Iraq: U.S. Analysts Say 'Surge' Progress Warrants Patience

[queequeger]

Originally Posted by xoxoxoBruce

European, Middle Eastern, or Asian contractors, couldn't do the job either. It behooves the 'bad guys' to disrupt as much infrastructure and services as they can. With millions of troops, it would still be impossible to guard everything, all the time. It's much faster and easier to destroy shit than to build it.

Yeah, I agree with you. I didn't mean to imply that any contractors could pull it off now, just that incompetent contractors with no foreign experience effed things up in the beginning of the war, when there was little security problems with the public works construction.

And with a larger number of troops it would be possible to secure the country, history is riddled with successful counter insurgency campaigns, but all the ones that worked had adequate resources. The usual approximation is that 3-4 hundred thousand troops plus equal contractors could do the job, because while you're correct about guarding every street corner, the modern military has impressive capabilities including an intelligence apparatus. With various intelligence disciplines it's possible to track the 'bad guys' therefore we'd only have to protect a small number of targets full time.

In addition, those are only the foreign troops. A major part of a good campaign would be retraining and re outfitting the ING and Police (hopefully using SF for it's real purpose instead of the purpose assigned by a secdef who watched too many rambo movies). It would take several years and more resources than are currently employed, but it could be done.