More Troops?

The ubiquitous Victor Davis Hanson questions the conventional wisdom that the US needs to send more troops into Iraq to establish order and peace. He draws on a number of historical examples to show that it is perfectly possible to subdue and control with a comparatively small force: “Alexander the Great, who never led an army numbering more than 50,000 men, defeated hordes five times that size in battle, and consolidated his victories with forces that were likewise vastly outnumbered. Julius Caesar conquered and held much of Western Europe with legions that numbered fewer than 40,000. The British defeated both Cetchewayo and the Great Mahdi with a few thousand redcoats, and held Zuzuland and the Sudan under control in the aftermath of victory . . . . Much the same as the story of warfare is the story of occupation. Rome administered an empore of some 50 million people stretching over a million square miles with rarely more than 250,000 legionaries. India’s many millions were occupied by many fewer than a million of the Queen’s soldiers. After World War II, Italy, Japan, Germany, and their territories together represented nearly 200 million occupied peoples; by 1947, the Allied armies exercising control over them amounted to a few hundred thousand. At one time, vast tracts of Sinai, the Golan, and the West Bank were secured by a few thousand Israeli soldiers.”

Further, increasing troop strength could well have adverse consequences. Hanson points out that “The greater the number of troops deployed, the great the expectations placed upon them and the more pressing the demands at home for immediate results.” If an army with numerical superiority is defeated, the smaller victorious army gets a tremendous boost in morale. Moreover, increasing the number of troops would also substantially increase the number of support personnel in Iraq: “each additional American soldier probably requires at least one or two additional support personnel. That means bigger base campes, which means more convoys, which means more large, well fed, and obtrustive Americans on the streets of Baghdad ?Eubiquitous Big Brothers in boots, Kevlar, and desert camouflage. Is this what we want: a HIGHER profile?”

More imortant than numbers, Hanson points out, is how soldiers are used. And the main thrust of his article is that Americans need to be more ruthless in actual military operations. His general rule is: “defeating ?Eeven humiliating ?Ean enemy decisively and then immediately establishing zero tolerance for the formation of militias and insurrectionists is a wiser strategy than stationing a vast and often static occupation force over an opponent who does not believe he was defeated in the first place.” Hanson argues that American reluctance to be ruthless has given opportunity for Iraqi insurrectionists to make a comeback. The US sent the message that “U.S. forces, overly circumspect in war, would not in its aftermath put down those who could and should be put down.” American restraint thus “could earn us contempt rather than the gratitude we expected.”