177. Sgian Dubh, read the link. URL?
The numbers there are calculated from the handbook Petraeus helped write. It is a consensus of opinion that 20 troops per 1,000 citizens is the MINIMUM needed to fight the type of insurgency we are facing in Afghanistan. McCrystal helped Petraeus write that manual.
Logically, that means either he doesn’t believe what he helped write, he thinks he was wrong, he thinks he has found a way to do it with less OR he knows he won’t get 600,000 troops at once, since the USA doesn’t have that many and his plan is to ‘rock soup’ it.
Rock Soup is the technique used in Vietnam. Start with a small number and then increase it a little at a time until you are finally where you need to be. It is a time honored military solution to the problem of getting adequate force levels out of the politicians. Mission creep is another term.
So McCrystal KNOWS he needs 600,000 + troops. By his OWN calculations. He also knows he can’t get 600,000 troops. So one has to ask why he is going thru with this dog and pony show?
BTW, the snide crack about 4 stars demonstrates a certain lack of information about military history. You seem unaware of the FACT that most of histories foremost military writers had little if any military (combat) experience.
Clausewitz was an adie-de-camp who was never close enough to a battlefield to smell the gunpowder.
Bernard Fall was a journalist and the creator of the ‘soft’ approach used by the USA’s COIN operations of today.
Sun Tzu, who is credited for the oldest book on military maxims ( a LOT of controversy over that. It is far from resolved as a point of military history) seems to have been a court follower.
Very few Generals add anything to what is loosely termed ‘military science’. That is because rising to the rank of general requires conventional thinking. Conventional thinking doesn’t produce advances in anything.
McCrystal is a dective. He would be great in a CSI type thingie were instaed of arresting some one, the JDAM them.
One of the reasons McCrystal is so popular among the Left is he feeds their delusion that terrorism is an act of crime, NOT an act of war.
Gates has the same problem. He really wants to be the Director of the FBI, not Sec of Def. So by treating a global war as a crime problem he gets to act out his fantasy.
Read that URL. While war at the tactical level cannot be reduced to columns and rows and put in a spreadsheet, it can be treated that way at an operational or strategic level. On a tactical level, it’s the men that matter. Once you get above that, it’s ALL about logistics.