The linked article estimates that a withdrawal from Iraq should take no longer than six months.
A few excerpts follow:
Modern armies, including ours, are mobile. So why would it take so much longer to leave? The short answer is that it won’t.
The long answer is that talk about an 18-month withdrawal is the product of confused priorities and poor strategic analysis.
Leaving behind everything but war-fighting equipment makes the move manageable. We’ve shipped something like 9 million tons of stuff to Iraq, but only a small fraction—less than 10 percent—is war materiel. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says that we have somewhere between 140,000 and 200,000 tons of crucial equipment and supplies in Iraq, as well as 15-20,000 vehicles and major weapons. That can’t add up to more than half a million tons total. Those vehicles can be driven out. The “crucial equipment†would have to be trucked out, which would take a week or two of normal traffic on the main road to Kuwait. We already make over 1,000 trips a day, and the trucks must be nearly empty when returning.
The insurgents today have no tanks, no APCs, no heavy artillery, and yet we’re supposed to worry about the havoc they would wreak during any withdrawal. We’ve been seeing about 100 men a month killed in action in 2007, we’d lose fewer in a rapid withdrawal than we would by staying one more month. The insurgents excel at planting IEDs and blending into the population—but that’s all they’re good at. In a conventional battle, they would do about as well as a rabbit in a lawnmower. If you’re worried that the Iraqi army we’re always training might turn on us, relax: we never gave them any heavy weapons, which shows that someone was thinking ahead.
The bottom line is that we can get troops and war-fighting equipment out of Iraq rapidly and relatively safely, certainly in less than six months, probably in three.
Link:
Easy Out
A few excerpts follow:
Modern armies, including ours, are mobile. So why would it take so much longer to leave? The short answer is that it won’t.
The long answer is that talk about an 18-month withdrawal is the product of confused priorities and poor strategic analysis.
Leaving behind everything but war-fighting equipment makes the move manageable. We’ve shipped something like 9 million tons of stuff to Iraq, but only a small fraction—less than 10 percent—is war materiel. Anthony Cordesman of the Center for Strategic and International Studies says that we have somewhere between 140,000 and 200,000 tons of crucial equipment and supplies in Iraq, as well as 15-20,000 vehicles and major weapons. That can’t add up to more than half a million tons total. Those vehicles can be driven out. The “crucial equipment†would have to be trucked out, which would take a week or two of normal traffic on the main road to Kuwait. We already make over 1,000 trips a day, and the trucks must be nearly empty when returning.
The insurgents today have no tanks, no APCs, no heavy artillery, and yet we’re supposed to worry about the havoc they would wreak during any withdrawal. We’ve been seeing about 100 men a month killed in action in 2007, we’d lose fewer in a rapid withdrawal than we would by staying one more month. The insurgents excel at planting IEDs and blending into the population—but that’s all they’re good at. In a conventional battle, they would do about as well as a rabbit in a lawnmower. If you’re worried that the Iraqi army we’re always training might turn on us, relax: we never gave them any heavy weapons, which shows that someone was thinking ahead.
The bottom line is that we can get troops and war-fighting equipment out of Iraq rapidly and relatively safely, certainly in less than six months, probably in three.
Link:
Easy Out
