Redeployment planning

The Captain's Journal:

The press reports are repleat with analyses about the exodus from Iraq and what that might look like. Most of them are poorly reasoned reports, but some are insightful and informative. I had previously predicted that it would require more than a year to remove all men and materiel from Iraq. It looks like this prediction is gratuitous. The Director of CENTCOM Logistics Operations Center weighs in on just what is going to be necessary to pull off redeployment from Iraq.

Political and public demand for a quick withdrawal is rising. But nothing about withdrawal will be quick.

The 20 ground combat brigades deployed here will fill 10,000 flatbed trucks and will take a year to move, logistics experts say. A full withdrawal, shipping home some 200,000 Americans and thousands of tons of equipment, dismantling dozens of American bases and disposing of tons of accumulated toxic waste, will take 20 months or longer, they estimate.

Yet the administration, long intent on avoiding what it once called a “cut and run” retreat from Iraq, has done little to lay the groundwork for withdrawal, officials here said.

“We don’t have the plan in detail yet. We’re seriously engaged in trying to figure this out,” said Marine Brig. Gen. Gray Payne, director of the U.S. Central Command’s logistics operations center.

Even with the benefit of a detailed plan, Payne said, “this is going to be an enormous challenge.”

Extricating combat forces during an active war is a tricky military maneuver under the best of circumstances, according to interviews with senior military officers and dozens of tactical and strategic military planners and logistics experts in Iraq and at U.S. military facilities across the region.

A hastier departure could find military convoys stalled on roads cratered by roadside bombs, interrupted by blown bridges and clogged with fleeing refugees; heavy cargo planes jammed with troops could labor into skies dark with smoke rising from abandoned American bases.

How the United States manages to disentangle itself from Iraq, whether in a graceful redeployment that strengthens stability or in a more chaotic retreat, will have profound repercussions for American power and prestige in the region, military and civilian strategists said.

Indeed, even though the word withdrawal has become this summer’s most shopworn term in Washington, few have grasped the staggering difficulty, time and cost of actually carrying it out.

“It’s going to be mind-boggling - like picking up the city of Los Angeles and putting all the pieces somewhere else,” said an official of the U.S. Army Sustainment Command, which will oversee much of the work.

Indeed, American power and prestige in the Middle East is an important parameter by which to perform planning for redeployment....

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There is much more. Even the idea of redeployment is illogical and makes no sense. There is no military reason for such a retreat. While there are obvious political reasons for it, the logic of them is not obvious. We are dealing with politicians and their supports who are so bereft of military history and and knowledge of military operations that they are asking that great effort be expended to lose a war when a much smaller effort is required to stay and win. It is a bad decision of historic proportions and it is the fault of people who will never take responsibility for it. In fact we already know their plan to deal with the consequences of their historically horrible decision. They will blame Bush. He is the designated scapegoat for everything that goes wrong with their sorry plans.

A top official at the Pentagon let Sen. Clinton know what he thought of her request for redeployment planning in a letter described as a stunning rocket by the NY Times. I suspect that the Secretary of Defense will be more politic in responding to Clinton's return rocket. That is too bad. It is time that these people be told the facts in a brutally frank manner and they they be aware of the consequences of their bad policy positions.