More Boots on the Ground

Amid a spike in violence in Iraqi cities coinciding with the Fallujah offensive, the U.S. military is now planning to boost combat forces to secure the country for elections in January.

The U.S. is likely to expand the force by thousands of GIs in coming weeks by delaying the departure of more experienced units from Iraq as fresh troops rotate in, military officials say.

The overlap would create a temporary surge in American forces – which now number 141,000 in Iraq – to cope with an expected wave of insurgent attacks aimed at disrupting the polling. More U.S. troops are required as Iraqi security forces remain highly vulnerable to attacks and intimidation. This was underscored by a rash of insurgent strikes on police stations in Mosul, Baqubah and other cities in the past week, when attacks nationwide rose to 50 percent higher than the average in recent months.

Some U.S. military officials have long argued that the United States cannot win the war in Iraq without committing tens of thousands more troops. Others contend that more troops would simply present more targets, and the U.S. military should scale back and let Iraqis contend with much of the violence.

In reality, the U.S. cannot substantially increase ground forces in Iraq for the long term without accepting risk in other parts of the world or making Iraq tours longer or closer together – a step sure to lower morale. "I'm committed to providing the troops that are requested, but I can't promise more than I've got," the Army chief of staff, Gen. Peter Schoomaker, told a Congressional hearing Wednesday in which military service chiefs detailed soaring demands on manpower and equipment.

"The demand on the force has increased exponentially," the Marine Corps commandant, Gen. Michael Hagee, told the House Armed Services Committee, saying Marines now spend about twice as much time deployed as two years ago.

Decisions are expected soon on extending specific units in Iraq, and on the possibility of deploying others early from bases in the U.S., according to senior military officials. In October, the military ordered some 6,500 troops to delay their departure from Iraq.

"There is ample opportunity" to increase troop levels by overlapping new arrivals with others whose tours would be extended as large units of 20,000 to 30,000 troops rotate, says a senior U.S. military official in Baghdad. But a larger increase could run into constraints – the current limits of basing and support services.

The string of U.S.-led military offensives on insurgent-held cities across Iraq since August has underscored the necessity for more American troops as well as elite Iraqi commando units. They're needed to step in for struggling local Iraqi security forces that are frequently unwilling or unable to fight off insurgents who threaten them and their families.

"When you take an area that has a stronghold of insurgents and you have to build the Iraqi police force from that population, you set yourself up potentially for failure if you don't have some type of moderating force," says Brig. Gen. Erv Lessel, deputy director for operations of Multinational Forces-Iraq.

To ensure that recaptured cities such as Fallujah and Samarra do not fall back under insurgent control, U.S. commanders are having to commit additional forces to maintaining a presence there, both with U.S. troops and non-local Iraqi forces such as Iraqi National Guard (ING) units from outside areas.

Indeed, in recent weeks U.S. commanders have pushed thousands of additional soldiers and Marines into trouble spots in the Sunni triangle such as Fallujah, Samarra, Ramadi and most recently the northern city of Mosul.

Samarra, for example, had no coalition presence prior to a major offensive in October to root out some 400 insurgents, but now 500 U.S. troops and 500 Iraqi forces are stationed there. Even then, insurgent attacks killed 17 Iraqi police in the city on Nov. 6, as daily strikes in the region tripled.