Iraq War: What kind of ISF are needed?

"I think we are winning.  Okay?  I think we're definitely winning.  I think we've been winning for some time." - Gen. Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, on the Iraq War 04/26/05

"I just wonder if they will ever tell us the truth." - Harold Casey, Louisville, KY, October 2004.

Jeffrey Record discussed the plans for the Iraqi Security Forces (ISF) in Dark Victory: America's Second War Against Iraq (2004), one of the first books on the Iraq War, which focused on the year 2003:

The issue of U.S. force size in postwar Iraq is greatly compounded by U.S. dissolution of the 400,000-man Iraqi army and plans to replace it, within three years, with a predominantly light infantry force of only 40,000.  Such a replacement army would be too small to defend Iraq against its more powerful neighbors, and might prove insufficient even to police Iraq's extensive and rugged border with Iran.  Indeed, such a small army, absent a major U.S. force presence or credible commitment to Iraq's defense, could invite Iranian and Turkish military intervention in Iraq.  This could mean saddling U.S. forces with the mission of Iraq's external defense as well as the mission of providing internal order.  Moreover, contends the regional military expert Anthony H. Cordesman, Iraqis could come to see a "token 40,000-man Iraq Army ... as leaving Iraq defenseless, and as dependent on US and British occupiers.  This problem - and the lack of any clear plan to create a meaningful self-defense capability against Iran and Turkey, the failure to deal with Iranian proliferation, and lack of any clear concept to share power equitably among Iraq's ethnic and sectarian factions - makes the new force seem like a puppet army.  Even those officers who seem to support the US and British secretly [could] become increasingly nationalistic and hostile."

Aside from leaving more than 100,000 career soldiers out of work, the decision, taken against the advice of Iraqi dissidents seconded to the State Department, to disband the prewar Iraqi army and to start from scratch on a new army one-tenth its size, may also encourage centrifugal political forces inside Iraq.  Since Iraq's creation as an independent state in 1932, the army has served as a primary vehicle for the inculcation of Iraqi nationalism, which in turn has served to subordinate, or at least weaken, loyalty to tribe, ethnic group, and religious affiliation.  Does the United States wish to discourage national loyalty in Iraq?  Would it not be possible and desirable to create a larger, thoroughly professional Iraqi army that posed no threat to the Iraqi people or their regional neighbors yet was capable of defending Iraq without U.S. intervention?  Would not such an army also serve to check Iranian ambitions in the Persian Gulf?  (my emphasis)

This is another issue that has received very inadequate attention in the US press, not least because of the secrecy and dishonesty that the White House and the Pentagon have practiced on this subject. But if Saddam needed 400,000 people in the Army alone, not counting police, both to hold the lid on his unhappy subjects (part of "the inculcation of Iraqi nationalism") and to guard the borders, could post-Saddam Iraq really be expected to handle both tasks with an army of only 40,000?

It has also not been easy to follow even the inflated-to-bogus official claims, because the figures we get publicly are often framed in terms of total Iraqi Security Forces (ISF), a term which includes both army and police.

It was unusual last week when Bush himself made the distinction in his long press conference, in which he said, "The goal is 325,000 troops; 137,000 military and the balance, police."

Anthony Cordesman in Iraq: Milestones, Benchmarks, and Real World Options 10/30/06 uses the following figures, relying on an 08/31/06  Defense Department report:  an ISF total of 312,400; 131,600 men in Iraqi regular forces (army, navy, air force) of which 129,700 are in the army; 24,800 in the National Police reporting to the Ministry of the Interior (MOI); 28,400 in the MOI's "other forces"; 128,000 in the "regular police" (the individual numbers total 400 more than the 312,400 overall ISF number).  There are an additional 144,000 authorized for the Facilities Protection Service.  Cordesman describes the forces as "men", and presumably that's a literal rather than generic use of the word.  As discussed in the previous post, Cordesman does not take the Pentagon's reporting on ISF numbers and performance at face value.  Given the unrealiability of the counting of the force strength, it's safe to say that these are authorized levels that are more-or-less filled according to official claims but significantly smaller in reality.

Cordesman gets quoted a lot on the Iraqi troop issue simply because he's one analyst who's been following it closely and has a great deal of credibility himself, not least because he never "drank the Kool-Aid" from the neocons on Iraq. 

Based on those figures, the original plan for an army of 40,000 has been increased to one of around 130,000, though actual effective strength is far below that.

Which may not be entirely bad news.  In their new book, Out of Iraq: A Practical Plan for Withdrawal Now, George McGovern and William Polk point out another aspect of the Iraqi army's tradition that is important to keep in mind.  Referring to the Iraqi army built up by the British, they write:

In Iraq in the 1930s and again in the 1950s and 1960s the army was the only functioning, powerful, and mobile organization.  Regarding itself as the only "pure" national institution and the only able defender of the country, time after time the army overthrew civilian governments of which it disapproved - or when its commanders grew ambitious.  More important, it prevented the growth, however feeble, of an independent judiciary, a representative parliament, and a free press.  Consequently Iraqi society lurched from one military dictatorship to the next with never a chance to form coherent institutions or even the accustomed habits of civil society.  The British policy thus - inadvertently, to be sure - formed the basis on which the tyranny of Saddam Hussein rested.  The current American emphasis on achieving "security" by creating an Iraqi army gives us every reason to believe that this pattern will repeat itself.  Building a large new army today will likely once again prove a major obstacle to Iraqi stability and freedom.

In their recommendations for withdrawal, they even make the surprising suggestion:

It is not in the interest of Iraq to encourage the growth and heavy armament of a reconstituted Iraqi army.  The civilian government of Iraq should, and hopefully will, take into account in considering its policy toward the creation of a regular army that previous Iraqi armies have frequently acted against civil governments and Iraqi citizens.  Iraqi armies have been a source not of defense but of disruption.  Thus, until balancing civic institutions have time and opportunity to grow, the creation of an army is not in Iraq's interest. America cannot prevent the reconstitution of an Iraqi army, but it should not, as it is currently doing, encourage it at an estimated cost of $2.2 billion.

It's not clear how they think Iraq would handle border defense without a formal national army.  Presumably they forsee regional and local militias as handling that task for some period of time.  But that particular recommendation would need to be seen in the context of the others they make, which is beyond the scope of this post.

It's also worth remembering that the Iraqi air force is virtually non-existent, nor is one of any significant size or armament planned.  As Spencer Ackerman points out in  War in Iraq, 2003-?? American Prospect 11/10/06 issue (accessed 11/01/06):

“The Iraqi Air Force doesn’t exist,” notes a senior Army officer. “Yet [airpower] maintains the government in power. It’s a good thing that the enemy can’t mass in the open. Why is that? Because we can kill them with airpower. We’ll need that capacity for a long time. The nascent Iraqi Air Force isn’t going to be ready for a decade. The American Air Force will have to be in Iraq for a long time. ...” (my emphasis)

The decision to have virtually no Iraqi air force implies, in the context of the administration's strategy for the ISF, that Iraq under the best of circumstances would be dependent on a permanent American tactical air support presence indefinitely.

"Wars are easy to get into, but hard as hell to get out of." - George McGovern and Jim McGovern 06/06/05