Hi LindyBill; Re: "... we have enough forces over there now to take China."
We have enough to conquer Baghdad, but as far as keeping Iraq under military control in the face of a hostile civilian population, we are woefully undermanned. Here's proof, from the military itself:
Force Requirements in Stability Operations
James T. Quinlivan, Parameters, Winter 1995
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Force ratios of one to four per thousand of population. At the low end of the force requirement scale are the police present day-to-day in generally peaceful populations such as the United States.
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Force ratios of four to ten per thousand of population. A number of operations have used security and military forces at such force ratios:
Ongoing operations in India's Punjab state against Sikh militants deploy a security force of about 115,000 (regular troops, paramilitary security formations, and police) to secure a population of about 20.2 million, giving a force ratio of 5.7 per thousand.[7] The counterinsurgency campaign in the Punjab has been denounced as routinely violating human rights by causing hundreds of disappearances and summary executions. In the face of some popular support for the insurgents, even such a harshly punitive campaign has required large forces to protect and coerce.[8]
In 1965, the United States intervened in the Dominican Republic to stave off an incipient civil war. The United States deployed soldiers and Marines to separate the protagonists and assumed responsibility for stability in much of the country, particularly the capital. Peak deployment of US forces brought 24,000 to stabilize a population of about 3.6 million, giving a force ratio of about 6.6 troops per thousand.[9]
Force ratios above ten per thousand of population. Force ratios above ten per thousand have been mounted in stability operations. In 1952 the British forces in the Malayan Emergency deployed close to 40,000 regular troops from Britain and the Commonwealth as well as the regulars of the Malay Regiment itself.[10] At the same time, the police force had 29,800 regular police together with 41,300 special constables,[11] for a total full-time security force of more than 111,000. With a population at the time of 5,506,000, the British generated a force ratio of about 20 per thousand of population. If the Home Guard force of 210,000 (1953 strength, not all of whom were either armed or active at any given time) were added to the previous figure, the force ratio would be even higher.
In Northern Ireland the British government deployed for more than 25 years a security force of around 32,000 (including both British military forces and the Royal Ulster Constabulary) to secure a total population of just over 1.6 million, giving a force ratio of about 20 per thousand. The British have recently reduced their military forces as part of an ongoing peace process.
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The figure suggests two implications. First, very few states have populations so small that they could be stabilized with modest-sized forces. Second, a number of states have populations so large that they are simply not candidates for stabilization by external forces. Between the two extremes are countries large enough that only substantial efforts on the part of great powers or substantial contributions from many states could generate forces large enough to overcome serious disorder in such populations. Consider, however, that even many of these countries have populations so large that relatively modest per capita force deployments would entail moving, sustaining, and employing tens of thousands of troops in what the Army calls a "bare-base environment." The more rustic the environment, the larger the logistics tail needed to sustain the force.
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The combination of force ratios, current populations, the size of existing infantry forces, and the implications for rotation can be astounding. Force ratios larger than ten members of the security forces for every thousand of population are not uncommon in current operations (Northern Ireland, or even Mogadishu). Sustaining a stabilizing force at such a force ratio for a city as large as one million (or for a country as small as one million) could require a deployment of about a quarter of all regular infantry battalions in the US Army. With current force sizes this means that within two years, every infantry soldier in the US Army would have been cycled through an operational deployment and many would have started on second deployments to the operational area.
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James T. Quinlivan is Director of the Arroyo Center at RAND, in Santa Monica, Calif. The Arroyo Center is the Army's federally funded research and development center for policy analysis. The author is a graduate of the Illinois Institute of Technology and has an M.S. in applied mathematics from the University of Colorado at Boulder and an Engineer's Degree in Operations Research from UCLA.
carlisle-www.army.mil
Iraq has a population of 24 million. Using the 20 per 1000 ratio that Britain used in bringing Northern Ireland under control, the US will need an occupation force of 480,000. Oh, and those are Army forces, you don't get to count the Air Force or Navy, and in the event of ongoing terrorism (i.e. the Israeli experience) they could get stuck there for years. And only then, after tens of thousands of body bags, we retreat with our tails between our legs, having relearned the lesson that our fathers learned in Korea and Vietnam -- don't get involved in land wars in Asia unless you can get some other party to supply the cannon fodder.
-- Carl |
