The big foot print Shinseki cult

Jack Kelly:

...

Former Army Chief of Staff Gen. Eric Shinseki has become a cult figure to officers critical of Mr. Rumsfeld, and for journalists looking for a club with which to beat the Bush administration. The admiration stems from Gen. Shinseki's testimony to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February 2003, that several hundred thousand more troops than the administration was planning for would be required to pacify Iraq.

It appears, in retrospect, that Gen. Shinseki was right. But we ought not to make this assumption as glibly as so many have.

To begin with, the Shinseki plan called for more troops than there were in the active U.S. Army, which casts some doubt on its practicality. But the larger issue is the debate within the military between the "big footprint" guys and the "little footprint" guys.

Gen. Shinseki is a big footprint guy. He favored an occupation like that in Germany and Japan after World War II.

The little footprint guys, most of whom are in special forces, said the presence of a large number of American troops was in itself an incitement to insurgency.

I'm a little footprint guy. I think by far the most serious of the mistakes we've made in Iraq was creation of the Coalition Provisional Authority. The CPA (soldiers said it stood for Can't Provide Anything) did little good, and provided a very visible "American occupation" for extremists to rally against.

We'd have been better off, in my opinion, if we'd followed the Afghan model and stood up right away an Iraqi interim government.

We wound up with the worst of both worlds -- a big footprint strategy with a force structure more suitable for a small footprint strategy.

A related egregious mistake was our failure to begin rebuilding immediately the Iraqi army and police. Great progress has been made since Lt. Gen. David Petraeus took over this responsibility in June 2004, but a critically important year was lost.

We are in the early stages of what figures to be a long war against a ruthless and determined enemy. To win this war, it is important we learn from our mistakes. But we can do that only if we hunt for the truth, not for scapegoats.

It should be noted that Kelly served in Special Forces after he served in the Marines. The original use for Shinseki statement was by politicians who did not want to liberate Iraq. The revolting generals have glumed on to it for a different reason. I suspect that the plans described in this post were really what the revolt was about. One indicator is that so far no Special Forces officers have joined the revolt. It is in this strategy, much more so than in Iraq, that the big footpring guys have lost the debate at DOD. In Iraq there is no indication that anyone in the chain of command ever sought additional troops. Kelly is right on this point. Some of the generals fear turning the war over to the snake eaters.