What's Wrong with The "Petraeus" Force Recommendations

Gone are the days of GOP blustering, "We will Prevail!". Finally - finally - a SecDef who can say quite candidly, "The enemy have a vote." Strangely, once you admit that you might lose (which includes stalemate in COIN), you may have a greater chance at winning ...

Hilzoy (at Obsdian wings) did a great job of exposing the longstanding, bogus benefit-benefit analysis done by the GOP (while at AS's blog).

Are COIN operations so different that we break from what seems "standard" for the military, which is to release troops after they are no longer needed, rather than request of the military to predict when forces won't be needed? What is going on with that?

This week Senator Graham introduced worst-case analysis to criticize the Democrats, without realizing that what the GOP under Bush has been doing for a long time is not worst-case analysis but "hope-for-the-best, don't-plan-for-the-rest". We can term this bogus GOP exercise as "maximize benefit" analysis (instead of the conservative "minimize regret" analysis).*

Today, we can look at a new kind of analysis.

How should troop drawdown occur?

Proposition: when forces are no longer needed, they are demobilized, that day, that week, or just as soon as the logistics can be worked out, provided there is no re-tasking to be done.

Therefore, what does it mean to 'demobilize' troops at an announced future date?

I dunno, but the options are

• (a) it's a political statement, not a military one, designed for whatever purpose
• (b) it's a resource utilization statement, not a facts-on-the-ground-as-we-know-them-now statement (which is how it is being portrayed)
• (c) it' s a gambit, a prediction about where the battle will have evolved by a future time

To be honest, I think it is all three of these things.

1. There is internal and external pressure to show a "crest"
2. Even if you make the case that COIN requires greater continuity and makes possible longer deployments than "conventional" warfare, going from 12 to 15 to 18 months may not be tolerable and just another sign of drips-and-drab "coin"tingency planning at the top. Most importantly, no one knows what the facts on the ground will be six months from now - there is absolutely no history of successful forecasting in Iraq on which to even predicate such a dashing tomfoolery.
3. I believe that Petraeus, et. al., are making a gambit on the growth of the ISF. (more later)

Are COIN operations so different that we break from what seems "standard" for the military, which is to release troops after they are no longer needed, rather than request of the military to predict when forces won't be needed? What is going on with that?

A Second Problem

It's worrisome, to some degree, that there is a unanimous recommendation to the President from all "senior military officers".

This is like a gift to the President. Did Roosevelt never face anything but unanimous recommendations? Truman? Wilson? Ike?

There have to be a range of military options that make sense under different sets of assumptions.

The President makes a decision among these. To "tee it up" doesn't seem ... credible, unless you really, really believe that there is a consensus and not simply disagreements that are getting buried in the interest of maximizing some other perceived good or goal.

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*This showed up in Peter Pace's talk with reporters, today (pictured above). We had assumptions when we went to Baghdad about the Iraqi Army. They were violated. Therefore, we failed. ARRG! Now, you cannot cover all contingencies, but if you undertake an operation like Iraqi Freedom where "success" hangs on a razor's edge, you had better cover 99.1% of the contingencies, right? Pretending that you can strike forward and deal with the consequences as they come up as a matter of lessons learned or whatever, which seems to characterize the Abrams-Cheney-Rumsfeld-Wolfowitz posture, to me, sometimes, is daft in a "too big to fail" situation.