March 20, 2007
Army Brigade Finds Itself Stretched Thin

By DAVID S. CLOUD
FORT POLK, La., March 14 — For decades, the Army has kept a brigade of the 82nd Airborne Division on round-the-clock alert, poised to respond to a crisis anywhere in 18 to 72 hours.

Today, the so-called ready brigade is no longer so ready. Its soldiers are not fully trained, much of its equipment is elsewhere, and for the past two weeks the unit has been far from the cargo aircraft it would need in an emergency.

Instead of waiting on standby, the First Brigade of the 82nd Airborne is deep in the swampy backwoods of this vast Army training installation, preparing to go to Iraq. Army officials concede that the unit is not capable of getting at least an initial force of several hundred to a war zone within 18 hours, a standard once considered inviolate.

The declining readiness of the brigade is just one measure of the toll that four years in Iraq — and more than five years in Afghanistan — have taken on the United States military. Since President Bush ordered reinforcements to Iraq and Afghanistan in January, roughly half of the Army’s 43 active-duty combat brigades are now deployed overseas, Army officials said. A brigade has about 3,500 soldiers.

Pentagon officials worry that among the just over 20 Army brigades left in the United States or at Army bases in Europe and Asia, none has enough equipment and manpower to be sent quickly into combat, except for an armored unit stationed permanently in South Korea, several senior Army officers said.

“We are fully committed right now,” said Col. Charles Hardy of the Forces Command, which oversees Army training and equipping of troops to be sent overseas. “If we had a fully trained-up brigade, hell, it’d be the next one to deploy.”

The 82nd recently canceled its annual Memorial Day parade because most of its 17,000 soldiers are overseas. When the First Brigade, which got the rotating assignment as the ready brigade in December, leaves for Iraq over the summer, the 101st Airborne Division, at Fort Campbell, Ky., will take over responsibility for the ready brigade. But its soldiers are preparing to go to Iraq this year as well.

[Gen. Richard Cody, the Army vice chief of staff, told Congress in testimony on March 15 that with the demands of Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army does not have the time or the resources to prepare for most of the other missions it could potentially face.]

Military officials say that the United States, which has more than two million personnel in active and reserve armed forces, has a combat-tested force that could still emerge victorious if another major conflict arose. But the response would be slower, with more casualties, and would have to rely heavily on the Navy and Air Force, they said.

Despite tensions with Iran and North Korea, another crisis requiring troops does not appear imminent.

If ground forces were needed urgently, Army commanders said they could draw units quickly from Iraq and send them wherever they might be needed, rather than relying solely on the ready brigade to provide a fast reaction force.

The Pentagon can also draw on 28 combat brigades in the reserves, several of which the military is making plans to mobilize later this year or early next to relieve some of the strain. But those units face even deeper problems than the active duty brigades because of equipment and training shortfalls.

Altogether, Army officials said 23 brigades, including one National Guard brigade, are now deployed overseas. Once the reinforcements called for by the White House are in place, 17 Army combat brigades will be in Iraq and two in Afghanistan, Army officials said, along with four more deployed in various locations, including as peacekeepers in the Sinai desert.

In effect, the Army has become a “just in time” organization: every combat brigade that finishes training is sent back to Iraq or Afghanistan almost immediately. Equipment vital for protecting troops, like armored vehicles, roadside bomb jammers and night vision goggles, is rushed to Iraq as quickly as it is made, officials say.

The 2007 Pentagon budget includes $17.1 billion to reset Army equipment, with a separate fund of $13.9 billion in emergency funds to replace or repair gear damaged in combat. Even so, units at home preparing to deploy are facing equipment shortages and have all but given up preparing for anything other than their next tour in Iraq or Afghanistan.

[“We do have shortages in the nondeployed forces,” General Cody conceded in his unusually candid testimony to Congress. There were not enough vehicles, radios and night vision gear, and there are “spot shortages” in weapons, he said, noting that those units constituted the nation’s strategic reserve.]

Later this year, the Army will probably be forced to send its first brigades back to Iraq with less than a year at home resting and training, senior Pentagon officials said. Another alternative, they said, would be to lengthen the tours in Iraq to 18 months from a year.

Army officials said no soldiers were sent overseas without adequate training and equipment. And they point to continued strong recruiting and retention numbers as proof that morale remains high.

But after insisting for years that one year at home is a minimum amount of time necessary to prepare a unit to conduct counterinsurgency operations, commanders now say that, by speeding up equipment overhauls and compressing training, they can do the job in 10 months or less.

Over time, the shortened training schedules will inevitably begin to affect the performance of troops in the field, some officers said.

Senior Pentagon officials worry about those deepening strains. Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, sent a secret report to Congress last month that upgraded from “moderate” to “significant” the risk of failing in its mission that the military faces this year in carrying out tasks in Iraq, Afghanistan and any other hot spots that might emerge.

[“We have the best counterinsurgency army in the world, but they’re not trained for full-spectrum operations,” General Cody said in his testimony.]

The Marines, which are also heavily engaged in Iraq, are facing similar strains.

Fort Polk is one of the last stops many combat units make before deploying to Iraq. During the cold war, the installation trained soldiers to fight the Soviets in Europe. The 82nd, based in Fort Bragg, N. C., used to parachute into Louisiana to keep its airborne skills sharp, but that tradition has been abandoned.

Now, even though the terrain bears little resemblance to Iraq’s desertlike conditions, the emphasis is solely on preparing infantry units to handle the chaotic sectarian conflict and random violence they are likely to encounter there.

Within the 82nd’s current First Brigade, about 4 soldiers in 10 have done previous tours in Iraq, making preparations to go back easier, said Col. Charles Flynn, the brigade commander. Last week, the brigade was spread out throughout the wooded training area at Fort Polk, in an exercise that featured simulations of the kind of Iraqi villages and roadside bomb attacks that many soldiers had actually experienced in previous deployments.

But almost all are in new jobs. Lt. Col. Michael Iacobucci, now a battalion commander, had served as a battalion executive officer in the 82nd when it was in Iraq in 2003. After coming home, Colonel Iacobucci, who is from Albany, had moved with his family to Australia as part of a three-year military exchange program.

He rejoined the 82nd in August, eager to go back to Iraq, he said while driving in a Humvee through the mock Iraqi villages. Before units were actually preparing to go into combat, their performance at Fort Polk would be graded only when the two-week exercise was over, said Lt. Col. Arthur Kandarian, a trainer. Now, the lessons are frequently spelled out as they happen, to get soldiers ready faster.

“It was treated as more of a test, and it was a closed-book test,” he explained. “Now it’s a coaching situation because we’re in a war.”

Training is being compressed at almost every stage, Army officers said. Soldiers who before 2003 spent months in specialized courses and on firing ranges now take compressed classes taught by so-called mobile training teams and hone their weapons proficiency on simulators, Army officers said.

“The biggest problem I’m seeing is unfamiliarity with equipment,” said Capt. Christian Durham, an instructor at Fort Polk, who sees all the units that rotate through before heading to Iraq.

Meanwhile, the Army is struggling just to keep up with current troop demands. The five additional combat brigades ordered by President Bush in January will raise the total American force level in Iraq to 160,000 troops, including combat and support troops, by June. That has forced the Army to take steps to supply troops faster to maintain the higher force levels.

Two Army brigades, one at Fort Riley, Kan., and another at Ft. Hood, Tex., that were not scheduled to return to the combat rotation until 2008 were ordered in December to speed up preparations so they will be ready to deploy by October, said Lt. Col. Christian Kubik, a spokesman for the First Infantry Division.

The Pentagon also informed the 172nd Stryker Brigade, which returned in December from a 16-month tour in Iraq, that it had to be ready for possible deployment between October and December, according to Maj. Michael Blankartz, a brigade spokesman.

Normally, a brigade is given half a year to overhaul its equipment, but the Alaska brigade, now part of the 25th Infantry Division, has only four months, he said. The timetable for preparing its troops is even more accelerated.

Roughly two-thirds of the brigade’s 3,300 soldiers are rotating to other units around the Army, as is customary after a deployment, Major Blankartz said. Their replacements are not scheduled to arrive until July and August, he said, leaving only one or two months before the Army wants the brigade prepared.

ARTICLE: "Army Brigade, Long a Symbol Of Readiness, Is Stretched Thin," by David S. Cloud, New York Times, 20 March 2007, p. A1.
Did an interview with "Inside the Pentagon" yesterday on this subject, but in reverse: would creating stabilization forces limit Big Army's ability to escalate?
The questions posed by the reporter reflect the Big Army's old trick to define SysAdmin-like forces as peacekeepers only. This has never been my argument, although some have described "stabilization" forces in this manner.
I see SysAdmin as a much larger function, so my embedded Marines readily rise up to Fallujahs or better. As I have written, I don't believe in the 3-block war. I want my Marines to remain Marines, and I want the non-combat portions of the SysAdmin function filled out by civvies and private sector.
As for turning Army into pure PKO-style troops, that's where the international/coalition factor must come into play.
We put 22-23 ground personnel per 1000 local population in Bosnia and Kosovo, and in both cases we're about 10 percent of total. That's a real model.
In Iraq we field 6-7 per 1K and supply over 90 percent ourselves. Surprise! That both fails and strains readiness.
But here's the kicker canard you'll now hear from Big Army in the budget battles ahead:
Military officials say that the United States, which has more than two million personnel in active and reserve armed forces, has a combat-tested force that could still emerge victorious is another major conflict arose. But the response would be slower, with more casualties, and would have to rely heavily on the Navy and Air Force, they said.
Bullshit, bullshit, and duh!
The response would not be slower.
It would not involve more casualties.
It would be air-heavy from USN and USAF asset bases, and it would simply win the war from above with no attempt to secure the victory from below. It would be pure Powell Doctrine, which is still valid and entirely proper for high-end scenarios (NK and Iran) being discussed
Do not be sold this line.
This is really the Future Combat System and the rest of Big Army's acquisition community squealing. But FCS is huge and expensive and largely inappropriate for the 21st-century battlespace that is the Gap, and no amount of readiness whining is going to change that.
Yes, we need more ground troops.
Yes, we need lots of gear replaced.
And yes, transformation in tactics and technology largely await application within the ground forces (unlike the air community--Vern Clark's point to me).
But the increased separation between air-dominated Leviathan and ground-pounding SysAdmin continues ...

March 21, 2007
Sensing Shift in Bush Policy, Another Hawk Leaves

By DAVID E. SANGER
WASHINGTON, March 20 — Among the hawks in the Bush administration, Robert Joseph long occupied a special perch.

As the architect of much of the administration’s strategy for countering nuclear proliferation, he helped engineer the decision to exit the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, worked secretly to squeeze Libya to give up its nuclear weapons program, and created a loose consortium of nations, now numbering more than 80, committed to intercepting illicit weapons at sea, in the air or on land.

But last month Mr. Joseph quietly left the State Department, where he was under secretary for arms control and international security, telling colleagues that, as a matter of principle, he simply could not abide the new agreement with North Korea that the Bush administration struck in February.

Mr. Joseph has declined to talk publicly about why he left, but he told colleagues that he thought the deal would prolong the survival of a North Korean government he has publicly called “criminal” and “morally abhorrent” while failing to require it to give up the weapons it has already produced. In an interview, Mr. Joseph made clear that he “does not support the policy” that President Bush has now embraced.

“The approach I would have endorsed was to continue to put pressure on the regime,” Mr. Joseph added.

He is among the last of the hawks to turn off the lights and walk away from an administration that many conservatives say has lost its clarity of mission. He insists he is leaving without rancor and without regrets, including for his role in assessing the weapons intelligence about Iraq. “I do share the recognition that there was an intelligence failure, but it wasn’t just a failure of the Bush administration,” he said. “Look, if we press too hard we are accused of politicizing the intelligence; if we don’t press, then we are not doing our job.”

The departure of Mr. Joseph and others has been welcomed by officials, mostly in the State Department, who believe the administration’s hawks blocked opportunities for negotiated settlements. They have celebrated a distinct change in the tone and actions of the administration, now so enmeshed in Iraq that it has neither the time nor the appetite for the agenda to remake the world that dominated its first term. To the departed hawks, the administration has simply lost its moorings.

Some, like Mr. Joseph’s predecessor at the State Department, John R. Bolton, the former ambassador to the United Nations, have taken to the airwaves, denouncing the North Korea accord specifically, and what they view as a general drift toward compromise, a post-Iraq overemphasis on caution.

Others, including Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary; Paul D. Wolfowitz, Stephen A. Cambone and Douglas J. Feith, Mr. Rumsfeld’s former deputies; and I. Lewis Libby Jr., Vice President Dick Cheney’s former chief of staff, have remained silent. Mr. Wolfowitz has used his position as president of the World Bank to turn to other issues; others are writing books or articles defending the use of intelligence or their role in the decision to invade Iraq.

Some hawks remain. Mr. Cheney is the most prominent, of course, and by all accounts he is as unyielding as ever in the administration’s internal debates. But his public statements are often more muted than before the Iraq war, when he argued that toppling Saddam Hussein would remake the Middle East.

Mr. Cheney is supported by a dwindling band of loyalists, including John Hannah, who succeeded Mr. Libby as the vice president’s national security adviser but seems to wield little of his clout.

At the White House, J. D. Crouch, the deputy national security adviser, who headed the group that devised the administration’s strategy to increase troops in Iraq, and Elliott Abrams, who leads global democracy strategy, are known for their relatively hawkish views. Mr. Abrams has assembled a team pressing internally to step up pressure on Iran, a strategy Mr. Bush has endorsed as a way to gain leverage over Tehran.

But that was considered a rare victory. “With the exception of a few — including the vice president — the hawks have returned to their nests,” said one of Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice’s top aides who viewed Mr. Joseph and others as seeking to block the give and take of negotiations.

Mr. Joseph, now 57 and preparing for a life as a speaker, consultant and part-time presidential envoy on proliferation issues, is careful not to criticize either Mr. Bush or Ms. Rice, both of whom he says he admires. But he declares as a fact what many still inside the administration will not: Iraq has taken the steel out of the administration’s diplomacy in the second term.

“Iraq,” Mr. Joseph said over lunch last week, shortly after he left his job, “inhibits taking actions that could be perceived as provocative.” He and his former colleagues wonder whether many of the actions that came to define Mr. Bush’s first term — when they scrapped the ABM treaty, walked away from the Kyoto Protocol on climate change and raised pre-emptive strikes to the status of a doctrine in the first National Security Strategy — would happen today.

In the first term, as he moved between his office at the National Security Council and frequent meetings with Mr. Bush and Ms. Rice, then the national security adviser, Mr. Joseph’s influence was evident in a wide constellation of issues.

“The first term was a running battle between the hawks and the middle, and Bob was always there,” said Michael Green, who ran Asian affairs at the National Security Council and is now at Georgetown University. Mr. Joseph turned out reams of position papers, arguing for deeper sanctions against the likes of Kim Jong-il of North Korea or the Iranian mullahs. Ms. Rice usually signed on.

When Ms. Rice declared four years ago that “we don’t want the smoking gun to be a mushroom cloud,” she was giving rhetorical edge to positions Mr. Joseph helped sketch out. Similarly, her dismissal of a French effort to give inspectors in Iraq more time — “the worst of both worlds,” she said — matched views he was expressing in interviews at the time.

In the second term, Mr. Joseph arrived at the State Department to discover a changed dynamic. Ms. Rice’s first imperative was to restore relations with allies, particularly in Europe, who had parted with the administration on the war. Over the past 26 months, she appears to have steadily edged back to the realist school that she was identified with for years before signing on to Mr. Bush’s presidential campaign in the late 1990s.

Some of her former colleagues argue that Ms. Rice has let the State Department change her, rather than the other way around.

Asked about that, Mr. Bolton, who moved to the American Enterprise Institute after it was clear his time as ambassador to the United Nations could not be extended, paused for a moment and said, “I think I will take a pass on that one.”

But he quickly added: “I would say that the difference is that the bureaucracy is now getting what it wanted on Jan. 21, 2001.”

Mr. Joseph’s own trajectory in the administration seems symbolic of the changes that have taken place.

He came to the administration brimming with ideas about “counterproliferation,” a more muscular approach to ending trade in the world’s most dangerous weapons than the Clinton administration and its predecessors had followed. One of his first tasks was to devise a strategy to get out of the ABM treaty, and answer critics who argued it would revive an arms race with Russia. Instead, the administration helped create a new treaty, signed in 2002, committing both sides to reduce the size of their arsenals, though it leaves thousands of warheads in storage.

“No one even thinks about the ABM treaty anymore, which is a true measure of success,” Mr. Joseph said.

Inside the White House, he drafted a new policy for aggressively pursuing trade in unconventional weapons, one that goes far beyond export controls. It became the “Proliferation Security Initiative,” a plan now supported by both Democrats and Republicans that creates a web of countries that use their national laws to cooperate in intercepting shipments.

When the new effort hit early pay dirt in the fall of 2003, intercepting a cargo ship bound for Libya with nuclear centrifuges built by Abdul Qadeer Khan’s nuclear smuggling network, it led to Mr. Joseph’s biggest success: working with American and British intelligence officials to persuade Libya to give up its nuclear program, which helped break up Mr. Khan’s network.

He had a personal stake in the Libya negotiations: In 1988, Mr. Joseph had nearly taken Pan Am Flight 103, which Libyan terrorists blew up, and in his dealings with the Libyans he said he periodically saw the faces of the passengers whom he watched waiting to board that plane in London.

He said growing up in an Arab-American family in North Dakota “provided an advantage” as he sat across the table from the Libyans, telling them that they would only see better relations with the United States after they gave up their entire nuclear program. Incremental steps, he told them, would not be sufficient.

That is clearly the aggressive model Mr. Joseph would like to see used with North Korea and Iran. In his first days at the State Department in 2005, he drafted a paper entitled “Defensive Measures for North Korea,” and when the United States succeeded in closing down a bank that North Korea used for a number of illicit transactions, he argued that similar techniques would bring pain to Tehran.

But he did not play a central role in devising negotiating strategies with either country. That was put into the hands of career diplomats, Christopher R. Hill in the case of North Korea, and R. Nicholas Burns in the case of Iran, while Mr. Joseph devised the administration’s new “global initiative to combat nuclear terrorism.”

Last fall, he argued vociferously against ending the action to seize illicit North Korean funds in order to get to a broader arms agreement. When he was overruled, he left the administration. “Pressure is essential,” Mr. Joseph said, “if diplomacy is to have any chance of success.”

March 21, 2007
Op-Ed Columnist
The Troika and the Surge

By THOMAS L. FRIEDMAN
President Bush’s Iraq surge policy is about a month old now, and there is only one thing you can say about it for certain: no matter what anyone in Congress, the military or the public has to say, it’s going ahead. The president has the authority to do it and the veto power to prevent anyone from stopping him. Therefore, there’s only one position to have on the surge anymore: hope that it works.

Does this mean that Democrats in Congress who are trying to shut down the war and force a deadline should take the advice of critics and shut up and let the surge play out?

No, just the opposite. I would argue that for the first time we have — by accident — the sort of balanced policy trio that had we had it in place four years go might have spared us the mess of today. It’s the Pelosi-Petraeus-Bush troika.

I hope the Democrats, under Speaker Nancy Pelosi, keep pushing to set a deadline for withdrawal from Iraq, because they are providing two patriotic services that the Republicans failed to offer in the previous four years: The first is policy discipline. Had Republicans spent the previous four years regularly questioning Don Rumsfeld’s ignorant bromides and demanding that the White House account for failures in Iraq, we might have had the surge in 2003 — when it was obvious we did not have enough troops on the ground — rather than in 2007, when the chances of success are much diminished.

Because the Republicans controlled the House and Senate, and because many conservatives sat in mute silence the last four years, the administration could too easily ignore its critics and drag out policies in Iraq that were not working. With the Democrats back in Congressional control, that is no longer possible.

The other useful function Speaker Pelosi and her colleagues are performing is to give the president and Gen. David Petraeus, our commander in Iraq, the leverage of a deadline without a formal deadline. How so? The surge can’t work without political reconciliation among Iraqi factions, which means Sunni-Shiite negotiations — and such negotiations are unlikely to work without America having the “leverage” of telling the parties that if they don’t compromise, we will leave. (Deadlines matter. At some point, Iraqis have to figure this out themselves.)

Since Mr. Bush refuses to set a deadline, Speaker Pelosi is the next best thing. Do not underestimate how useful it is for General Petraeus to be able to say to Iraqi politicians: “Look guys, Pelosi’s mad as hell — and she has a big following! I don’t want to quit, but Americans won’t stick with this forever. I only have a few months.”

Speaker Pelosi: Keep the heat on.

As for General Petraeus, I have no idea whether his military strategy is right, but at least he has one — and he has stated that by “late summer” we should know if it’s working. As General Petraeus told the BBC last week, “I have an obligation to the young men and women in uniform out here, that if I think it’s not going to happen, to tell them that it’s not going to happen, and there needs to be a change.”

We need to root for General Petraeus to succeed, and hold him to those words if he doesn’t — not only for the sake of the soldiers on the ground, but also so that Mr. Bush is not allowed to drag the war out until the end of his term, and then leave it for his successor to unwind.

But how will General Petraeus or Congress judge if the surge is working? It may be obvious, but it may not be. It will likely require looking beneath the surface calm of any Iraqi neighborhood — where violence has been smothered by the surge of U.S. troops — and trying to figure out: what will happen here when those U.S. troops leave? Remember, enough U.S. troops can quiet any neighborhood for a while. The real test is whether a self-sustaining Iraqi army and political consensus are being put in place that can hold after we leave.

It will also likely require asking: Are the Shiite neighborhoods quieting down as a result of reconciliation or because their forces are just lying low so the U.S. will focus on whacking the Sunnis — in effect, carrying out the civil war on the Shiites’ behalf, so that when we leave they can dominate more easily?

When you’re sitting on a volcano, it is never easy to tell exactly what is happening underneath — or what will happen if you move. But those are the judgments we may soon have to make. In the meantime, since Bush is going to be Bush, let Pelosi be Pelosi and Petraeus be Petraeus — and hope for the best. For now, we don’t have much choice.

The Kurdish north remained a far brighter spot in these terms -- a place where nearly eight in 10 Iraqis feel "very safe," and where Iraqis are much less likely to have witnessed violence or even to have been indirectly affected by it.