimates (see the table below). The 20,000 combat forces account for $5 billion of that cost. If the higher level was maintained for 12 months, costs would be $27 billion higher than the current level—$11 billion of which would fund the combat forces alone. Costs would increase by lesser amounts if the combat forces were accompanied by fewer support personnel. If additional forces totaled 35,000 troops, CBO estimates that sustaining such a deployment would cost $9 billion for four months and $20 billion for 12 months.

Defense Tech (http://www.defensetech.org/archives/003239.html)

Yet another Nixonian moment.

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February 1, 2007

General Says Iraq War Is ‘Winnable’

By BRIAN KNOWLTON

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — The recently returned commander of the American forces in Iraq faced pointed questions and criticism at a Senate hearing today as lawmakers maneuvered over wording of a resolution criticizing President Bush’s troop increase

Gen. George W. Casey Jr. told members of the Senate Armed Services Committee that the war remained “winnable” even with fewer than the 21,500 additional troops called for by President Bush. But he acknowledged that a rise in sectarian violence took place during his term as field commander in Iraq.

“While I do not in any way question your honor, your patriotism or your service to our country,” Senator John McCain, Republican of Arizona, told General Casey, “I do question some of the decisions and judgments you’ve made.”

General Casey was appearing before the committee to as part of the process to win confirmation as Army chief of staff — a nomination that Mr. McCain said he was not sure he could support.

But most committee members were far less critical, praising the general’s long service and family sacrifices and noting that his father, a two-star general, was killed in Vietnam.

Meantime, there was growing support from Democrats for a nonbinding resolution criticizing the troop increase. The resolution, put together by Senator John Warner, Republican of Virginia, states that “the Senate disagrees with the plan to augment our forces by 21,500” and calls on the administration “engage selected nations in the Middle East to develop a regional, internationally sponsored peace-and-reconciliation process for Iraq.”

General Casey faced a sometimes hostile reception at the armed services committee over his record in Iraq, particularly from Mr. McCain.

The senator, long an advocate of a larger U.S. force for Iraq, noted that while the Samarrah mosque bombing last February had produced “a dramatic change in the Iraqi security environment, our military strategy remained essentially unchanged.

“I’m not certain five additional brigades in Baghdad and one more in Anbar Province are sufficient to do the job,” Mr. McCain said, describing the Bush plan. “I am certain, however, that the job cannot be done with just two additional brigades as you, General Casey, had advocated.”

General Casey late last year had opposed a large increase, but today would not be drawn to criticize the Bush plan. He said the three additional brigades would give commanders important flexibility.

Still, pressed about the need for five brigades, he conceded, “`I believe that the job in Baghdad, as it’s designed now, can be done with less than that," he said.

Senator McCain suggested that General Casey had a too-rosy view of events. He reminded the general that as recently as December, when Mr. McCain visited Iraq, General Casey hold him “we were winning in Iraq.”

“In light of these remarks and decisions, I have expressed serious concerns about your nomination as army chief of staff,” McCain said. “My strong reservations persist.”

Still, General Casey remained cautiously positive.

“Two and a half years ago Iraq was totally dependent on coalition forces for security,” he said. “Today, Iraqis are poised to assume responsibility for their own security by the end of 2007, still with some level of support from us.”

Carl Hulse in Washington and John Holusha in New York contributed.


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So The Urge works, even somewhat, in Bagdad, so just the while the The Surge has The Urge in Bagdad, the insurgents surge, temporariily, out of Bagdad:

"Dozens die in Iraq suicide blasts


At least 58 people have been killed and some 150 injured in a double suicide bombing near a busy market in the Iraqi town of Hilla, local police have said."

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/6320495.stm

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iow, fixing Bagdad, which is hardly easy, DOESN'T fix the entire country.

Iraq was lost when Shinsheki was fired and the Rummy did just the opposite of what Shinsheki wanted.

btw, Rummy fucked up in Afghanistan, too, with too few troops. The number of US troops in Afghanistan now is 5x more than it was at the time of the battle of Tora Bora.

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Doubts Run Deep on Reforms Crucial to Bush's Iraq Strategy

Even Plan's Authors Say Political, Economic Changes May Fail

By Karen DeYoung
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, February 4, 2007; A16

The success of the Bush administration's new Iraq strategy depends on a series of rapid and dramatic political and economic reforms that even the plan's authors have little confidence will work.

In the current go-for-broke atmosphere, administration officials say they are aware that failure to achieve the reforms would result in a repeat of last year's unsuccessful Baghdad offensive, when efforts to consolidate military gains with lasting stability on the ground did not work. This time, they acknowledge, there will be no second chance.

Among many deep uncertainties are

whether Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki is up to the task and committed to spearheading what the administration foresees as a fundamental realignment of Iraqi politics;

whether Maliki's Shiite-dominated government and its sluggish financial bureaucracy will part with $10 billion for rapid job creation and reconstruction, at least some of it directed to sectarian opponents; and

whether the U.S. military and State Department can calibrate their own stepped-up reconstruction assistance to push for action without once again taking over.

A pessimistic new National Intelligence Estimate released Friday described the Iraqi government as "hard-pressed" to achieve sectarian reconciliation, even in the unlikely event that violence diminishes. Without directly mentioning Maliki, it noted that "the absence of unifying leaders among the Arab Sunni or Shia with the capacity to speak for or exert control over their confessional groups limits prospects."

Several senior officials involved in formulating the political and economic aspects of the administration's strategy, along with a number of informed outsiders, agreed to discuss its assumptions and risks on the condition that they not be identified by name. Other sources refused to be even anonymously quoted, describing the administration as standing on the brink of an intricate combination of maneuvers whose outcome is far from assured.

The foundation of the strategy is not new -- U.S. policy since the March 2003 invasion has been to use American military might, money and know-how to foster a peaceful Iraq with a unified government and a solid economy. The strategy incorporates major elements of last year's "clear, hold and build" plan, whose "hold and build" parts never got off the ground.

Several sources expressed concern that the administration, by publicly rejecting a "containment" option -- withdrawing U.S. troops to Iraqi borders to avoid sectarian fighting while preventing outside arms and personnel from entering the country -- has not left itself a fall-back plan in the event of failure.

Shift in Political Climate

The strategy's political component centers on replacing deepening Sunni-Shiite-Kurdish divides with a new delineation between "extremists" and "moderates." Moderates are defined as those of all religious and political persuasions who eschew violence in favor of safety and employment.

With the help of outside Iraq experts, the administration has compiled lists of active and still-untapped moderates around the country. "They wondered could I give them some [names] from the provinces or anywhere" from which to construct a new political base, recalled one think-tank expert called to the State Department in December. According to the intelligence estimate, however, Iraq's reservoir of such people, especially trained technocrats and entrepreneurs, has been drained as they have fled the country in droves.

As American and Iraqi combat forces focus on cooling the cauldron of violence in Baghdad, U.S. military commanders and State Department teams plan to funnel "bridge money" toward moderate designees in outer provinces and in the capital to create jobs, start businesses and revitalize moribund factories. Iraqi money would come in behind to make it all permanent.

Iraqis with physical and economic security, the thinking goes, will give their political support to the government that produces both. Closing the circle, the Iraqi government will see non-sectarian moderates as the central support for a new political coalition.

As they put the plan together, officials held heated internal debates over whether Maliki was the right man to head such an effort. Some argued in favor of engineering a new Iraqi government under Maliki's Shiite coalition partner, Abdul Aziz al-Hakim, head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), and Hakim's political stalking horse, Iraqi Vice President Adel Abdul Mahdi.

They closely examined the makeup of Iraq's 275-seat parliament, where a no-confidence vote requires only a simple majority. Maliki's Dawa party is part of the Hakim-led United Iraqi Alliance, the largest Shiite group, with 130 seats. Making a strong case for SCIRI, some argued that the Iraqis themselves were so fed up with Maliki that a different governing coalition is possible with realigned Sunni and Kurdish elements. This view found proponents in the White House and Pentagon, and it extended into parts of the normally more cautious State Department.

Maliki, whose Dawa party holds 12 seats in the parliament, was seen as unwilling to separate voluntarily from his existing power base -- dominated by the violent and unruly Baghdad-based Jaish al-Mahdi militia, also known as the Mahdi Army, of Shiite cleric Moqtada al-Sadr. With a new coalition, the Alliance would not need Sadr's 30 seats.

SCIRI's own militia, the Badr Organization, is seen as more cohesive, "an actual organization with command and control" that might be integrated into the Iraqi military, said one State Department official. The administration has charged that both the Sadr and Badr militias receive assistance from Iran. But officials regularly note that Badr forces have not attacked the U.S. military and that SCIRI has voiced equal opposition to Iranian and U.S. domination.

Other officials find that view naive, noting that evidence of Iran's involvement in Iraqi violence was found in a SCIRI compound during a raid last month.

Several officials said they believe that Hakim's backers in the Bush administration have been seduced by his forceful demeanor and Abdul Mahdi's fluent English. And while many emphasized the importance of a single, visible Iraqi leader, others have said it is a mistake to personalize the policy in one Shiite actor.

After extensive discussions last month with Maliki, Hakim and Vice President Tariq al-Hashimi, the most senior Sunni in the Iraqi government, policymakers decided to place their bets on Maliki. "We judge that Maliki does not wish to fail in his role," National Intelligence Council Chairman Thomas Fingar told Congress in a tepid endorsement recently. "He has some, but not all, of the obvious requirements for success."

In any case, replacing Maliki was determined to be "too hard," in the words of one analyst. A two-thirds parliamentary majority is required to install a new prime minister, and any attempt to remove Maliki by parliamentary maneuver, it was agreed, should remain a Plan B that Iraqis themselves would undertake if he failed to produce results.

So far, Maliki has said the right things about cracking down on the sectarian violence -- including by Sadr's militia -- that is tearing Baghdad apart. But there are worrisome signs. A parliamentary session late last month in which Maliki introduced the new plan was adjourned after it erupted in sectarian squabbling in which the prime minister gave as good as he got.

Many experts believe that the administration's effort to build a new political center, supported by "moderate" Sunni allies in the region that fear Shiite Iranian expansion, such as Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt, is hopelessly outdated. "Our struggle may be between moderates and extremists," Brookings Institution scholar Martin Indyk said last month. "Their struggle is between Sunnis and Shias."
New Economic Initiatives

On the economic front, where the United States has already invested more than $38 billion, the administration has asked for $538 million to keep current programs running and has proposed an additional $1.2 billion for new initiatives that it says will receive long-term Iraqi funding.

A combination of violent attacks on previous projects, sectarian favors, inefficient and overly cautious officials, and a complex bureaucracy -- much of it installed by the United States under the post-invasion Coalition Provisional Authority -- has left the Iraqi government with a significant capital surplus in each of the past several years.

Getting approval for reconstruction expenditures in the past, observed one U.S. official, has been like "pushing wet spaghetti." The surplus, which is kept in the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, now totals $12.5 billion. Maliki has publicly agreed to spend $10 billion of it on reconstruction and jobs.

The State Department has sent new "tiger teams" to six Iraqi ministries to help clear away the wreckage of the past and speed financing for approved projects, and it plans to double to 20 the number of U.S.-staffed provisional reconstruction teams in Baghdad and around the country.

In addition to Foreign Service officers, experts including small-business advisers and camel veterinarians are being recruited from the U.S. Agriculture Department and elsewhere to staff the teams, the State Department's Iraq coordinator, David Satterfield, told Congress last week.

Former Foreign Service officer Timothy M. Carney, who worked in Iraq in 2003, has been appointed to coordinate the U.S. and Iraqi bureaucracies, to get the Iraqi government's money moving and to make sure that Iraqi funding priorities coincide with the administration's.

But some officials worry that the expanded U.S. presence will repeat the mistakes of the past -- when the United States oversaw virtually every part of the Iraqi government -- and undermine the goal of turning the country over to the Iraqis themselves.

"It's the same old problem as in 2003," cautioned one official. "The same impatience that if they can't do it we'll step in and do it. There is a bit of that creeping into this dialogue."

Staff writers Rajiv Chandrasekaran and Michael Abramowitz contributed to this report.

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So, in short, the Iraqis can't/aren't "standing up" and taking responsibility for their "country", so dubya is stuck in Iraq, can't "stand down". One more empty vow and slogan that dubya is so robotically good at.

you're doing a heckuva job, dubya

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Petraeus is using "pointy-headed" war dissident intellectuals to turn Iraq around and save dubya/dickhead/Repug testicles. Good luck!


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Officers With PhDs Advising War Effort

By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, February 5, 2007; A01

http://media.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/photo/2007/02/04/PH2007020401458.jpg


Gen. David H. Petraeus, the new U.S. commander in Iraq, is assembling a small band of warrior-intellectuals -- including a quirky Australian anthropologist, a Princeton economist who is the son of a former U.S. attorney general and a military expert on the Vietnam War sharply critical of its top commanders -- in an eleventh-hour effort to reverse the downward trend in the Iraq war.

Army officers tend to refer to the group as "Petraeus guys." They are smart colonels who have been noticed by Petraeus, and who make up one of the most selective clubs in the world: military officers with doctorates from top-flight universities and combat experience in Iraq.

Essentially, the Army is turning the war over to its dissidents, who have criticized the way the service has operated there the past three years, and is letting them try to wage the war their way.

"Their role is crucial if we are to reverse the effects of four years of conventional mind-set fighting an unconventional war," said a Special Forces colonel who knows some of the officers.

But there is widespread skepticism that even this unusual group, with its specialized knowledge of counterinsurgency methods, will be able to win the battle of Baghdad.

"Petraeus's 'brain trust' is an impressive bunch, but I think it's too late to salvage success in Iraq," said a professor at a military war college, who said he thinks that the general will still not have sufficient troops to implement a genuine counterinsurgency strategy and that the United States really has no solution for the sectarian violence tearing apart Iraq.

"It's too late to make a difference in Iraq," agreed Bruce Hoffman, a Georgetown University expert on terrorism who has advised the U.S. government on the war effort.
Expanded Role for Academics

Having academic specialists advise top commanders is not new. Gen. George W. Casey Jr., Petraeus's predecessor, established a small panel of counterinsurgency experts, but it was limited to an advisory role. Also, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the No. 2 U.S. commander in Iraq, created a "Red Team" to examine his operations from the enemy's perspective and to report directly to him.

Still, the team being assembled by Petraeus promises to be both larger and more influential than anything seen in the U.S. war effort so far, both making plans and helping to implement them. The group's members are very much in the high-energy mold of Petraeus, whose 2003-04 tour commanding the 101st Airborne Division in Mosul, the biggest city in northern Iraq, gave the U.S. military one of its few notable success stories of the war. He also holds a PhD in international affairs from Princeton University.

"I cannot think of another case of so many highly educated officers advising a general," said Carter Malkasian, who has advised Marine Corps commanders in Iraq on counterinsurgency and himself holds an Oxford doctorate in the history of war.

As the U.S.-designed campaign to bring security to Baghdad unfolds, Petraeus's chief economic adviser, Col. Michael J. Meese, will coordinate security and reconstruction efforts, trying to ensure that "build" follows the "clear" and "hold" phases of action. Meese also holds a PhD from Princeton, where he studied how the Army historically handled budget cuts. He is the son of former attorney general Edwin Meese III, who was a member of the bipartisan Iraq Study Group, whose December critique helped push the Bush administration to shift its approach in Baghdad.

Petraeus, who along with the group's members declined to be interviewed for this article, has chosen as his chief adviser on counterinsurgency operations an outspoken officer in the Australian Army. Lt. Col. David Kilcullen holds a PhD in anthropology, for which he studied Islamic extremism in Indonesia.

Kilcullen has served in Cyprus, Papua New Guinea and East Timor and most recently was chief strategist for the State Department's counterterrorism office, lent by the Australian government. His 2006 essay "Twenty-Eight Articles: Fundamentals of Company-Level Counterinsurgency" was read by Petraeus, who sent it rocketing around the Army via e-mail. Among Kilcullen's dictums: "Rank is nothing: talent is everything" -- a subversive thought in an organization as hierarchical as the U.S. military.
Veteran Strategists

The two most influential members of the brain trust are likely to be Col. Peter R. Mansoor and Col. H.R. McMaster, whose influence already outstrips their rank. Both men served on a secret panel convened last fall by Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to review Iraq strategy. The panel's core conclusion, never released to the public but briefed to President Bush on Dec. 13, according to an officer on the Joint Staff, was that the U.S. government should "go long" in Iraq by shifting from a combat stance to a long-term training-and-advisory effort.

But to make that shift, the review also concluded, the U.S. military might first have to "spike" its presence by about 20,000 to 30,000 troops to curb sectarian violence and improve security in Baghdad. That is almost exactly what the U.S. government hopes to do over the next eight months.

Mansoor, who commanded a brigade of the 1st Armored Division in Baghdad in 2003-04, received a PhD at Ohio State for a dissertation on how U.S. Army infantry divisions were developed during World War II. He will be Petraeus's executive officer in Baghdad, a key figure in implementing the general's decisions.

McMaster's command of the 3rd Armored Cavalry Regiment in northwestern Iraq in 2005-06 provided one of the few bright spots for the U.S. military in Iraq over that year. In a patiently executed campaign, he took back the city of Tall Afar from a terrorist group, and he was so successful that Bush dedicated much of a speech to the operation. McMaster, author of the well-received book "Dereliction of Duty," about the failures of the Joint Chiefs of Staff during the Vietnam War, is expected to operate for Petraeus as a long-distance adviser on strategy. He is based this year at the International Institute for Strategic Studies, a London think tank, but is likely to visit Iraq every month or two, according to a top U.S. military officer.

Beyond those senior officers is a larger ring of advisers whose views already are shaping planning for the coming operation in Baghdad.

Lt. Col. Douglas A. Ollivant caught Petraeus's eye last year by winning first prize in an Army "counterinsurgency writing" competition, sponsored by the general, with an essay that scorned the U.S. military's reliance in Iraq on big "forward operating bases." "Having a fortress mentality simply isolates the counterinsurgent from the fight," he wrote.

Ollivant, a veteran of battles in Najaf and Fallujah who earned a political science PhD studying Thomas Jefferson, argued that U.S. forces should instead operate from patrol bases shared with Iraqi military and police units. That is exactly what Petraeus plans to do in the coming months in Baghdad, setting up about three dozen such outposts across the city -- which isn't surprising, considering Ollivant has become a top planner for the U.S. military in Baghdad.

Another adviser will be Ahmed S. Hashim, a professor of strategy at the Naval War College who served as a military intelligence officer in Iraq and then wrote a book sharply critical of how the U.S. military has operated there. Hashim, who holds a PhD from MIT, concluded his critique by arguing that the best course would be to partition the country along ethnic and sectarian lines.

A Different Arena

Many military insiders are skeptical that the extra brainpower ultimately will make much difference, or that lessons learned by McMaster in Tall Afar or Petraeus in Mosul will be easily applied in the far larger arena of Baghdad.

The joke among some staff officers was that Petraeus operated in such a freewheeling manner in Iraq's north that he had his own foreign policy with Syria and Turkey. In Baghdad, by contrast, he will have to operate constantly with Iraqi officials, with the U.S. government bureaucracy, and in the global media spotlight. Also, experts agree that the basic problem in Iraq is political, not military, and that although a military campaign can create a breathing space for politicians, it cannot by itself reverse the dynamic driving Iraqis to fight a civil war.

"It wouldn't surprise me if Congress pulled the rug out or the Iraqis blocked major revisions in strategy," said Erin M. Simpson, a Harvard University counterinsurgency expert. "I think they're going to be a very frustrated group."

Kilcullen, the counterinsurgency adviser, wrote recently on the Web site Small Wars Journal, "All that the new strategy can do is give us a fighting chance of success, and it certainly does give us that."

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2007/02/04/AR2007020401196.html

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