Rethinking Colin Powell

In a recent column, Thomas Friedman once again attacked President Bush for attacking Iraq with too few troops. You would think that a smart man like Friedman would know why Bush didn't use more troops - he doesn't have them. An article last year in Slate did the math. Once you subtract the Navy and Air Force and allow for troop rotation and personnel needed to keep bases open, you only have around 80,000 troops left to constitute an occupation force. In order to boost the numbers to the 100,000-150,000 that we have had, Bush had to call up the reserves and short other areas.

Of course, Bush cannot stand up and tell the world that we don't have enough troops to occupy a 2nd rate, broken-down country like Iraq. Our reputation as a super power would be gone forever if he did. But we aren't really a super power any longer, at least not in terms of available troops.

We used to have a lot more troops. Under Reagan we had enough troops to fight two wars at once with enough left over to slow a Soviet invasion of Germany until more troops could be brought in.

After the end of the Cold War, Bush I cut the army back to enough troops to fight a single war. This was cut further under Clinton who assured that we only needed enough troops to fight one war at a time.

It would be easy to blame Bush I and Clinton for leaving the military cupboard bare but I blame Colin Powell and the infamous Powell Doctrine. While this is not how he phrased it, the Powell Doctrine boils down to the maxim that we should not get into a war with anyone unless we can crush them quickly then leave. He held that the American people are not able to sustain support for a war that lasts longer than a few weeks and that we should not stick around to put things back together. Further, we would rely on high-tech, low-risk attacks so that American troops were at lower risk than in training. Prior to 9/11, we bombed countries into submission then turned them over to the UN or NATO. With Iraq, we bombed them, ran over them with tanks, then established UN sanctions.

After the Gulf War, everyone was sold on the Powell Doctrine. That was how all future wars would be fought. We did not need a big occupying force because we would never occupy anyone. Bush I and Clinton bought it. It meant that they could cut the military and balance the budget.

September 11 changed our world view-point. We could no longer avoid fights just because they would get messy.

So here we are. We can vaporize anyone in the world. We can probably overthrow anyone short of China or Russia. But we cannot occupy them.

neither can anyone else. The few countries with larger militaries than we have (China, for example) do not have the supply lines needed to invade a distant enemy to say nothing about occupying them.

Ever since the USSR exploded their first atomic bomb, it was obvious that all-out wars between super powers were a thing of the past. Smaller regional conflicts are still possible and, as the world's remaining super power, we keep getting called in to stop the conflicts but, thanks to the Powell Doctrine, we are very limited on what we can actually accomplish.