More Ground Troops Needed?-Updated

The argument is on going and in this Washington Times Op-Ed. I for one have been against more troops in Iraq, and the President echoed this with sound reasoning in his speech last night:

Some Americans ask me, if completing the mission is so important, why don't you send more troops? If our commanders on the ground say we need more troops, I will send them. But our commanders tell me they have the number of troops they need to do their job. Sending more Americans would undermine our strategy of encouraging Iraqis to take the lead in this fight. And sending more Americans would suggest that we intend to stay forever, when we are in fact working for the day when Iraq can defend itself and we can leave. As we determine the right force level, our troops can know that I will continue to be guided by the advice that matters: the sober judgment of our military leaders.

I am always reminded of Westmoreland in Vietnam calling for increased troops strength, getting them and still losing the war. That said, I think that an increase in Army strength is inevitable, as the saying goes, There's probably very little on earth scarier than a US soldier or Marine with a map and a radio.

From the Op-Ed:

An interesting moment in the ground-forces expansion debate happened earlier this month when a panel of experts on the military convened at the American Enterprise Institute to discuss the subject. AEI's Thomas Donnelly, one of the leading proponents of expansion, remarked that both the Army and the Marine Corps "are just simply too small for what we're asking them to do now and what we're likely to ask them to do in the future. And I think that current estimations of how much larger the force needs to be" -- 40,000 more, in a Senate bill earlier this year -- "are off by maybe a factor of five or so. So I would think that over the long haul increasing ground force, and I mean Army and Marine Corps, both, in strength, by something in the range of 125,000 is definitely called for." That would hike the Army's numbers to over 600,000 from its current level of around half a million.

There's good news: The Army is going ahead with plans to increase troop strength on its own by returning troops from overseas (70,000 from Europe) and reorganizing the brigade, now called units of action. This latter plan will increase the number of brigades/UA's from the present 33 to 48 in a few years.