Pentagon moves towards further troop deployments

Military planners and White House budget analysts have been asked to provide President Bush with options for increasing US forces in Iraq by 20,000 or more. The request indicates that the option of a major "surge" in troop strength is gaining ground as part of a White House strategy review, senior administration officials said on Dec. 15. Discussion of increasing the number of US troops, at least temporarily, has coursed through Washington for two months, as a possible way to reverse the deteriorating security situation in Baghdad. But the decision to ask the Joint Chiefs of Staff to specify where the additional forces could be found among overstretched Army, Marine and National Guard units, and to seek a cost estimate from the White House Office of Management and Budget, signifies a turn in the debate. Officials said that the options being considered included the deployment of upwards of 50,000 additional troops, but that the political, training and recruiting obstacles to an increase larger than 20,000 to 30,000 troops would be prohibitive. At present, only about 17,000 US soldiers are actively involved in the effort to secure Baghdad, so even the low end of the proposals being considered by military and budget officials could more than double the size of that force. If adopted, such an increase would be a major departure from the current strategy advocated by Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the senior US commander in Iraq, which has stressed stepping up the training of Iraqi forces and handing off to them as soon as possible. The details of the plan under study by the White House are not known, but in most scenarios the troop increase would be accomplished in large part by accelerating some scheduled deployments while delaying the departure of units in Iraq. President Bush has made no final decision, the White House said. Gordon Johndroe, the National Security Council spokesman, said that no memorandums outlining the options for increasing troop strength had gone to the president. But one senior official said the subject was discussed at length on Dec. 13 during Bush's briefing at the Pentagon, and the president has reportedly asked detailed questions that some officials have interpreted as suggesting that he is strongly leaning in that direction. US military officials said on Dec. 15 that the Pentagon was planning to send the Second Brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division to Kuwait in January. The brigade, based at Fort Bragg, NC, would serve as a reserve that commanders in Iraq could draw on. US military commanders have been operating without such a reserve since the Marine unit that had been on call was dispatched to Anbar Province in western Iraq. The Army brigade could become an element of a larger troop deployment to Iraq if the White House decided to increase troops there. Advocates of a troop increase say the aim would be to reverse the slide toward an all-out civil war and give the new Iraqi government more time to consolidate control, while training of Iraqis is stepped up. Critics of a surge approach have argued that any US troop increase would lead to more US casualties and merely put off the day when the Iraqis need to assume responsibility for their own security. There is also concern that the military benefits would be short-lived unless the higher troop levels were sustained for a long period, adding to the strain on US forces. Alternatively, critics say, if the surge in troop levels was too brief, adversaries could simply wait for the reinforcements to leave. Senator John McCain (R-AZ) said during a visit to Baghdad last week that US military commanders were discussing the possibility of adding as many as 10 more combat brigades–a maximum of about 35,000 troops–to establish some control while Iraq's divided political leaders seek solutions to the mounting violence. Currently, the US military has about 140,000 troops in Iraq. "The American people are confused, they're frustrated, they're disappointed by the Iraq war, but they also want us to succeed if there's any way to do that," he said. The surge proposal has also gained greater support among recently retired officers who served in Iraq, particularly if carried out as part of a broader political and economic strategy. Two retired Army veterans who served in the unit that took control of the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005–Col. Joel Armstrong and Maj. Daniel Dwyer–helped draft a new study issued on Dec. 14 by the American Enterprise Institute that called for sending an additional four or five combat brigades, or some 14,000 to 17,500 troops, to Baghdad. The study determined that the military could sustain a surge of that level, but that it would require sending several Army brigades back to Iraq a couple of months early and extending the customary year-long Army tour to 15 months. In its recent report, the Iraq Study Group rejected the idea of a "substantial" force increase on the order of 100,000 to 200,000 troops, saying that those levels were not "available for a sustained deployment" and would feed fears in Iraq that the United States was planning a long-term occupation. "We could, however, support a short-term redeployment or surge of American combat forces to stabilize Baghdad," the report added, "or to speed up the training and equipping mission, if the US commander in Iraq determines that such steps would be effective."