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Bring Home The 3rd ID
by Jonathan Foreman
The New York Post, June 16, 2003

THE PENTAGON's apparent desire to administer and pacify Iraq on the cheap isn't just risky policy, it's cruelly unfair to the troops on whom the burden is falling. It is especially unfair to the Third Infantry Division, which did a large part of the fighting in the war and has been serving under arduous conditions ever since.

The 3ID's three brigades captured Baghdad at the end of the first week of April, and (until the last two weeks or so) have done the lion's share of securing and stabilizing the Iraqi capital. Indeed, both the Second and Third Brigades have all been in the Gulf for at least nine months (a long deployment for an army in which most personnel are married).

They were due to go home at the end of May, to be relieved in place by fresh soldiers from the 1st Armored Division, and the 2d and 3d Armored Cavalry Regiments. (Other units that bore the brunt of the fighting have mostly gone home already.)

But CENTCOM took massive media flak for the lack of security in Iraq's cities at the end of May, so the Army promised to increase the number of troops on the ground. It did so not by bringing in a fresh division, but by the quick fix of keeping the exhausted Third Infantry in and around Baghdad.

The 3ID does have considerable, immensely valuable experience of peacekeeping in Bosnia and Kosovo, whereas the 4th Infantry now deployed in Tikrit has none.

And many 3ID units, despite having borne the brunt of the war's combat operations, have acquitted themselves surprisingly well in Baghdad. (Unlike the Marines, who had to be pulled out after helping to take the Eastern part of the city, they were able to make the transition from killers to policemen very quickly).

But peacekeeping operations requires a patience that can't be expected of troops that have been worked into the ground. As one 2d brigade captain said to me even before the deployment was extended by another two months, "The men are simply spent."

The same is true of the division's vehicles. Few tanks, Bradleys or humvees are now in condition to drive back to Kuwait, and many will have to be shipped back on flatbed trucks.

Yet the whole of the 2nd ("Spartan") Brigade, including the 4/64 armored battalion (in which I was embedded until recently) has now been ordered to Falluja, the No. 1 flashpoint in the country.

Leave aside the questionable logic of sending in a combat-weary tank unit - albeit one which has performed policing tasks magnificently - to perform tasks better suited to armored cavalry and infantry. Why send worn-out soldiers - quite possibly at the end of their tether - to a matchbox like Falluja when there are thousands of fresh combat troops all over Iraq?

Not to mention the 1st Cavalry Division, the 1st Infantry Division or the 25th Infantry Division, and significant parts of other units like the 82d airborne - all or most of which are sitting pretty at home.

It may be that there are genuine strategic reasons for keeping these units in reserve, rather than rotating them through Iraq. There may also be a convincing argument even for using the battered 3ID to do the heavy lifting in places like Falluja, instead of relatively unblooded units like the 1st Armored.

But all of this seems to show that the U.S. Army not should not be shrunk from 10 divisions to eight, as reportedly planned by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. Indeed, given that its tasks now and in the future involve operations other than war, it may be that our 10-division army is simply too small for the post-9/11 era.

As Lt.-Col. Wesley of the 2nd Brigade Combat Team explains, when assessing the necessary size of the army "the real issue is the ability to sustain force projection over time." (For every division on deployment, you typically have one recovering from the same, while another prepares to take its place).

It may also be time to consider raising auxiliary forces in Iraq to lessen the burden on our troops. (The Kurdish peshmerga are a ready-made one, though the use of an ethnic minority to maintain order in a conquered country carries its own risks.)

Admittedly, the use of foreign auxiliaries trained and even officered by Americans would be a measure troublingly redolent of empire. And it's one that would make explicit all the issues about post-liberation Iraq that seem to have received bizarrely inadequate consideration from the Pentagon (even given that the war ended several weeks earlier than planners expected).

An alternative would be to subsidize the temporary deployment of friendly foreign forces to help police Iraq. (Apparently, Washington has already approached India on this.) This, too, would entail political risk.

In the meantime, however, the Pentagon should do right by the division that took Baghdad - and let it come home to enjoy the appreciation of the American people for a stunning victory.