Digging In For A Fight

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The official estimates of how many troops would be required going forward have been wobbling for a year, but until last week the trend line was always heading down. A year ago, U.S. Central Command was saying the 150,000 troops needed for the initial invasion could be reduced to 30,000 by last September. Then by Christmas the new goal was to reduce the force to 105,000 by spring. Now, concedes Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz, the arrow is pointing up. "The debate is about whether to keep 135,000 troops there or to add more," he told the Senate Armed Services Committee. Warning that tensions may only grow with the approach of June 30, the day the U.S. plans to return sovereignty to Iraq, General John Abizaid, head of the U.S. Central Command, told the New York Times that 135,000 may not suffice. "We're going to make sure we have the right forces in place to do the job that needs to be done," he said.

For starters, the U.S. will have to take up the slack left by departing allies. When Spain's new Socialist Prime Minister held firm on his campaign promise to withdraw his 1,300 troops, Honduras and the Dominican Republic, which rely on the Spanish for command and control, decided to bug out as well. Thailand threatened to withdraw its aid workers if attacked, and even faithful Australia is down to 850 of the 2,000 troops it originally shipped over last year. Secretary of State Colin Powell called leaders of roughly half the 34 coalition countries to try to prevent further defections.

Meanwhile, the Iraqi police and security forces to whom the U.S. had hoped to turn over more responsibility were proving barely competent. U.S. officers on the ground in Fallujah, Najaf and other hot spots warned of a level of training and coordination by rebel bands that kept U.S. troops tied down. Plus, there is no slack in U.S. force strength. "Everybody's committed," says an Army officer who has tracked U.S. troop levels in Iraq over the past year. "If civil war erupts between the Kurds and Sunnis, who goes there? There is nobody. How is it possible we are fighting a war and there is no available reserve?"

The loss of internal and external allies now forces U.S. commanders to rethink their tactics and timetables. The notion that U.S. soldiers would gradually pull back off the streets of the cities to a local base and then to a few main garrisons while local Iraqi forces stepped in to smooth the path toward a peaceful and democratic Iraq looks a little quaint now. And as long as U.S. troops are spread out across the country to douse local flare-ups, the supply lines will be long and the convoys vulnerable to roadside bombs and ambushes. The only way to protect such convoys is to make them big and mean enough to defend themselves against attack. That may mean adding air cover, usually helicopter gunships like the Army's AH-64 Apache or the Marines' AH-1 Cobra — which in turn would require more troops and more choppers than are available in the theater at the moment. Although vital supplies are getting through, there are shortages of little luxuries — like deodorant — in the green zone, and looming shortfalls of ammunition and fuel. "We didn't have enough transportation units in the major combat operation, and we sure don't have enough now," says an Army planner intimately involved in the war. "You know, we were thinking of taking airmen and sailors and throwing them into trucks. We abandoned that, but that shows how desperate the Army is for people."

With each notch up in tension, the whole rebuilding enterprise becomes more difficult. The fighting has grown so intense, security costs that were supposed to account for about 10% of the $18 billion in reconstruction money through September 2004 are instead running at 25%. Major contractors like General Electric and Siemens AG are scaling back their efforts because of the unsafe environment. Money and energy that were meant to go into new schools and new water-treatment plants are diverted toward rebuilding bombed police stations and retraining Iraqi troops.

With reversals of fortune come reversals of policy: having initially dissolved the Iraqi army and purged civilian ministries of most members of Saddam's Baath Party, Pentagon officials reversed course — they deny it is a policy change — and began inviting them back in hopes of drawing on much needed expertise. Despite President Bush's vow that the June 30 deadline for handing sovereignty back to Iraqis was cast in stone, Administration officials on the Hill were slicing the definition of sovereignty. The interim authority could make no laws, they said, and even Iraqi troops would remain under American control.