On Wed, 16 Feb 2005, Fred Kaplan was cited:
http://www.slate.com/id/2113575/fr/nl/
war stories Military analysis. Supplemental Insecurity The revelations buried in Bush's latest supplemental budget request. By Fred Kaplan Posted Tuesday, Feb. 15, 2005, at 2:58 PM PT
Deeply buried in the Bush administration's 97-page supplemental budget request for $81.9 billion ($75 billion of it for the Pentagon), mainly to fund operations in Iraq and Afghanistan, there is one sentence that expresses--more succinctly and shockingly than any official statement to date--just how little progress we've made toward making Iraq a stable nation.
It's there in the section dealing with the $5.7 billion requested for the "Iraq Security Force Fund," which notes that the interim Iraqi government, with assistance from coalition nations, has already created a security force of 90 battalions, but then adds:
All but one of these 90 battalions, however, are lightly equipped and armed, and have very limited mobility and sustainment capabilities.
In other words, 89 of Iraq's 90 battalions essentially cannot fight.
This is a far worse state of affairs than even President Bush's critics have imagined. During Condoleezza Rice's confirmation hearings last month, Sen. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the foreign relations committee, said he'd been told that of the 120,000 security forces that Rice maintained existed, only 4,000--or 3 percent--were well-trained. Now the administration is admitting, in the pursuit of seeking more money to improve matters, that the real number is more like 1 percent.
Kaplan has made many very sharp analyses of the main and supplemental military budgets over the years. But in this case, he seems to be way overinterpreting the text. The sentence he quotes doesn't say anything about troop training. It says they "are lightly equipped and armed, have limited mobility [i.e., they don't have enough wheeled combat vehicles] and sustainment capabilities [i.e., they don't have enough supplies, including everything from gas and food to extra bullets]."
Nothing in there that says they haven't been well-trained. What it says is they need equipment. From that sentence, it is theoretically possible that all 120,000 are ready to go as soon as you give them enough bullets, heavier arms, armor, humvees, gas and a quartermaster staff.
Don't get me wrong. I'm sure the training of "native troops" as they used to be called in the old days is going disastrously. But, far from being a revelation, this sentence Kaplan has isolated doesn't really tell us anything about it.
Michael
