Hi NightOwl; Re: "Well my butcher's bill to eliminate the urban shooting match is around 3,725. 625 for Fallujah, and 3100 for the rest of the cities. Make it 4,000 worse case, assuming the Iraqi's fight and we stop playing politics."
Unfortunately, that's more than the American public will tolerate.
Re: "What's your calculator say?"
We need around 800,000 troops just to maintain control in Iraq. (That is, just to prevent the insurgents from setting up "occupation free" zones.) Our troops will take a death rate of about what the current per capita death rate is (that is assume the same rate of patrols, but more patrols being made), for a total of about 25 soldiers per day.
That seems like a lot, but for any one soldier, the probability of getting killed in Iraq during a 2 year deployment would only be about 2%, which is quite acceptable in military terms. We have to stay there for about 20 years, which is to say one human generation. Total butcher bill, something like 200,000. Of course, since this sort of thing has never been done successfully in modern times, my numbers are only guesses.
The figures are extrapolations from France's experience in Algeria. France had 400,000 troops in a country much smaller than Iraq and lost. They lost 26,000 souls over a war that only lasted a few years. The French had the advantage of being far more vicious then than we are now, and the disadvantage of being seen as somewhat more of an occupier than we have been, at least up to now, along with the advantage of not being seen as toadies of the Israelis.
We tried a somewhat similar pacification campaign in Vietnam:
Vietnam Algeria Iraq
Popn 12M 9M 26M
Total ethnic 24M 80M 150M
West KIA >60,000 >26,000 ???????
------- ------- -------
KIA/Popn >5000 >2900 ???
KIA/Ethnic >2500 >325 ???
In the above table, the population figures are approximate for the duration of the war. "Total Ethnic" is the total number of world population speaking that language and sharing that ethnic group. "West KIA" is soldiers lost by a western power. Neither Algeria nor Vietnam was a success, so the total number required to actually pacify them would be something in excess of the numbers given. The ratios suggest that the total local population is the figure that must be analyzed, rather than the ethnic population of the whole region which is to be pacified, but I've included the other figure as a measure of the possible effect of the "street". In other words, if you beat up on the Irish Catholics in Northern Ireland, they will get assistance from their cousins across the border. If you beat up on the British, they will get assistance from the other English speaking countries. Another way of describing this principle is the common axiom, "me and my brother against my cousin, me and my cousin against my neighbor, etc." News reports now say that fairly large numbers of Syrians are now fighting us in Iraq.
I chose Vietnam and Algeria because they are good examples of western powers attempting to pacify unruly populations of very different ethnic type. If, for example, Saudi Arabia was trying to pacify Iraq, they could do it with far fewer KIA. Also, the KIA figure includes deaths due to accidents and stuff that technically are not "KIA".
So go ahead and put whatever number you think right into the ratio "KIA/Popn" or "KIA/Ethnic". My guess is that the correct figure for "KIA/Popn" is around the 10,000 figure, which gives a total western KIA in Iraq of about 250,000. That means we have to lose 1 soldier killed, for every 100 Iraqis that we "liberate". That's about 80x worse than the WTC attack. Since our western allies are too smart to jump in there with us, we can expect to spend most of those lives ourselves.
If you don't like that calculation, you can go ahead with the general figure that it takes about a 5% kill rate to pacify a population. With 25,000,000 Iraqis, that's about 1,000,000 dead. Our kill rate against the Iraqis (in urban and guerilla combat) is around 10 to 1. This ratio will decrease as the quality of our troops suffer due to the draft that will be required to achieve the troop totals, and as the insurgents slowly learn to be more professional. Overall, we might be lucky enough to hang on to a 5 to 1 kill ratio, which means about 200,000 US troop losses. This means that it costs us about one US soldier dead in order to "liberate" 125 Iraqis, five of whom won't live to see "freedom".
Hey, maybe you've got a way of getting the US public to accept this kind of expense. I don't. Put drugs in the municipal water supplies?
-- Carl
P.S. If you want to look at another modern example of one ethnic group attempting to pacify another, go look up the numbers for the USSR's failed attempt in Afghanistan. |
