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Pentagon between Iraq and a hard
place
By Michael Schwartz
After two years of intensive fighting in
Iraq, the Pentagon is feeling the strain in every
military muscle and has been looking for relief in
just about every direction but one - the draft.
All across the United States today, young people
are wondering whether, sooner or later, in its
increasingly airless military universe, the
administration of President George W Bush will
open the window a crack and let the draft in.
A key reason for the ever-more-evident
strain on military resources is that more than 40%
of the 150,000 soldiers in Iraq are Army Reserves
and National Guards. As army historian Renee
Hylton told Salon reporter Jeff Horowitz, use of
these forces creates pressure to "win and get out
... there's a definite limit to people's service".
When they are called to active duty, these troops
risk their jobs as well as their lives; so, when
their mandatory two-year terms expire, a
significant proportion of them, under the best of
circumstances, are likely to refuse further
service. And service in Iraq has already proved
something less than the best of circumstances.
Little wonder then that, just past the two-year
anniversary of the invasion, the US military is
under increasing pressure to replenish this
crucial element in the recruitment mix - without
much of an idea of how to do so.
In
addition, in order to maintain troop strength in
Iraq at anything like present levels, large
numbers of active-duty soldiers must return there
for more than one nine-month tour of duty, and
this redeployment too generates distrust and
distaste. Sooner or later, sizable numbers of
these angry soldiers must nevertheless be
persuaded to re-enlist, or else the pressure for
new enlistees will escalate out of control and
beyond the bounds of the present system to
satisfy.
Add to this a constantly
increasing casualty toll, now well beyond 30,000,
which, in a variety of ways, places yet more
pressure on recruitment. Finally, as embittered
double-deployment veterans and angry Reserves,
along with wounded and mentally stressed
dischargees, return home, they only stiffen the
resistance to enlistment among the young in their
neighborhoods.
None of this was
anticipated at the start of the Iraq war by Bush
administration officials; they were confident that
the US military could topple Saddam Hussein's
government and pacify any leftover "dead end"
loyalists of the old regime in about three months.
Defense Department figures, reported by the
Washington Post projected reductions in US troop
strength in Iraq and Afghanistan from just over
200,000 at the time of the invasion to about
125,000 by September 2003; to 50,000 six months
later; and - not counting troops left to garrison
the permanent bases - to zero by the end of 2004.
They were wrong, of course. Troop levels,
after declining according to plan during the
summer of 2003, began climbing again as the
resistance grew - in response to a deepening
economic and infrastructural disaster, and to the
brutal nature of the US military occupation. With
some fluctuations, since the beginning of 2004 the
numbers of boots on the ground in Iraq have
remained at about the 150,000 level (not counting
expensive private "security contractors" hired by
the Pentagon and private firms) - almost double
the number that the United States could hope to
sustain in the long run, given the force levels of
the present volunteer military.
Several
recent reports have documented the depth of the
impending crisis, including a detailed analysis of
troop strengths by Ann Tyson in the Washington
Post. So far, more than a million US military
personnel have served in Iraq and Afghanistan,
with some 341,000 already doing the dreaded double
deployments (and many now entering
triple-deployment territory). The military has
moved troops into Iraq from all over the world,
including previously untouchable Cold War
detachments in Korea, Germany and Alaska, and it's
still "scrambling" to keep 17 battalions regularly
in Iraq, many severely undermanned. These
shortages have led to an increasing dependence on
expensive private security contractors, who
themselves add to the Pentagon's recruitment
problems by hiring away otherwise re-upable
military personnel for four times the wages paid
in the US Army.
To make matters worse, the
Defense Department (to protect against a crisis
elsewhere) has decided, with congressional
authorization, to increase the overall size of
active-duty forces by 30,000, which can only
amplify the retention/recruitment crunch.
Recruitment: Entering free
fall
Last autumn the military embarked on a
Herculean set of efforts to meet these daunting
demands. It manufactured a 40% increase in the
pool of candidates available for the Guard and
Reserve by relaxing entry standards and raising
the enlistment age to 40 years. It added thousands
of new recruiters (1,400 for the National Guard
alone) and equipped them with an array of new
inducements, including signing bonuses as high as
US$20,000 (for those with previous experience) and
up to $70,000 in college credits for new
enlistees. Re-enlistment bonuses, depending on
specialty, can now reach $100,000. The Defense
Department also launched a new $180 million
recruitment campaign that includes "sponsorship of
a rodeo cowboy, ads on ESPN [a US sports
television network], and a 24-hour website that
allows users to chat with recruiters ... 24 hours
a day". In a special effort to help the most
stressed service, the military is offering $6
million of recruitment money in exchange for the
right to name the home of the new Washington
Nationals baseball team National Guard Stadium.
The most dramatic of the new measures were
aimed at inducing (or coercing) personnel to
remain in the military beyond their enlistment
contracts. Tom Reeves, author of The End of the
Draft and longtime observer of draft policy,
reports that 40,000 soldiers have already been
retained by using the notorious "stop-loss"
system, which allows the US Army unilaterally to
keep soldiers for up to 18 months beyond the date
their enlistment is scheduled to terminate. This
is in essence a more bureaucratic and politer form
of the old British method of "impressment", also
known as shanghaiing. There is now a congressional
investigation into persistent reports that
short-timers - those with less then a year or so
left on their enlistment contracts - are being
told that re-enlistment will guarantee a
non-combat assignment, while refusal to re-enlist
will lead to an Iraq deployment during the
remainder of their service. While the Defense
Department denies that such blackmail-style
practices are taking place, it does admit that
station "stabilization" - a pre-agreed duty
station away from Iraq - has become a major
incentive for re-enlistment.
Such military
efforts were augmented by what may be the ultimate
sign of military desperation: the call-up of 5,500
members of the "Individual Ready Reserves". As
Reeves notes, these are "older men and women whose
regular reserve duty has ended - including
grandmothers and grandfathers edging toward
retirement ... who have no idea they would be
recalled to duty". It is hardly surprising that
nearly one-third of these superannuated reserves
have refused to report. Nor is it surprising that
modest signs of rebellion are appearing inside
what was, until recently, a volunteer military.
The Los Angeles Times, for instance, has
documented cases of National Guard soldiers
protesting inadequate equipment and the TV program
60 Minutes, among others, has reported at
least 5,500 desertions among the troops, largely
to avoid deployment or redeployment to Iraq.
Worse yet, from the Pentagon's point of
view, even its most far-reaching and draconian
efforts seem to be failing. Re-enlistment levels
in both the army and the Guard have now slipped
below quota, and Reuters reports that this
shortfall can be expected to get dramatically
worse once larger numbers of soldiers reach that
18-month stop-loss limit. New recruitment appears
to be entering free fall, with the most drastic
declines among blacks, who traditionally make up
25% of the volunteer army. January and February
recorded the first Marine Corps recruitment
shortfalls in a decade, while the army is running
6% below targets for the year. Hardest hit have
been the Reserves, with a 10% decline, and the
Army National Guard at 26%. These units are in
full crisis, with the Guard already announcing it
will not reach full strength in 2005, and Reserve
commander General James Helmly stating that
"overuse" is making his units into "a broken
force". Reeves reports that even the military
academies have suffered 15-25% declines in
applications for admission. To make matters worse,
as the newspaper USA Today has reported, the
anti-war movement has begun (with at least some
success) targeting the recruitment process. (A
meticulous account by activist Peter Charaek of
one successful protest in Oregon can be found on
the Jeff Rense website, www.rense.com.)
Major-General Michael D Rochelle, the man
in charge of army recruiting, told New York Times
reporter Damien Cave that the recruitment crisis
constituted the "toughest challenge to the
all-volunteer army" since its inception in 1973.
The Iraqi armed forces: Replacement
killers?
Optimistic reports that the United
States' local military allies will soon begin to
replace US troops follow a familiar pattern of
miraculous overstatement (first established in
Vietnam decades ago), as reporter Timothy Phelps
documented in a March 21 article in Newsday that
reviewed the history of US attempts to build Iraqi
military forces. In the spring of 2004, official
(and unofficial) Bush administration reports
claimed the existence of 206,000 fully trained
Iraqi troops. To the surprise of those who had
accepted these claims, none of them fought
successfully in the major battles that April (in
Fallujah, Najaf or Sadr City). Most deserted
beforehand, refused to fight, or fled under fire.
A measurable minority, however, did fight
ferociously - for the resistance, using
US-supplied weapons and equipment.
By
autumn 2004, though the US was publicly claiming
135,000 "combat-ready" Iraqi troops, one military
official told New York Times reporter John Burns
that as few as 1,500 Iraqi troops were actually
fully trained. This was vividly demonstrated in
the second battle of Fallujah, when only Kurdish
militia units imported from the north fought
successfully alongside the Americans. The official
Iraqi army units resisted, either through mutiny
or desertion, or by defecting to the other side.
Kalev Sepp, a counterinsurgency expert at the
Naval Postgraduate School, told Newsday's Phelps
that the second battle of Fallujah was largely
fought against Iraqis who had been "trained and
equipped by Americans".
Then came Rear
Admiral William Sullivan's report to Congress in
spring 2005 that spoke of 145,000
"combat-capable", "new" Iraqi armed forces. This
claim was disputed by - of all people - Sabah
Hadhum, a spokesman for the Iraqi Ministry of the
Interior. He told Telegraph reporter Anton La
Guardia, "We are paying about 135,000 [members of
the security services] but that does not
necessarily mean that 135,000 are actually
working." As many as 50,000 of these may actually
be what he termed "ghost soldiers" - men not on
duty but whose paychecks were being pocketed
either by their officers or themselves.
Newsday's investigative report confirms
Hadhum's negative assertion. Just under 40,000 of
the reported 145,000 armed forces turn out to be
holdovers from the old Iraqi National Guard.
According to US Army experts, they had received
the same "haphazard training" as their
predecessors (who refused to fight) and could be
relied upon to do nothing except receive their
paychecks.
Another 55,000 were Iraqi
police whose unwillingness to confront the
guerrillas has become legendary. The deputy
governor of Nineveh province - where the Iraqi
"northern capital" Mosul is located - accused the
14,000 police there of being "in league" with the
resistance. He assured reporter Patrick Cockburn
of The Independent that his bodyguards "don't tell
them our movements", since he suspects them of
trying to assassinate him. Military expert Kalev
Sepp told Newsday the US military had concluded
that "70% of the police in Anwar province are
insurgents or sympathizers", with substantial
infiltration elsewhere as well. (According to
Sepp, even "one infiltrator with access to
intelligence" could give the enemy "forewarning",
so imagine what a 20-70% infiltration rate might
do.)
According to Rear Admiral Sullivan,
only a meager 14,000 troops were fully trained
units in the "new Iraqi army", the first
beneficiaries of what Burns of the Times called a
"$5 billion American-financed effort". These
troops had not, however, yet endured a major
battle, and some of the US troops who worked with
them evidently considered them worthless. As one
trooper told Times of London reporter Anthony
Loyd, "I'm more scared of going out with these
guys than clashing with the insurgents". According
to Los Angeles Times reporter David Zuccino, even
the 205th Iraqi Army Brigade, "considered the
country's best unit by many US trainers", had been
infiltrated by insurgents. And US Army Staff
Sergeant Craig Patrick, one of the advisers in
charge of training the Iraqis, told Washington
Post reporter Steve Fainaru, "It's all about
perception, to convince the American public that
everything is going as planned and we're right on
schedule to be out of here. I mean, they can
[mislead] the American people, but they can't
[mislead] us. These guys are not ready."
Nevertheless, in mid-February, Burns
reported that two brigades of this new force
"became the first home-grown unit to take
operational responsibility for any combat zone in
Iraq", the restive Haifa neighborhood in Baghdad.
The remaining 30,000 troops in Sullivan's
count were vaguely defined military personnel
commanded by the Iraqi Ministry of the Interior.
In the long run, US military leadership hopes that
these will become the Iraqi equivalent of the US
Special Forces, and will constitute a new secret
police or other sinister entities. In the
meantime, they are, it seems, largely incapable of
confronting the resistance. In their first solo
effort, reported in the New York Times, between
500 and 700 members of the 1st Police Commando
Battalion, with air support from the US military,
could not capture a training camp containing fewer
than 100 guerrillas. Eventually, US ground forces
were needed, and even then, the guerrillas might
have escaped.
In a recent report to the
Carnegie Endowment, military expert Jeffrey Miller
concluded that the "gap" between the forces needed
to handle the security situation in Iraq and the
actual strength of the Iraqi military had doubled
in the past year, raising "grave doubts about the
... hope for success" of the strategy of
transferring responsibility to the Iraqi military.
Certainly, no such transfer can succeed in time to
allow for a comfortable transition before the
onset of the recruitment crisis now facing the US
military.
Does anyone feel a draft
coming in?
As the strain on the US military
continues to build, so does the pressure on
policy. The only option that does not imply the
sacrifice of many more American lives and
magnitudes more Iraqi lives may be the withdrawal
of US troops, but this option is "unthinkable" to
the Bush administration - and to its loyal
Democratic opposition, not to speak of the bulk of
the mainstream media. Only the American people
(according to the most recent Marist poll) - and
the rest of the world - consider it "thinkable".
According to former US national security
adviser Zbigniew Brzezinski, avoiding this
unthinkable option would require "500,000 troops,
$500 billion and the resumption of the military
draft". The need for a draft has been seconded by
a wide range of military experts, including
then-presidential candidate General Wesley Clark,
who, in 2004, said the US needed to start
"thinking about the draft"; frequent Pentagon
adviser Colonel David Hackworth, who called the
draft a "no-brainer in '05 and '06"; and Charles
Moskos, adviser to four presidents on military
manpower, who declared that "we cannot achieve the
number of troops we need in Iraq without a draft".
Washington Monthly editor Paul Glastris and
national-security analyst Philip Carter
articulated what might be the most comprehensive
argument, calling for a "21st-century draft" that
would "create a cascading series of benefits",
including turning the tide in Iraq.
Despite this crescendo of advocacy by
friends and foes of administration policy,
government insiders continue to tread very lightly
on the issue. The Project for a New American
Century, the policy planning group that developed
significant aspects of current US foreign policy,
has called for several years of 25,000-troop
increments to the military, but it has not
indicated how this could be done. Secretary of the
Army Francis J Harvey, after "bursting into
laughter" when asked about the draft, stated, "The
D-word is the farthest thing from my thoughts."
And President Bush has repeatedly reasserted his
commitment to keeping the volunteer army.
The deal-breaker for the Bush
administration may be exactly what it has
repeatedly said since talk of the draft burst on
to the scene during the 2004 election campaign -
the experience of Vietnam gave a conscripted army
a bad name. The current volunteer army (even if
its recruitment involves large elements of
coercion and manipulation) is better suited for
the sorts of wars the US is fighting, it believes,
and any move toward the draft would severely
undermine commitment to such wars, both inside and
outside the army. Even such partisan advocates as
Glastris and Carter concede this problem, though
they offer what they feel are viable ways of
getting around it.
But if the draft
advocates eventually convince the administration
that a conscripted army is viable, I believe they
would still have to overcome a second layer of
reluctance among decision-makers in charge of
military policy: a fear that the draft will
specifically alienate those who currently endorse
the war in Iraq. Pro-war partisans rest much of
their support of administration foreign policy on
the expectation that the January 30 election was a
turning point, that the battle of Fallujah
disabled the resistance, that Iraqi troops will be
ready to handle the guerrillas in the
not-too-distant future - and that US troops will
soon be brought home at least reasonably
victorious. The reinstitution of a draft would
constitute an admission that these beliefs are so
many illusions. In all likelihood, therefore, any
relaxation of the unequivocal opposition to the
draft in the administration would indeed
precipitate a sharp erosion of the war's already
eroding base. Opposition might then reach the
critical mass needed to make withdrawal
"thinkable".
But this reluctance to
embrace the draft leaves the Bush administration
in a knot of a dilemma. Without rejuvenating the
armed forces, the situation in Iraq is likely to
remain at best undecided, and even a stalemated
situation would constitute a mighty blow against
the administration's larger foreign-policy goals.
The goal of unilateral US dominance in global
politics and in global markets depends on the
image and reality of US military invincibility, so
that - with each passing day - the lack of victory
in Iraq undermines the credibility of Washington's
threats to force regime change wherever "rogue
states" resist its diplomatic will. As Carter and
Glastris wrote in their Washington Monthly
article, "America has a choice. It can be the
world's superpower, or it can maintain the current
all-volunteer military, but it probably can't do
both."
For many Americans, the
de-escalation of US imperial ambition is an
attractive alternative to further war and a
conscripted army. But for the Bush administration,
this alternative is just as unthinkable as the
draft. It is stuck, therefore, between Iraq and a
hard place.
The solution thus far has
involved a contradictory and unstable set of
pronouncements and policies. Rhetorically, the
administration has continued to reaffirm its
commitment to a no-draft military and its promise
to pursue "preventive wars" of all sorts. At the
same time, its officials have taken specific steps
meant to give them added flexibility. As Reeves
has documented, they have been quietly erecting
the Selective Service System (SSS) needed for a
future draft. In March, the SSS issued a report
assuring the president that "it would be ready to
implement a draft within 75 days" after
congressional authorization. Richard Flahavan, a
spokesman for the Selective Service System, told
reporter Eric Rosenberg of the Seattle
Post-Intelligencer that the SSS already has in
place "a special system to register and draft
health care personnel" and that it was undertaking
active planning for "a special skills draft" aimed
at computer programmers and language specialists.
These programs would be ready for implementation
any time the need arose.
News of this high
level of preparedness has added to already
widespread rumors of a renewed draft, and has fed
speculation that the government was perhaps
waiting for a dramatic event which would justify
the draft without jeopardizing support for the war
- perhaps an internal terrorist attack, or an
authentic (or US-precipitated) crisis elsewhere.
Fitted together with this posture of
waiting is a shift in military tactics in Iraq.
General Richard Cody, the US Army's second ranking
general, told New York Times reporter Eric Schmitt
that "a shift from combat operations" to US
"leadership" over Iraqi troops has been under way
since the January 30 election. Babakr Badarkhan
Ziabri, the Iraqi commanding general, told the
Arabic-language paper Al-Zaman that US troops
would withdraw into bases within six months,
emerging only when Iraqi troops needed support,
but avoiding offensive operations.
While
this military strategy could slow or halt the
disintegration of the forces stationed there (and
lessen the wear and tear on their dangerously
fraying equipment), it has already proved quite
detrimental for the "pacification" effort. In
early April, for example, the Washington Post
quoted US officials conceding that "many attacks
have gone unchallenged by Iraqi forces in large
areas of the country dominated by insurgents". At
the same time, the Shi'ite resistance, led by
young cleric Muqtada al-Sadr's forces, has
re-emerged as a major force in many cities of the
south.
These new strategies, therefore,
are likely in the long run to erode further the US
military position and strengthen the resistance,
and so may lead - as US president Richard Nixon's
Vietnamization program did decades ago - to the
increased use of US air power against resistance
strongholds. Such a strategy would promise an
intolerable rate of civilian casualties, as well
as the devastation of homes and neighborhoods
wherever the resistance is strong. This, in turn,
would, of course, only heighten support for the
guerrillas and increase pressure on US forces.
The Bush administration is likely to find
itself increasingly trapped, wound in an
ever-tightening knot of failing policy and falling
support, at the heart of which lies a decision
about reconstituting a draft. How this will
resolve itself will be one of the complex dramas
of our time.
Michael Schwartz,
professor of sociology at the State University of
New York at Stony Brook, has written extensively
on popular protest and insurgency, and on US
business and government dynamics. His work on Iraq
has appeared on the Internet at numerous sites,
including Tomdispatch (which made
this article available), Asia Times Online,
MotherJones.com, and ZNet; and in print at
Contexts and Z Magazine. His books include
Radical Politics and Social Structure, The
Power Structure of American Business (with Beth
Mintz), and Social Policy and the Conservative
Agenda (edited, with Clarence Lo). His e-mail
address is Ms42@optonline.net@optonline.net.
(Copyright 2005 Michael Schwartz.) |
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