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How many troops would it take to win in Afghanistan?

Larry Kummer, Editor

Summary:   How many troops must we send to win in Afghanistan.  It’s a key question that receives too little attention in public sources, other than guessing.   What have our generals told DoD planners?  Are we being guided into a larger war according to a well-considered plan?  Or are we sliding thoughtlessly into a larger war, as we did in Vietnam?  The answer is more complex, but it makes clear our responsibility for the results — and our role in reforming the system.

Contents

  1. Force requirements in wars like Af-Pak
  2. Results so far
  3. Echos from Vietnam about the process of escalation
  4. Conclusions – about our role in the war
  5. Update:  evidence DoD did ignore this question
  6. All this assumes that counter-insurgency works
  7. Afterword and For More Information

(1)  Force requirements in wars like Af-Pak

There is a large body of work on the general question, starting with “Force Requirements in Stability Operations“, James T. Quinlivan, Parameters, Winter 1995.  The COIN manual, FM 3-24, echoed Quinlivan’s conclusions:

No predetermined, fixed ratio of friendly troops to enemy combatants ensures success in COIN. The conditions of the operational environment and the approaches insurgents use vary too widely.

A better force requirement gauge is troop density, the ratio of security forces (including the host nation’s military and police forces as well as foreign counterinsurgents) to inhabitants. Most density recommendations fall within a range of 20 to 25 counterinsurgents for every 1000 residents in an AO. Twenty counterinsurgents per 1000 residents is often considered the minimum troop density required for effective COIN operations; however as with any fixed ratio, such calculations remain very dependent upon the situation.

By this calculation NATO must send horrifically large forces, given the number of Afghanistan government forces (and their limited training and willingness to fight).  Instead the NATO planners decided to send few troops to Afghanistan, as described in America’s Role in Nation-Building – From Germany to Iraq, RAND, 2003

A small international peacekeeping force of about 5,000 troops, initially under UK command, was established for the capital, Kabul. U.S. and coalition forces of about 8,000 troops continued to conduct counterterrorist operations against residual Taliban and al Qaeda elements throughout the country, mostly along the border with Pakistan. But they did not undertake any peacekeeping or stabilization responsibilities.

The United States initially opposed establishing a countrywide international stabilization force for several reasons.

  • There was some fear that Afghanistan’s legendary xenophobia would manifest itself anew in resistance to any substantial foreign troop presence.
  • The U.S. administration wanted to break with the pattern of ever-more-ambitious nation-building endeavors that its predecessor had set.
  • Establishing even a modest countrywide peacekeeping presence would raise daunting logistical challenges. Because of the country’s destroyed infrastructure, all troops, equipment, and sustaining supplies would initially have to be flown in.
  • Finally, the U.S. administration viewed Afghanistan as the opening campaign in a larger war against terrorism. U.S. policymakers did not want to tie down significant numbers of U.S. forces or logistical capabilities in Afghanistan.

Since then troop numbers have crept up, but our leaders carefully avoid discussing how many NATO troops are needed for victory.  As seen in this interview with General Jones and Senators Levin and Graham on Face the Nation, 9 August 2009. General Jones adroitly dances around the question of more troops, while the Senators call for more troops — without placing limits on what “more” means.  It adds up to more troops, one slice of the salami at a time.

The war’s advocates among NGO experts are no more eager to discuss this.  As in this brief essay by Adam Silverman, “Counterinsurgency Operations: Strategy versus Tactics“, posted Sic Semper Tyrannis at 13 September 2009.  Strong advocacy of the war, with no discussion of costs in money or blood.

(2)  Results so far are not good

It should not surprise us that too few troops produced few good results.  As described in this excerpt from “Securing Afghanistan“, C. Christine Fair and Seth G. Jones, US Institute for Peace, 23 January 2009 — Emphasis added:

Violence has increased virtually every year between 2002 and 2008, especially in southern Afghanistan. It increased 27% between 2006 and 2007, and another 32% between 2007 and 2008. The low level of U.S. and international forces has contributed to the rising violence, and international force levels are among the lowest of any stability operation since World War II. Indeed, there are three times the number of international forces in Iraq as in Afghanistan, and Afghanistan is larger in terms of population (31,056,947 compared with 26,783,383) and geography (647,500 square kilometers compared with 432,162).

So the military appears ready to request more troops.  Without any analysis of how this next tranche of troops will change the situation.  Just hope for change.  To use another analogy from Vietnam:  our generals will ask for another slice of the salami, an incremental slide into a larger war.

(3)  Echos from Vietnam about the process of escalation

Is there a plan?  Are there elements in US military pushing for more US involvement, as there was in Vietnam.  From David Halberstam’s The Best and the Brightest:

As far as Washington was concerned, it was something they slipped into more than they chose; they thought they were going to have time to make clear, well-planned choices, to decide how many men and what type of strategy they would follow, but events got ahead of them. The pressures from Saigon for more and more men would exceed Washington’s capacity to slow it down and think coolly, and so the decisions evolved rather than were made, and Washington slipped into a ground combat war.

But it was not something that the military in Saigon slipped into; the planning of troops, the need for them and how to use them was something that had long been in the contingency planning stage, and now, slowly, MACV {the US military command in Vietnam} was moving toward it, careful not to ask for too much too soon lest it scare the White House … In April the military arm of MACV was asked to do an estimate for Westmoreland on the enemy capacity for reinforcement; when the assignment was given, no one knew what the answer would be. But when Colonel William Crossen, one of the top intelligence officers, put it together he was appalled: the number of men that Hanoi could send down the trails without seriously damaging its defenses at home was quite astonishing. … “Jesus,” said the general {Westmoreland}, “if we tell this to the people in Washington we’ll be out of the war tomorrow. We’ll have to revise it downward.”

So Crossen’s figures were duly scaled down considerably, which was a good example of how the Army system worked, the staff intuitively protecting the commander from things he didn’t want to see and didn’t want to hear, never coming up with information which might challenge what a commander wanted to do at a given moment. Because the Westmoreland staff in February, March and April of 1965 knew that he wanted to get in the ball game with combat troops, it did everything carefully, never getting ahead of itself. The design was in private, if the truth were to be known, rather grand …

But why did civilian decision-makers approve each round of escalation, until public suport for the war collapsed?  Daniel Ellsberg explains in The Quagmire Myth and the Stalemate Machine:

In the light of the internal documentation in the Pentagon Papers, it appears that the pattern of Presidential choice described above for 1961 applies virtually across-the-board to major presidential initiatives on Vietnam over the last 2 decades … No more than in 1961 were any of the measures of increased involvement that a President actually adopted described to him by officials as being adequate “last steps”, or indeed, as anything but holding actions, adequate to avoid defeat in the short run but long shots so far as ultimate success was concerned.

… Even in the Phase A {of crisis and deception} years of decision, analyses were not devoid of optimism; on the contrary, it was typical that certain approaches were presented by their proponents as winning strategies; but these were never the options chosen.

… But it was not only the military who told each President that what he had chosen would, at best, restore a violent stalemate. that was, regularly, also the gist of the National Intelligence Estimates (which also said much the same for the more violent or costly measures that the military proposed as well … and it was also the view of those, mainly in State, who believed that a different political strategy was essential.

To summarize Ellsberg’s subtle analysis (of which this is just a fragment), Presidents receive 3 proposals.  Generals say the first will produce victory, but the costs will be great and selling it to the public too difficult.  The third risks defeat — even worse, defeat before the next election.  So the middle course, a compromise, gets chosen.  Ellsberg continues:

… successful politicians are likely to exhibit these same traits for temperamental reasons as well. A strong focus on the short run, a hopeful attitude toward the future, a tendency to put off painful decisions in the hope, and with some confidence, that something will turn up to make the decision either unnecessary or easier…

Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. memorably described this dynamic in “Eyeless in Indochina“, New York Review of Books, 21 October 1971:

Immersion in the Pentagon Papers had persuaded me that I was mistaken in the suggestion that the escalatory steps actually taken by Presidents were accompanied by promises that these particular steps would bring victory or would be the last steps necessary. No President ever escalated enough to satisfy the military, who always complained about civilian restrictions on military action and kept insisting that they be allowed to bomb, shoot, and drown more and more Vietnamese.

Other sources of information about this aspect of the Vietnam War:

(4)  Conclusions – about our role in the war

The decision-making process described here is another aspect of America’s broken observation-orientation-decision-action loop (OODA loop).   It operates because public officials routinely lie to us, and we passively accept their lies — over and over and over again.

We can whine about this.  Or we can accept responsibility for it — the first step towards reform.  America is a Republic, which means that we can only to ourselves to produce a better future.

(5)  Evidence DoD did ignore this question

Excerpt from “Civilian, Military Officials at Odds Over Resources Needed for Afghan Mission“, Washington Post, 8 October 2009:

In early March, after weeks of debate across a conference table in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, the participants in President Obama’s strategic review of the war in Afghanistan figured that the most contentious part of their discussions was behind them. Everyone, save Vice President Biden’s national security adviser, agreed that the United States needed to mount a comprehensive counterinsurgency mission to defeat the Taliban.

That conclusion, which was later endorsed by the president and members of his national security team, would become the first in a set of recommendations contained in an administration white paper outlining what Obama called “a comprehensive, new strategy for Afghanistan and Pakistan.” Preventing al-Qaeda’s return to Afghanistan, the document stated, would require “executing and resourcing an integrated civilian-military counterinsurgency strategy.”

To senior military commanders, the sentence was unambiguous: U.S. and NATO forces would have to change the way they operated in Afghanistan. Instead of focusing on hunting and killing insurgents, the troops would have to concentrate on protecting the good Afghans from the bad ones.

And to carry out such a counterinsurgency effort the way its doctrine prescribes, the military would almost certainly need more boots on the ground.

To some civilians who participated in the strategic review, that conclusion was much less clear. Some took it as inevitable that more troops would be needed, but others thought the thrust of the new approach was to send over scores more diplomats and reconstruction experts. They figured a counterinsurgency mission could be accomplished with the forces already in the country, plus the 17,000 new troops Obama had authorized in February.

“It was easy to say, ‘Hey, I support COIN,’ because nobody had done the assessment of what it would really take, and nobody had thought through whether we want to do what it takes,” said one senior civilian administration official who participated in the review, using the shorthand for counterinsurgency.

The failure to reach a shared understanding of the resources required to execute the strategy has complicated the White House’s response to the grim assessment of the war by the top U.S. and NATO commander in Afghanistan, forcing the president to decide, in effect, what his administration really meant when it endorsed a counterinsurgency plan. Gen. Stanley A. McChrystal’s follow-up request for more forces, which presents a range of options but makes clear that the best chance of achieving the administration’s goals requires an additional 40,000 U.S. troops on top of the 68,000 who are already there, has given senior members of Obama’s national security team “a case of sticker shock,” the administration official said.

This well-sourced article describes a shocking level of incompetence — shocking to those unfamilar with the history of the US government’s war-making processes. Apparently that includes Prof Bernard Finel. See this from “A Broken Process and a Lack of Due Diligence“, at his blog on 8 October 2009:

This story is extremely depressing. It suggests a shockingly low level of debate. No one brought up the force-sizing requirements in 3-24? And it makes me wonder whether they even considered what “diplomats and reconstruction experts” could actually accomplish in one of the poorest countries in the world.

This was the product of “weeks” of discussion? A strategy signed off on with no sense of the forces required? A strategy bolstered by a hand-wave about “reconstruction experts”? am just speechless.

But I have to admit, if this story is correct, my initial assessment of the process was wrong. The policy process was not captured by a cabal of COINdinistas shutting out all skeptics — the policy process was instead mismanaged and the participants failed to do sufficient due diligence. Incompetence rather than conspiracy explained the outcome.

Prof Finel is a brilliant and knowledgeable expert in these things.  Why does he find this surprising?  Why didn’t most of our geopolitical experts expect this?  It was clear from the stream of news leaks that force levels were not being realistically discussed.

(6)  All this assumes that counter-insurgency works

This analysis assumes that more foreign troops increases the odds of success in counter-insurgency.  As many experts have shown, the historical record provides little support for this belief.  Since Mao brought 4GW to maturity, most CI by foreign troops end in defeat.  The few wins tend to be special cases:

In general, increasing the number of foreign troops does not help in CI.  Often it decreases the legitimacy of the local government (increasing its legitimacy is a major focus of FM 3-24), more than offsetting the increased military effectiveness.

(7)  For more information

To see all posts about our new wars: Iraq & Sub-continent Wars – my articles

Posts about America’s broken observation-orientation-decision-action loop (OODA loop):

  1. News from the Front: America’s military has mastered 4GW!, 2 September 2007
  2. Another cycle down the Defense Death Spiral, 30 January 2008
  3. The magic of the mainstream media changes even the plainest words into face powder, 24 April 2009
  4. The media – a broken component of America’s machinery to observe and understand the world, 2 June 2009
  5. We’re ignorant about the world because we rely on our media for information, 3 June 2009
  6. The decay of our government, visible for all to see, 3 June 2009
  7. A great, brief analysis of problem with America’s society – a model to follow when looking at other problems, 4 June 2009
  8. Does America have clear vision? Here’s an “eye chart” for our minds., 15 June 2009
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