Iraq War: The war and "Rumsfeldian transformation"

Bruce Nussbaum was already drawing an appropriate lesson from the Iraq War experience well over a year ago:  Iraq: Hard Lessons and How to Use Them Business Week 09/22/03 issue.  He wrote:

The theory of transforming the U.S. military into a smaller, more mobile, and more technologically lethal force appears deficient in Iraq. During the war itself, a larger invading force might have subdued Saddam's areas of support before they had time to organize. Postwar, a much larger occupation force than is currently on the ground is needed to provide security. How you win the war and how you police the peace afterward are as important as winning. Indeed, there is a danger of reading too much into the Iraq victory, which is being publicized by military "transformationalists" as proof of their doctrine. There was no test of it. Saddam's army didn't fight, instead dissolving in the face of U.S. forces to regroup as guerrillas. Battling guerrillas takes more troops, not fewer of them. Yet when then-U.S. Army Chief of Staff Eric Shinseki testified that it would take 250,000 to 500,000 troops to secure Iraq based on experience in Bosnia and Kosovo, he was quickly rebuked by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz.

The truth is that U.S. can't sustain the troops it has in Iraq. A Congressional Budget Office report said that the U.S. may have to cut its 140,000 troops there in half by the spring if the country is to remain prepared for conflict in North Korea. The commanders on the ground in Iraq understand that. They recently took the unusual step of bypassing Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld to join with Secretary of State (and former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff) Colin Powell in asking President Bush to go back to the U.N. for a new mandate that would get foreign troops into Iraq. It's clear the U.S. military wants a multilateral occupation.

I wonder if the Congressional Budget Office has followed up on that prediction.  Bush recently announced plans to boost the number of troops yet again, to an official level of around 150,000. The extended deployments and the "backdoor draft" are already producing serious recruiting problems for the services.