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[Tvoivozhd <tvoivozd AT infionline.net>]

Mr. Rumsfeld, however, still seems wedded to his vision, as he's granted 
permission to only temporarily enlarge the Army by 30,000 troops.

tvoivozhd---THIRTY THOUSAND???---the driveling idiot!---infected by the 
Bush Virus--"promise everything but pay for 
nothing"---great-great-grandkids in diapers can pay.

I started out as a Captain the the Air Commandos, operating in 
Burma---our end of the Composite Group being the guerrilla component, 
working with the British behind-the-Japanese-lines guerrillas, which in 
turn was commanded by British Corporals, whose squads were West Africans 
and Gurkhas.  We had some outstanding people, Colonel Philip Cochran (of 
Terry And The Pirates comic strip fame), Lt.Colonel Levi R. Chase, A 
(maybe THE) leading pilot from U.S. Air Forces in North Africa, and 
Major Rebori, whose tropical guerrilla  background, left him 
shivering-helpless part of each day, eaten up by malaria---died in his 
mid-30's, long before the war with the Japanese was over.


         
   The Christian Science Monitor - csmonitor.com    
from the October 01, 2004 edition - 
http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/1001/p08s03-comv.html

When Army Morale Takes a Hit
The demands on America's overstretched armed forces are starting to take 
a toll on troop morale. That has consequences beyond soldiers' mental 
outlook (which is of itself no minor issue).

Concerned about its ability to retain and recruit soldiers, the Army is 
considering reducing its 12-month combat tour in Iraq and Afghanistan to 
between six and nine months (the Marine tour is only seven months).

The tour was lengthened last year because the insurgency in Iraq 
required maintaining a large military presence there. But feedback from 
the front line is that a year is too much of a hardship.

That complaint goes especially for the National Guard's "weekend 
soldiers" who never expected to be away from their families and regular 
jobs for a year.

Signs of recruitment troubles are beginning to surface in the Guard and 
Reserves, the Army's backup. For the first time in 10 years, the 
National Guard expects to fall short of its recruitment target - by 
about 5,000, or 9 percent. And more than a third of the 1,662 former 
soldiers being reactivated from the Individual Ready Reserve had failed 
to report for duty in Fort Jackson, S.C., by last week's deadline.

The interplay between morale and recruitment is now hitting home. 
Overextending forces threatens morale. Yet morale needs to be improved 
in order to maintain and build troop numbers in an all-volunteer military.

And let no doubt linger that the Army needs to increase its size.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld's lean-and-mean vision for the 
military may have sufficed for attacks on Afghanistan and Iraq, but that 
hasn't held true for the nation-building missions that came later.

Mr. Rumsfeld, however, still seems wedded to his vision, as he's granted 
permission to only temporarily enlarge the Army by 30,000 troops.

A recent report by a Pentagon-appointed panel, the respected Defense 
Science Board, says the US military faces several choices: add 
"substantial" forces to its numbers of troops, scale back missions, or 
depend more on other nations.

Perhaps Rumsfeld is counting on the last two options to support his 
temporary fix. Yet the training of Iraqi forces is going slowly, and the 
Army plans to maintain current US troop levels in Iraq at least through 
2007.

What will motivate recruits and boost morale is confidence that the 
Pentagon will increase force numbers and rotation.

Given the troops' outstanding service in what has turned into a 
guerrilla war, they deserve it.



        

"Guerrilla warfare is the most underrated and the most successful form 
of warfare in human history," says Ivan Eland, a specialist on national 
security at the Independent Institute in Oakland, Calif. "It is a 
defensive type of war against a foreign invader. If the guerrillas don't 
lose, they win. The objective is to wait out your opponent until he goes 
home."

From the Filipino insurrection during the Spanish-American War to 
Vietnam to El Salvador, American troops have had plenty of experience in 
fighting home-grown enemies that look nothing like a conventional army. 
As have France in Algeria, Britain in Malaysia and Northern Ireland, 
Israel in the occupied territories.

Though "counterinsurgency" calls up memories of Vietnam, there may be as 
many differences as similarities.

Different from Vietnam

Iraqi insurgents have no means of deploying battalion-size forces, as 
North Vietnam and the Viet Cong did with help from the former Soviet 
Union. Iraq won't become a proxy conflict between superpowers, as the 
Vietnam War was. There is a heavy criminal dimension to the violence in 
Iraq, just as there has been in Algeria, Colombia, and Chechnya. And 
there is unlikely to be a negotiated resolution as long as Iraq is seen 
as part of the broader war on terrorism.

Still, Iraqi insurgents have the advantage of terrain - not jungles but 
an urban setting. They appear to have at least the passive support of 
many Iraqis. It's often difficult to tell the fighters from innocent 
civilians. And they try to force American forces to overreact, causing 
civilian casualties and consequent outrage.

"No two insurgencies are alike," says retired Army Col. Dan Smith of the 
Friends Committee on National Legislation. "Except that they are violent 
affairs in which noncombatants tend to suffer most and national 
infrastructure tends to be destroyed."

Since early April, when the health ministry in Baghdad began keeping 
figures, some 3,200 civilians (not including Iraqi police or insurgents) 
have been killed - some in terrorist attacks, some by the US-led 
coalition. On average, insurgents now are attacking US forces 87 times a 
day. More than 100 foreigners have been kidnapped, and some 30 of those 
killed. Attacks on oil pipelines are occurring nearly every day now.

Four insurgencies

In fact, Iraq at the moment has four simultaneous insurgencies: Sunni 
tribalists, former Saddam regime loyalists, fighters loyal to anti-US 
cleric Moqtada al-Sadr, and foreign jihadists.

"Most importantly, the insurgents haven't made much effort to develop a 
coherent political program or identify a leadership," says Professor 
Steven Metz of the US Army War College. "I see this as their most 
serious weakness."

Still, they do have a common enemy: those they see as foreign occupiers, 
not liberators.

Within the US military, much of the debate over how to deal with 
insurgencies revolves around one assertion: "No more Vietnams."

Army Lt. Col. Robert Cassidy, who has served in Iraq and is now 
stationed in Germany, notes that the US military "has had a host of 
successful experiences in counterguerrilla war, including some distinct 
successes with certain aspects of the Vietnam War."

But, he writes in a recent issue of the Army journal Parameters, 
"Because the experience was perceived as anathema to the mainstream 
American military, hard lessons learned there about fighting guerrillas 
were neither embedded nor preserved in the US Army's institutional memory."

How to win: the hard lessons

"Unconventional war" in fact has been studied, trained for, and 
practiced for more than 40 years. But fighting guerrillas doesn't 
necessarily allow for the best use of the largest, most technologically 
advanced armed force in human history. Nor does it always address the 
real basis for defeating an insurgency, which rests more on political, 
cultural, and economic factors. Other militarily dominant countries have 
learned this as well.

"In many aspects, the French counterinsurgency effort typified the 
frustrations faced by modern powers in a classic unconventional 
conflict," states a US Marine Corps training document. "Like the US in 
Vietnam, the French in Algeria were unable to transform military 
successes (of which there were many) into a political victory."

Challenges for US forces

Defense analyst Loren Thompson of the Lexington Institute sees two basic 
defects in the US-led counterinsurgency campaign in Iraq today.

"First, policymakers wrongly assume that Sunni Arabs can be induced to 
join in a democratic government where they are assured of permanent 
minority status," says Dr. Thompson, who supported the US invasion of 
Iraq. "Second, policymakers insist on viewing violence through the prism 
of the war on global terrorism, which obscures the sources of conflict 
and requirements for victory." Thompson's controversial answer would be 
to partition Iraq into three countries: Sunni Arab, Shiite Arab, and Kurd.

That US military planners did not adequately plan for an organized Iraqi 
resistance that would become an insurgency reflects a way of thinking 
that has often afflicted governments and militaries, says RAND Corp. 
analyst Bruce Hoffman, who spent a month this year in Baghdad advising 
the Coalition Provisional Authority on counterterrorism and 
counterinsurgency.

Problem unleashed

What this amounts to, writes Dr. Hoffman in a recent RAND paper, is "the 
failure not only to recognize the incipient conditions for insurgency, 
but also to ignore its nascent manifestations and arrest its growth 
before it is able to gain initial traction and in turn momentum."

With the insurgency apparently gaining traction and momentum, such 
criticisms now are coming from prominent Republicans in Congress. "The 
lack of planning is apparent," Senate Foreign Relations Committee 
chairman Richard Lugar (R) of Indiana said last week. Sen. Chuck Hagel 
(R) Nebraska, a decorated infantry squad leader in Vietnam, says the 
recently announced shifting of reconstruction funds to security is "an 
acknowledgment that we are in deep trouble."

Classified British documents, reported in the Daily Telegraph newspaper 
over the weekend, warned a year before the invasion of Iraq that even if 
a democratic government could be created there, "it would require the US 
and others to commit to nation-building for many years" and that this 
would "entail a substantial international security force."

What a few can do

Even if the insurgents dwindle to a handful of terrorists, their impact 
on security and stability in Iraq could far outweigh their numbers. 
RAND's Hoffman points out that just 20-30 members of the Baader Meinhof 
Gang terrorized the former West Germany for two decades; 50-75 Red 
Brigadists did the same in Italy; and some 200-400 IRA gunmen and 
bombers required the prolonged deployment of tens of thousands of 
British troops in Northern Ireland.

Is it possible to prevail over the Iraqi insurgency?

First, says John Pike of the group GlobalSecurity.org, enemy combatants 
must be killed, captured, or demoralized faster than new ones can be 
recruited, and the majority of the population must come to see the 
insurgency as illegitimate and its defeat as inevitable.

It's a tough job, one that's likely to take years - as long as 10 years, 
says Dr. Metz at the Army War College. And the outcome is by no means 
assured.

"The government must appear to be legitimate, inevitable, and effective 
at providing security and services," says Mr. Pike. "As long as Iran 
does not stir the pot, these objectives could be approached by the end 
of this decade, with luck."