JOIN THE FOREIGN LEGION: There’s an article in this month’s Atlantic Mag by Kenneth Pollack of the Brooking Institution about the situation in Iraq. Mr. Pollack agrees with the “oil spots” philosophy of Andrew Krepinevich, i.e. the idea that US and British forces should play a mostly defensive role providing reliable security in selected areas, versus continually launching offensive missions against the insurgents in their strongholds in western Iraq. Ever since modern armies became mechanized and highly mobile in the 1930s, standard military doctrine says that when you are attacked, you don’t just stand there and defend your ground; you counter-attack, take it back to the enemy’s turf. Pollack and Krepinevich are saying that in “asymmetric” wars against guerrilla / insurgency forces, such as Iraq has become, things are different. Because insurgency groups melt away into the small towns and villages so easily, it’s a waste of time for a modern army to try to attack them on their own territory. The best thing to do is to just stand your ground. That way, you stop the insurgents from inflicting an atmosphere of fear in the populace that you are trying to defend. Once fear sets in, normal life comes to a halt and it’s just a matter of time until the guerrillas win.

The problem with this doctrine is that it takes a whole lot of soldiers to do it. Pollack estimates that to do it correctly in Iraq would take about 440,000 troops, based on historical ratios of needed forces to population. However, counting American, British and trained Iraqi soldiers, we have about 220,000. So we can only control half of the country. However, once we secure an area, according to this theory, we should be able to move our troops over a few miles over into bordering unsecured areas. By doing that repeatedly over the course of many months, we should be able to spread out the secured zone, similar to the way that an oil spot slowly spreads. The US Army and Marines are aware of this theory, but thus far have refused to implement it.

I’m not a military expert; I was never in the service. But I would guess that if we concentrated our forces in half of the populated areas of Iraq, the insurgents and militias would embed themselves pretty firmly in the other half. If we then tried to spread out into hostile regions, we might not do so well. At the same time, we’d risk losing the security that we had previously established in our safety zones. It’s hard to stop car bombs and suicide bombers even if you have a soldier on every street corner; and once they leave, it’s that much easier.

The bottom line here is that we probably don’t have enough troops in Iraq to beat the insurgency. Three years ago, General Eric Shinseki said that we would need “several hundred thousand” soldiers to stabilize post-war Iraq. In his 2004 book, General Tommy Franks said that 250,000 troops were needed. It sounds as though we were at least 100,000 troops short of getting Iraq under control after the invasion. Now that the insurgency and militias have grown and gotten stronger, the gap is probably more like 220,000 soldiers, as indicated by Mr. Pollack’s analysis.

But even the 150,000 or so troops that we now have in Iraq (and that we can’t bring home anytime soon given the worsening threat of civil war) are straining the capacity of the US military and endangering our ability to cover other potential hot spots in the world (such as Korea). I would definitely conclude that our military is too small for us to become both the world’s policeman and the conqueror / re-builder of rogue states. We’re pretty much getting all the usable people that we can get thru voluntary recruiting. It’s fairly obvious that if we want to expand our military, we need to re-institute the draft. But college kids would go ape-s**t if that were to happen. The days of campus activism would be back, with chants once more of “peace, pot, microdot”. (Imagine all the creative energy that would be unleashed again from our youth, as in the late 60s). Mr. Bush and his friends certainly don’t want to see that happen.

So what can the US do? One idea that makes rough sense is to start a foreign legion aimed at men and women under the age of 35 from Spanish-speaking countries. We supposedly have a lot of Spanish bi-lingual officers in our military today that could staff and train such a legion. But why would young Latin Americans want to join such a force and do America’s dirty work overseas? Well, we could give them a deal — serve five years honorably and you get American citizenship, along with your legal wife and kids (or if you die in action, the wife and kids still get in). Disclaimer: I didn’t make this idea up. I saw it on some right-wing “war on terror” blog (www.windsofchange.net).

To raise the incentive, we could militarize the Mexican border and seal it tight (as many Republicans want to do; and I don’t entirely disagree). And at the same time, we would spread the word throughout Mexico and Latin America that there are still two ways into America — 1.) do the paperwork and get a five year workers visa, as Mr. Bush proposes and I agree with; 2.) join the foreign legion, do your time in Iraq or where ever, and get full citizenship. Right now, the Pew Hispanic Center estimates that about 485,000 people cross the border illegally every year. If 100,000 of them took the foreign legion deal, then before long we’d have an extra 500,000 in our military. We’d have our southern border back under control, and maybe we’d have enough military force to get involved in places where we could really do some good (like Sudan).

Again, this idea makes “rough sense”, but I’m sure that it would make a lot of people unhappy. And it probably would be harder to accomplish than it sounds. But if Bush and his Republican cronies had the guts to pull something like this off (I know the Democrats could never do it), I would have to take my hat off to them. For once.