By Richard Hart Sinnreich
Sunday, December 5, 2004; Page B07
Gradualism rarely is a productive way to apply military power. War, as theorist Carl von Clausewitz reminded us, is not just the application of force against an unresisting object. Enemies adapt, and piecemealing combat power allows them that much more freedom to do it.
All of which is relevant to Iraq troop levels -- which, the Pentagon announced last week, will climb for the next few months to 150,000, the highest level since the war began. Only about 1,500 will be troops not already scheduled to deploy. The rest of the increase will come from extending the tours of the units the new deployments were intended to replace.
That's likely to arouse justifiable unhappiness among affected soldiers and their families. For all the benefits of unit rotation, raising expectations only to shatter them isn't one. As many have noted, the human burdens of this war are being borne by a very small number of our citizens in and out of uniform. Overstraining their undoubted dedication isn't wise.
But the broader question is what, in a military sense, 12,000 more troops for a few months will buy us. In that connection, recent trends are anything but encouraging.
This year alone U.S. troop levels in Iraq rose from 115,000 in February, to 130,000 in March, to 138,000 in May, to 140,000 in July, before dipping to 138,000 in September. During the same period, insurgent attacks on coalition forces, never mind Iraqis, rose from around 400 a month to 2,400.
That's an ominous correlation. It suggests that the insurgents have been able not only to withstand incremental U.S. troop increases but also to expand their operations significantly despite them.
There's no obvious reason to expect that another marginal troop increase will reverse that pattern. On the contrary, official announcement of the increase as merely a temporary measure to dampen violence in advance of January's scheduled election offers the insurgents every incentive to ride it out.
Given the overall scarcity of coalition forces in relation to Iraq's populated geography, that shouldn't be too difficult. From the outset, the military problem in Iraq has never been insufficient troops to defeat the enemy in battle, but rather insufficient troops to secure what they've won.
Now that we've belatedly decided to clear the insurgents from urban strongholds such as Samarra and Fallujah rather than simply hoping they would disarm, the problem is likely to mount. Each local success implies a subsequent requirement to secure the cleared locality, and troops committed to such occupation can't also continue to attack.
Nor, apparently, can we count on Iraq's fledgling security forces to bail us out. Even the most encouraging reports of their performance confirm that their reliability and effectiveness depend entirely on their continued integration with better equipped, trained and led coalition forces. Turning cleared areas over to them lock, stock and barrel isn't feasible yet.
Meanwhile, far from seeing an increase in other than U.S. forces, all the indications are that January may well see the departure or reduction of some current allied contingents. Presuming that these cutbacks would not include our British allies, the military consequences would be relatively modest, however uncomfortable the political ramifications. But they certainly wouldn't help.
All of which suggests that, as has been true from the first day of the invasion, this is America's war to win or lose. Barring an unlikely change of heart by those with little reason to have one, we had better start thinking seriously about what it will take to win it.
The odds are that continued gradualism won't. The temptation is to blame it on politicians too stubborn to admit that their predictions of cheap success in Iraq were monumentally wrong.
But that doesn't excuse military commanders who should know better and who repeatedly have insisted that they have all the troops they need even as events just as repeatedly have proved otherwise. A brand new lieutenant would blush at so consistent a pattern of military misjudgment.
That also happened 40 years ago, and we're still paying the price. Even the most stubborn leaders should be reluctant to risk making the same mistake again.
Richard Hart Sinnreich writes about military affairs for the Lawton, Okla., Sunday Constitution.
© 2004 The Washington Post Company
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