Greg "BLT" Donahue has more to say on troop strength:

Now, keep in mind the figure of 250,000 is for troops deployed in support of operations. That doesn't translate into combat troops deployed. It looks like you're trying to sort through that in your post, but in this day and age, it is getting harder and harder to differentiate between "combat troop" and "combat support"...the example someone mentioned on the bar of the armed jeep driver comes to mind.

As an Air Force example, a single modern fighter bomber, crewed by two and supported by 6 maintenance guys, and operationally controlled by 10 other guys (i.e. intelligence officers using satellite data to tell them where to attack, etc...) is way more effective than 9 fighter-bombers with no maintenance guys and no overhead operational oversight. So overall combat effectiveness can't really be measured by raw numbers of trigger pulling troops.

And so does Adam Maas:

The Army does need to concentrate on given non 11-Bravo's a little more infantry training, maybe going as far as what the USMC does, send everyone to Infantry School first.

Note that there is one problem with the LBJ comparison, the Army in the 60's was VERY different, primarily being composed of short-service draftees on a two-year hitch, as opposed to the current long-service professional army. Any private today is worth 2-3 privates in the old army, simply due to having the training and experience they never had the chance to get. It takes 18 months to train a competent private, Selective Service Hitches were 24 months. So a Draftee would ETS right at the point where they'd had enough training and experience to actually be effective, not to mention the idiotic replacement policy used back then, which severely hampered unit cohesion.

The current 150,000 troops are likely more effective than the half-million that were in Vietnam in '68, in every measure apart from sheer numbers.

Andy Sullivan also thinks things might be going well in Iraq:

And there was an even less-noticed development this past month: the relative silence across Iraq after the devastating coalition assault on Falluja. The military campaign led to the deaths of thousands, including civilians caught in the crossfire, and left much of the city in rubble. It included the awful imagery of a scared U.S. Marine blowing a wounded Iraqi's head off, a scene replayed endlessly on Arab television. Did the rest of Iraq rise up in protest, as happened in the spring during a similar aborted attack on Falluja? Not even close. The Kurds and the Shia understand that their interest today lies in a successful election. They're not unhappy to see Sunni and Baathist rebels get pummeled by American arms. In that, you see the beginning of the new Iraqi reality: a place where 80 percent of the country wants the democratic transition to succeed.

Two things are bugging me. First, due to time constrants, I'm letting other people write my blog for me today, which feels like cheating—and, more importantly, I'm afraid The New Republic will sue. Second, Andy writes further:

The coalition has learned a critical tactic in neo-imperial governance: divide and rule. From the Romans to the Brits, it has long been a useful strategy. By working with the grain of Iraqi ethnic tension, specifically the pent-up hostility of Kurds and Shia toward the Sunnis, who for decades ran the country, the United States has been able to gain leverage against the largely Sunni insurgency. So as Sunni Falluja was pummeled, the Shia were quiet and Kurdish troops actually took part in the operation. Yes, it's a potentially dangerous ploy. Pushing the division too far could lead to civil war. But there's some good news here as well: In a recent poll of 2,210 Iraqis, a full two-thirds of those surveyed said the prospect of a civil war was "not realistic."

So the state of our military is definately better than I thought, and things in Iraq may be going better than I thought. But let's find the clout in this silver lining. "The coalition has learned a critical tactic in neo-imperial governance: divide and rule. From the Romans to the Brits, it has long been a useful strategy."

I'm reading Gore Vidal's Lincoln right now, and I have to wonder: who among our Founders would have thought the Roman Empire a good example for this nation to follow?

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