TM, where are you getting the 700,000 high estimate figure?

My recollection was that the manpower estimate was on the order of 250,000 -- I spent some time yesterday digging through the media stories of the day and all the ones that I was able to find variously report between 225,000 and 250,000 with most reporting the lower figure.

This figure seems to originate with testimony in front of the Armed Services Committee on 25 February 2003 -- I've been unable to dig up the original transcript of questions following Shinseki's prepared remarks, but this purports to be an excerpt:

"SEN. LEVIN: Thank you, Mr. Chairman. General Shinseki, could you give us some idea as to the magnitude of the Army's force requirement for an occupation of Iraq following a successful completion of the war?

GEN. ERIC K. SHINSEKI: In specific numbers, I would have to rely on combatant commanders' exact requirements. But I think --

SEN. LEVIN: How about a range?

GEN. SHINSEKI: I would say that what's been mobilized to this point -- something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers are probably, you know, a figure that would be required. We're talking about post-hostilities control over a piece of geography that's fairly significant, with the kinds of ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems. And so it takes a significant ground-force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this."

I have found a few references to the 700,000 figure, but they all seem to track back into the void of the greater blogosphere, with no primary source that I can identify cited -- if you have one, I'd certainly like to pursue it.

In terms of higher figures, I do vaguely recall talk of a high upper bound of 400,000 coming out of some pre-war wargaming and I have also found secondary references to this figure -- numerous sources have also described this as Shinseki's "private" estimate (whatever the hell that means) even though that is, I believe, in excess of the total peak forces mobilized for the invasion of Iraq.

PenGun /m4651 - The ICC is only a proper venue when national justice systems are nonexistent or decline to prosecute for political reasons. Even under the ICC framework, national prosecutions are preferred. To make the point you made, you either have to be ignorant of that basic fact or you are slandering the US military justice system which is in the middle of investigating a wide list of people including Karpinski, has started trials in several cases already, and has finished careers. Karpinski is safely removed from command responsibility. She will never again be in a position to foul things up and she's not out of the woods for doing hard time at Leavenworth.

The military lawyers and military cops investigating this mess deserve support at least as much as the combat troops who properly execute their jobs. The nature of criminal trials the world over would suggest that Karpinski's would be last, with testimony culled from prior trials used as evidence in hers. Can you give one iota of evidence that would demonstrate that your accusation is more than a base smear against honest CID and Army lawyers prosecuting this mess?

Edited by author 05-12-2004 04:32 AM
TM Lutas

 Nice list of success. Syrian WMDs ...

 I guess the folowing would be a reason for the US refusing to subscribe to the War Crimes commission.

"Karpinski told Taguba that Sanchez expressed disappointment to her that the guard force had not used lethal firepower from the outset to put down the riot. She said yesterday through her lawyer that Sanchez said, "I'm tired of this MP mentality; I want them to shoot first and use nonlethal force later."

 Prisoners, rioting for better treatment, throwing rocks. A clear order to commit war crimes.

  PenGun
 Do What Now ???

 A nice piece on OS X and it's kernel

http://www.kernelthread.com/mac/osx/arch_xnu.html

PenGun /m4646 - You ask what are the other successes we've had as a consequence of Iraq. There's the whole Libya disarmament success. I also wonder if the Sudanese government would have been as upset about Syrian WMD parked in Sudan if there hadn't been the Iraqi invasion. Al Jazeera has been exposed as desperately wanting when it comes to reasonably accurate war coverage. And we've gotten a lot of the bugs out in the military conduct of this new type of war. I'm sure I'm missing plenty but those should do for a start.

You assert that the rebellion is just getting started. Besides Michael Moore's flatulence what can you point to as evidence? Sadr's uprising is being cut to pieces and Shiites are clearly turning on him. Fallujah is still in doubt but by no means lost. The last I heard they were doing test runs for US military convoys going through the city and the first one was successful. Since this entire affair started with the insurgents in Fallujah asserting that the US can't enter the city, the US running convoys through does seem to be a bit of a loss, for them.

Ikram /m4647 - Remember, you heard it here first. Whether you believe that the paradigm is bunkum or not, it's important to understand. Foolish ideas can have real world consequences as Lysenkoism proved long ago. But I don't think Core/Gap is foolish. I think it provides a framework for tying economic globalization to national security in a way that will get us past colonialism, neo-colonialism, and post-colonialism.

Charles Tupper /m4648 - It's pity you didn't include links. I googled about and came up with the following two stories (largely the same story but some differences):
http://www.sweden.se/templates/SISResearchNews____8707.asp
http://www.betterhumans.com/News/news.aspx?articleID=2004-05-07-1

In summary, several studies have indicated that transdifferentiation does occur but one study challenges this in the specific case of heart attack repair. As a result of the study, one of the article calls for the immediate cessation of human trials even though there is clinical evidence of actual benefit for patients. The benefit must be from some other means than actual stem cell repair and we must shut down all experiments to actually get data.

Doesn't this smell the least bit fishy to you?

As for the Korean experiments on nuclear transfer, I'd be much more comfortable with the scientific efficacy of the technique if they could actually get reliable results in animals. Currently, it's very hit and miss with lots of spontaneous abortions and genetic damage to even the viable animals. Even the much trumpeted successes like Dolly the sheep generally end up with something (in Dolly's case, an abnormal type of early onset arthritis). But getting things right in animals would take time and patience. It would mean doing the science right. Instead we have glory hounds who want to go straight to humans when we simply don't know if the current methods are ever going to work reliably.

Apart from the very real moral issues, the issue of current usefulness for actual medical treatments provides a very compelling argument to prioritize adult stem cell work for government funding. This is what Republicans would do. Democrats would reverse the process and I haven't seen a convincing argument of why they should do so that is not ultimately drenched in cynicism and special interest politics.

Hank /m4649 - I understand where you are coming from on the Army/Rumsfeld relationship but I can't agree with it. Yes, Rumsfeld is not the Army's best friend in terms of emphasis and funding. Rumsfeld came in wanting fast and flexible and the Army was not only not prepared to deliver, they seemed, with Crusader and several other issues, to be going the opposite way. They got into bad habits during the Clinton administration.

One of the reason we had so few boots on the ground in Afghanistan is that Rumsfeld called for them to submit plans for the takedown of Afghanistan and they blew it. They wanted a lot more troops, they wanted a lot of time to get there, and they wanted a slow, methodical plodding sort of campaign. Iraq was simply round two of the same Army song and dance. While more troops may help in Iraq, I still stand by my assertion that the 700,000 high figure was a PR bomb designed to derail the invasion.

Do you recall the incident where UK troops did some live fire exercises on the Kuwait/Iraq border prior to the start of OIF and Iraqi soldiers hearing the shooting went straight into surrender mode? The idea that these guys were going to give any sort of decent account of themselves on a conventional battlefield is more than "better safe than sorry", it was outright delusional. If Rumsfeld is rightly coming under criticism for the back end planning, he certainly has to get credit for knowing the Army's capabilities on the front end better than the generals.

If I were a Cabinet Secretary and I had one branch of my department consistently resisting my reforms and trying to torpedo my initiatives through Congressional back channels, you bet they'd be the first branch to look at when I wanted to extract money out of the budget. That's just par for the course. So Rumsfeld started out with the idea of cutting two divisions out of the Army. Currently, he's reorganizing and stuffing more people into it. That seems to me to mark somebody more interested in results that serve the national interest than bureaucratic vendetta.

I'll agree with your evaluation of Gen. Shinseki but I think that while the enthusiasts for the revolution in military affairs might have gone a bit overoptimistic on the occupation, Gen. Shinseki has been much too pessimistic. Do you seriously mean to say that the occupation really needs 5.2 times as many troops, that each soldier in Iraq is doing the work of 5?

Oh, and look up your history. The biggest enthusiast for the Strykers has long been one Gen. Shinseki. Again, if Rumsfeld was the nasty anti-Army tyrant and Shinseki hater that he's supposed to be, wouldn't it be normal for him to want to stake Stryker and cancel that project?

The Strykers are, I agree, good vehicles for the Sys Admin force. But the Sys Admin force is MOotW, a sure career killer in today's Pentagon if you decide to specialize in it. The Sys Admin force doesn't really exist but needs to and will likely be the busiest part of the Army. The Leviathan force, with heavy armor, is not likely to be called on very often in comparison.

Finally, I think you misunderstand my opinion on a partitioned Iraq. The classic regional balance of power has always been the little Gulf states shifting and dodging between the two giants, Iraq and Iran, who are always at conflict. A divided Iraq means that Tehran will become regional hegemon. This would be a horrible result.

TM

Your Letter XXI is right on the point, To reinforce it a little, privately owned companies are spending their stockholders money on adult stem research. They can and have built a business case that in reasonable (by FDA approval) time they develop a medically useful product, recover their costs and even make a profit. However they are not spending a dime of their stockholders money embryonic stem cell because they do not see any reasonable hope of developing a product let alone recover their costs.



Your Letter XX I think misses the point in Tacticus’s rather pessimistic article. The reason the Army is upset is not simply because Rumsfeld has done more damage to the Army than the Republican Guard or 8 years of Bill Clinton, it is a reasonable fear that under Rumsfelds leadership the war could be lost, or won with much unnecessary casualties, and in any case unable to meet future contingencies. It is not a question of back door opposition to reasonable reforms

General Harold Johnson, the Army Chief of Staff during the Viet Nam war, related that in 1966 he was ready to publicly resign over President Lyndon Johnson’s war policy, and that the rest of the Chiefs would probably have followed. A few hours before the point to make the decision point he made one of the few bad decisions of his career, that he could do more good if he stayed. He much lamented that decision. General Johnson’s story is in the text books studied by every Staff and War Collage student, a class discussion item even in the striped down reserve officer version. To guess from the article that Tactius quoted (and also Phil Carter see his comments) there is a portion of the Army leadership that is having the same internal and professional crisis as General Johnson.

So what is happening?

For historic reasons ground based Continental Air Defense is an Army responsibility. That means the ground based part of the Star Wars program comes out of the Army budget. Since Congress would not fund the whole program with additional funding the money would have to be striped out of the Army budget. So when commentators on US defense had been saying that the Army’s 10 divisions were inadequate to the potential missions Rumsfeld decides to go to and 8 divisions to use the funds for missile defense. He looked for major programs to cut and anything else to move money to missile defense. He maintained the 8-division goal long after 9/11 and he was calling up large amounts of reservists to supplement the 10 division Army. I’m not against Star Wars per se, but this strikes me as very poor cost/benefit analysis, especially since it was not being presented as cost/benefit analysis.

The Crusader system had fallen into several of the traps that large programs can fall into and needed to be sent back to the drawing boards. I doubt this had much to do with the cancellation. The idea was to spend the money elsewhere. As Bruce noted a few days ago, it was also show who is boss. The idea for developing the Crusader system was because US artillery 1970’s technology is out ranged by the revolution in artillery design of the 1980’s that leaves US artillery out ranged. Even the Iraqi Army could outrange us in a straight artillery duel. But Rumsfeld made it clear this was a total cancellation, not a back to the drawing board decision. If our troops get in a jam where air power cannot fly we could get a serious dose of our own medicine.. One of the quotes in the article Tacitus linked was that it wasn’t so much that policies were hurting the Army as the Rumsfeld does not seem to care he is hurting the Army.

The first war plan direction from Rumsfeld to the military staffs called for ridiculously low force levels. The Army’s instinct to plan on the assumption that at least the 5 or 6 Republican Guard Divisions would put up a first class fight was in the case overly safe sided, but who likes unpleasant surprises. Rumsfeld finally allowed the minimum (no fudge factor) force levels for the first phase. Even so if the Iraqi army had fought like the February 1945 Wermacht it would have been a much longer and bloodier campaign.

The Army has maintained for years the capability and knowledge base for “rear area operations” aka an occupation. Rumsfeld intentionally bypassed the in house capability to rely on someone he had to fire inside a month after Baghdad fell. Most of the Civil Affairs units that are organized and trained for this sort of action had not been called up in April 2003. Perhaps you noticed the US got much criticism for what seems like rank amateurishness. Much of the subsequent troubles could have been at least ameliorated if the Civil Affairs and supporting troops were able to take over in the trail of the advance but they weren’t in theater. (I’m not sure it has relevance given the internal problems of the 800th MP brigade but much of the POW handling units were also called up late.)

Bill Clinton’s Army Chief of Staff Gen Shinseki was the weakest COS since Westmoreland, maybe worse. This made him a very poor choice to explain the Army position to Rumsfeld or Congress. But even he knows that you can look up in experience tables how much strength is needed to occupy a given area with a given population. The two-war scenario’s I saw described in the press were for (9 division? fight and go home) conventional wars with a reasonably secure rear area. When he was saying we needed several hundred thousand troops he was accurately commenting on a very different mission.

Much of the turbulence the reserves (and regular Army)a re having could have been avoided by relatively minor temporary increase in the active duty troop ceiling which would only have needed incremental increases in spending not capital increases.



Rumsfeld claim that he is supporting lighter more lethal and agile forces is more hype to justify moving money than a reality. When planning for a war you look at what the enemy has and plan to move the forces to take care of the saturation. You do not plan what you can move and hope they can win. There is a good need for medium forces such as the stryker brigades but that does not eliminate the need for heavy forces.

The difference is between strategic mobility and tactical mobility. While lighter forces can be transported much faster than heavy forces they do arrive in a hostile or potential hostile theater. When they arrive relative to a heavy force, they have lighter weapons, less ability to survive enemy fire, and they have less off road mobility than heavy forces. Basically once in theater they are less agile and lethal than a heavy force. The ability to, hopefully and less expensively, prevent a war with a quick “show of force” makes the lighter force structure popular with diplomats and politicians, but if the bluff gets called - then the force is in serious trouble (for a good example do a google search on “task force smith.”) As was noted in an article Bruce posted long ago a lighter force in place could lead us to take earlier preemptive action to protect the force, negating “show of force” aspect.

While a stryker equipped force would be excellent in peace keeping and occupation role r the main war in Iraq have taken longer, required more forces, and had noticeably more casualties. After all the force is more lightly equipped has less protection. Because of less off road mobility it may have to fight though rather than go around. The 101st Airborne had the 2-70 Armor battalion attached throughout the advance to provide the leverage to advance, without the M-1s it would have been a slower and more costly.

To put it another way, after the Iraq war Rumsfeld will leave us with an Army that is not really able to meet the military requirements of the “core/gap” scenarios you believe are the wave of the future.



I think it is a real possibility that after the election one or more senior Army officers will publicly resign to protest Rumsfeld’s policies. Probably not before to avoid any problems with the doctrine of “civilian control of the military.” The catch here is that to threaten to do this if conditions are not corrected is a court martial offence; just doing it with no notice is legal.




I am not as pessimistic as those articles about the final out come of the war. Like you if it turns out to be a divided Iraq I do not think that it a necessarily bad thing. Instance on ratifying the boundaries drawn by 19th and early 20th century colonial offices is stupid. But that is a decision to be made by the Iraqi’s.

Like me, I think you would agree with Tacticus’s estimate of a Kerry administration. It is probably to close the election to dump Rumsfeld. But then on of Kerry’s best possibilities is that a Rumsfeldism will come to light that will sink Bush.

The supremacy of adult stem cells, as an argument, is bunk. It is contrived simply to support a political and moral position. Embryonic stem cells are toti-potent, they can produce any of the 200 cell types in the body. Adult stem cells cannot.

Swedish researchers at Lund University, where Dr. Stig Renchrona pioneered the first stereotaxic technique for the implantation of fetal substantia nigra tissue into the putamen, in an attempt to treat Parkinson’s disease, have debunked recent studies that have suggested that adult stem cells can become different types of cells than those of their respective organs.
 
"Both we and two American research teams have used various methods to replicate a study from three years ago that appeared in Nature," says Stem Cell Center researcher Jens Nygren. "It was about transplanting blood stem cells to create new heart muscle cells to repair a heart after a heart attack. But all of our results univocally indicate that this is not possible."

Korean researchers using therapeutic cloning techniques have addressed the issue of rejection.

"Because these cells carry the nuclear genome of the individual, after differentiation they could be expected to be transplanted without immune rejection for treatment of degenerative disorders," Woo said. "Our approach opens the door for the use of these specially developed cells in transplantation medicine."

“The South Korean team used the classic cloning technique, pioneered in Dolly the sheep, which is to take an egg and remove the nucleus, which contains virtually all of the DNA code for programming the egg into a human being. They then replaced the nucleus with one taken from an adult non-reproductive cell, fused them together and then cultured the egg in a warm nutrient bath so that it divided and developed into an early embryo.”

Dr. Seung Kim at the University of British Columbia (UBC) has generated a neural stem cell factory or farm if you will. The stem cells originally obtained from aborted fetal tissue, have been replicating in a petrie dish in his lab for at least five years. If banks of neural or embryonic stem cells can exist, ad infinitum, in the lab, it diminishes the moral argument. Researchers will not need new sources to replenish their stem cells but harvest them in laboratories.

Harvesting embryonic stem cells is only the first step leading to cellular repair. A clinical trial, at UBC, intending to transplant neural stem cells into six MS volunteers was rejected by the UBC Ethics Committee not because of the use of fetal derived neural stem cells but because the component that encouraged these stem cells to migrate and proliferate was imbued with an oncogene that was potential tumorous. There was the possibility of giving the MS volunteers brain cancer.

To discard embryonic stem cell research, now, without allowing researchers the opportunity to explore its great potential, is simply criminal. However, it will not stop the research but simply transfer it to a more amiable environment.

http://dsc.discovery.com/news/afp/20040209/stemcell.html

http://www.diagnostico.com/trejos/Stereota.stm

TMLutas: You may be interestd in today's Wall Street Journal, front page, left hand column. All about 'gap states'. I still think the paradigm is bunkum. But, clearly, there are those in the US military that do not.

TM Lutas said

"We've had some reverses but the successes are real and they will be of lasting consequence."

 What successes would those be? Oh yeah ... you did get Sadam. Any more?

TM Lutas also said:

"The forces of disconnection are in their "Battle of the Bulge" phase. They are expending all because they know that once sovereignty is restored and elections become the main preoccupation of the country, they are history. Stand fast for the few months more until we get there."

 No the uprising is just getting started. They have had some success, Fallujah, and with the massive stupidity (it's a feature) at Abu Ghraib, they have the bit in their teeth. This is the _people_ of Iraq you are fighting. Make no mistake.

 Your military is starting to assert it's self. They are not prepared to see the despicable people in the white house (it's kinda grey now eh') ruin their toy.

  PenGun
 Do What Now ???

Condolences to all who have lost old threads. If any were addressed to me, resubmit.

PenGun /m4643 - No, I don't see the GWOT as US conquest. The DoD has to plan against an enemy. Pentagon planners look out and see who are likely military challenges and structure the force to successfully meet those challenges over the short, medium, and long terms. The DoD has looked at the PRC as a medium to long-term possible near peer competitor for some time and are trying to gather a force that could take it on if the politicians called them to do it.

What I said was that if the PRC blows up and you end up with a resurgence of warlordism in a post-communist China, with several of the warlords being nuclear, we might end up having to go in to restore stability but not as the DoD was planning it, to restrain PRC aggressive expansionism but rather to fix a failed state.

Edited by author 05-10-2004 02:02 PM
From Quicktopic

"I've got it working, but apparently about 300 messages are lost. Sorry for
the inconvenience."

 "Moan" and my long reasons post is gone ... damn.

  PenGun
 Do What Now ???

TM Lutas said:
 (talking about the PRC)
The US military may end up having to fight there after all, in the end. The only difference is that it'll be in a Barnett style weak, disconnected China and not the strong near-peer that currently figures in medium range Pentagon plans.

 You see the GWOT as a war of US global conquest? It would seem so. If I could be sure that was in the plans I would switch sides.

 I want _one_ government for this planet. We have much to do and the nation state deal is a failure. I am a pragmatist and if the US wants the world as it's states count me in.

 The United States of Earth. I like it.

  PenGun
 Do What Now ???

I guess there has been a data base screw up. They can probably repair this, assuming the data is still uncorrupted.

  PenGun
 Do What Now ???

 Guy Simonds is my choice

Hmmm I test it and get an ancient Minigun post. Damn ;).

Testing this

Re Fallujah:

Fallujah is surrounded. They can't get resupply which means that those rockets, mortars and RPGs they're firing at long range against dug in Marines can't be replaced. That ammo can't be fired against Marines when they move in to close range. Fallujah is a true source of a lot of this, and it will be taken.

I have a friend who in 1968 was part of a platoon that went into Hue City, and had a few attachments and Marines he'd picked up for that fight. Forty of them got off the landing craft that took them across the Perfume River. At the end of the fight there were eleven of them still on their feet. They went in a heavy platoon, they left a squad.

This is a far bigger conflict than Vietnam. Iran, Syria, Algeria, Morocco, Indonesia, the Philippines--all of these have jihadist nests which must be destroyed at some point.

Canada, the US, and especially France (and other European countries) are heavily infiltrated by the enemy. That is a much more intractable problem than Fallujah. You can't exactly start randomly kicking in doors in New Jersey or Toronto. However this war will eventually end, as long as we can get a handle on the other enemy, the "Transnational Progressives" (i.e., recrudescent communism). The TPs and the Islamists form a Red/Brown (communist/Nazi) union which is absolutely dangerous

I went back to read VDH's article: typical: lots of erudite scholarship and historical references backing up overheated political opinionizing.....
But, among the other numerous nits to pick: I think his reference to "the fate of the Great Mahdi's resting place" may be more to the fact that the Mahdi's tomb was part of, IIRC, a mosque complex in Khartoum, capped by large and prominent dome. Winston Churchill, in his excellent dispatches from Omdurman, makes note of the fact that the Sudanese Mahdists believed that the Mahdi's tomb was protected by Allah and so invulnerable. British gunboat crews on the Nile thus made the dome one of their first targets, and its destruction by shellfire was supposed to have serious punctured the Sudanese' morale (which the slaughter of their fighters at Omdurman completely shattered).
I am guessing this is Hanson's oblique reference to the fact that Moqtada al-Sadr's "mahdist" insurgents are holed up in a sacred Shiite mosque in Najaf - however, I am not sure this would be a good analogy to want to promulgate as a hopeful outcome: Najaf 2004 is not Khratoum 1898 - not least in that there are no Kitcheners in charge!