January 5, 2004 © New York University. All Rights Reserved.

A New Occupation: The coming price for preventive wars and regime changes

By Charles Knight and Richard Corbin
Global Beat Syndicate
CAMBRIDGE, Mass—Just over a year after the September 11 terrorist attacks, the Bush administration published its new National Security Strategy Policy, giving prominent place to unilateral, preventive wars—followed by the dismantling of the leadership and governing structures in targeted countries.
What this radical new doctrine failed to acknowledge, describe or discuss was our preparation for the consequences.
Left unsaid is that we would bear the heavy new burdens of protracted occupation and state building on a massive scale after these preventive wars. Instead, the new doctrine reads more like a vision statement than a strategic plan. It fails to address how to achieve the administration’s stated objectives in light of real world constraints: acceptable costs and consequences.
Euphoria over the capture of Saddam Hussein notwithstanding, a year after the publishing of the NSSP, our military faces long-term occupation duty in not one, but two, countries. In Afghanistan, about 9,000 U.S. troops are attempting to guarantee the survival of a new government, train the new Afghan army, and fight resurgent Taliban and al-Qaeda units increasingly emboldened since their defeat in 2001.
Over 150,000 coalition soldiers (87 percent American) now occupy Iraq—about six soldiers for every 1,000 Iraqis. That is a very low ratio by historic standards. Occupations forces facing concerted resistance often require about 20 troops per thousand, so if insurgency in Iraq continues to intensify, suppressing it may eventually require 300,000 troops or more.
Yet the Bush administration neither planned for such a large-scale, long-serving occupation force, nor did it instruct our military to train troops for occupation duty, a task very different from battlefield combat. Maintaining public order, guarding civilian reconstruction activities and rooting out insurgents—all while respecting the rights of civilians—requires specific training that has been given to only a small portion of our troops in Iraq. To this administration, such training is uncomfortably close to that needed for peacekeeping operations—a role Bush officials disdain.
The consequences of the Bush NSSP become more stark when we “do the numbers.” Our total deployable ground forces (Army and Marines) number about 400,000 active duty men and women and another 500,000 reservists. Together these numbers are more than enough to fight America’s wars of short duration such as the 1991 war with Iraq.
But when policy choices result in long occupations, such totals quickly become insufficient—a result of the dismal math of force rotations. It takes four troop units on active duty to sustain deployment of one active unit in the field for multiple years, and it takes nine reserve units to sustain deployment of one reserve unit. A four or five year occupation of Iraq by 65,000 regular and 35,000 reserve troops—a realistic possibility—will require a rotation base of 260,000 active troops (65 percent of our deployable active ground forces) and 315,000 reserve troops (63 percent of our deployable reserve ground forces.) This illustration does not properly capture the full effect of our broader "war on terror" on our reservists. Currently, more than 130,000 reserve ground troops are serving in homeland security roles, "back filling" for active-duty soldiers elsewhere abroad and deployed to Afghanistan and Iraq. For the reservists, this level of mobilization is already more than twice the long-term sustainable rate.
If another war begins, President Bush will still be able to mobilize plenty of military power. It is occupations that are the problem. If occupation of Iraq stretches into years and the "war on terrorism" widens even further, Army Reserve and National Guard units will be called to active service again and again—an activation rate far higher than the norm expected by our citizen soldiers, their families and their communities. Soon there will be significant problems with recruitment, morale and retention. One possible indicator of things to come: the Army Reserve missed this fiscal year’s overall retention rate goal by 6.7 percent—and by 9.3 percent among career soldiers.
The Bush administration plans to start drawing down U.S. troops in Iraq next spring, but history suggests a different course is as likely. After WWII, U.S. forces occupied Germany for 10 years and Japan for seven.
So far, Congress and the American people are only dimly aware of a critical decision just ahead due to the new Iraq War: either we invest in larger armies trained and ready for long occupation duty, or we jettison the Bush administration’s radical doctrine of preventive wars and regime change.
ABOUT THE WRITERS
Charles Knight is co-director of the Project on Defense Alternatives (CDA) in Cambridge, MA. Marcus Corbin is director, Military Reform Project at the Center for Defense Information (CDI), Washington, DC. CDI and PDA are members of the Security Policy Working Group, a collaborative policy research consortium seeking to reform U.S. security policy.

© 2000 New York University. All Rights Reserved. The Global Beat Syndicate, a service of New York University's Center for War, Peace, and the News Media, provides editors with commentary and perspective articles on critical global issues from contributors around the world. For more information, check out http://www.nyu.edu/globalbeat/syndicate/.
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