So I've committed more than 20,000 additional American troops to Iraq.The next day it had moved up slightly and the number 21,500 was being thrown around:
President Bush appealed directly to the American people last night to support a renewed campaign to pacify Iraq, calling for an additional 21,500 U.S. troops to help the beleaguered Iraqi government regain control of Baghdad while warning that he would not support an "open-ended" U.S. commitment.And it's been that way ever since, right? No one in the administration has since corrected that number, right? Seems like that's the number they want you to think of when you think "The Surge".
21,500.
Take a look at this from The Hill:
Via TPMmuckraker, you can read a Congressional Budget Office report itself.The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) is predicting that President Bush's troop surge may require more soldiers to go to Iraq than the White House is saying publicly.
In a letter sent to House Budget Committee Chairman John Spratt (D-S.C.) Thursday, CBO said the Pentagon so far has only announced which combat units would be part of the surge.
"However, U.S. military operations also require substantial support forces, including personnel to staff headquarters, serve as military police and provide communications, contracting, engineering, intelligence, medical and other services," CBO said. "Over the past few years, DoD's practice has been to deploy a total of about 9,500 personnel per combat brigade to the Iraq theater, including about 4,000 combat troops and about 5,500 supporting troops."
The budget office said if the same ratio would apply to the new troops as to those currently in Iraq, the surge would require 48,000 troops to be part of the surge. Even scaled-back support forces would still result in a total of 35,000 troops to be sent to Iraq.
So it's not 21,500 new troops heading (or "surging") to Iraq, is it? It's somewhere between 35,000 and 48,000, isn't it?
Can't these people be honest about anything?
1 comment:
No matter what the number is, it won't be enough. Although 40,000+ is probably better than just slightly over 20,000. 40,000 troops might actually have some highly-unlikely chance to something very temporary and just within a very small geographic area that might allow us to say (breathlessly, and with obvious impatience), "Well. Right! Problem solved. Glad that's over. Got to be going now. Lots of other things to attend to. See ya!"
The thing is that the "effective" size of any military force has a way of evaporating with astonishing speed. When I was a young officer, I was given the largest division of sailors on my ship. On any given day, I had between 50 and 60 guys assigned to me. But that was on paper. A percentage of that number were always sick, another group was on leave, some were away at schools, some more were attending mandatory onboard training, another group were on a work detail, loading food onboard, at thest 3 or 4 were standing watch somewhere, another 3 or 4 had just come off a night watch, and were too sleep-deprived to do much good, a small group was temporarily assigned to the mess decks, a couple were studying for their selected 3rd-class petty officer exams, one or two were just plain absent, a couple were at the dentist, etc. By the time we mustered up to do the days work, my 50-man division had sometimes shrunk to just 5-10 sailors, and one of them might be on light duty that week.
Even worse, because I had "so many guys", I was always told that I had to give up a batch of them for whatever work detail came up on short notice.
All this is just my long-winded way of saying that you can take any number you want and send them there. The number of boots on the ground outside the camp gates will be, at any given moment in time, just a very small fraction of that number. It ain't going to be anywhere near enough. Too little, too late.
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