After yesterday's consulate bombing and the recent decision to increase troop strength in Iraq, discussion on the Bar has—mercifully—swerved from Kerry talk to foreign affairs. An interesting question: is the US military stretched thin?

A few barflies think it's not:

From: "Greg "BLT" Donahue"

We have about 250,000 troops actively deployed in operations out of about 1.6 million total available ~active duty~ military, with 145,000 Guard and Reserve helping fill the actively deployed ranks.

http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/global-deployments.htm

Nice try. Next red herring, please.

I've been working on this most of the morning, and I've learned a few things:

First, searching the DoD Defenselink site for troop strength will get you a lot of headlines like "N.M. Teenager Supports Troops" and 'Airman Deploys with Dog.' (That last one comes from DefendAmerica.mil, which shall be henceforth dumped in the "paging Leni Riefenstahl" blogroll.)

Second, the latest figures I could find on any government site was 1.31 million active duty troops in April 2001; so obviously Greg's figure is seems pretty much accurate.

But on no site could I find a distinction between active duty troops and combat troops. The general rule I was always told is ten support troops for every pair of boots on the ground. That can't be right, though. Applying that math to 1.6m would give us only 160,000 combat troops, and with this weeks escalation, we're going to be hitting 150,000 combat troops in Iraq alone by the end of the year. (Remember that escalation I mentioned? So obviously we've been pretty successful outsourcing the support of our troops to Halliburton, and are now doing significantly better than 10:1.

In any case, we now have, according to Greg's source, 250,000 troops deployed in combat, peacekeeping and other operations, with another 150,000 deployed in our various European and Japanese bases, bravely defending our allies from the Red menace. But I still cannot find anywhere a total number of _combat_ troops anywhere.

I expect that to be cleared up pretty soon.

In any case, it's interesting to note that we will have 150,000 combat troops in Iraq by the end of 2004. LBJ had 175,000 boots on the ground in you-know-where at the end of '64; by the end of '68 there were over a half-million troops deployed.

GlobalSecurity.org has a chart claiming we'll have only 9 active combat brigades in Iraq in 2007. But that chart currently shows only 16 non-Guard ACBs deployed worldwide, as of this August. By the end of the year, we'll have 20 ACBs just in Iraq.

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