Is It Even Feasible to Send More Troops to Afghanistan?

Spencer Ackerman reminds us that amateurs study tactics while professionals study logistics. Can the U.S. deploy 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan without violating soldiers' rotation policies or becoming dangerously underprepared for a crisis?

If President Obama orders an additional 30,000 to 40,000 troops to Afghanistan, he will be deploying practically every available U.S. Army brigade to war, leaving few units in reserve in case of an unforeseen emergency and further stressing a force that has seen repeated combat deployments since 2002.

According to information compiled by the U.S. Army for The Washington Independent about the deployment status of active-duty and National Guard Army brigades, as of December 2009, there will be about 50,600 active-duty soldiers, serving in 14 combat brigades, and as many as 24,000 National Guard soldiers available for deployment. All other soldiers and National Guardsmen will either be deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan already or ineligible to deploy while they rest from a previous deployment.

The shortage of available combat brigades means that an escalation of between 30,000 and 40,000 troops is “not realistic,” said Lawrence Korb, a former senior Pentagon official in the Reagan administration who now studies defense issues for the liberal Center for American Progress. To send practically all available soldiers into one of the two wars would leave the U.S. with “no reserve in case you had a problem in Korea.”

That's the real talk. There are other variables in the mix -- how much of the force is made up of Marines, how smoothly drawdown goes in Iraq -- but getting troop levels up to where Gen. Stanley McChrystal wants them won't be easy. When McChrystal made his original requests at the end of the summer, his strategic review described a 12-month window for changing the dynamic of the war, a window that is rapidly shrinking -- even if the first deployments began in January, it's not clear that overall levels could rise until the spring, nearly eight months after his deadline, and I'm curious what effect that would have on the conflict.

Meanwhile, in amateur news, my column this week is about how you can't elide the troop factor when talking about strategic issues, either, because doing so cuts several critical options off the table, not the least of which is getting Hamid Karzai to clean up his act.

-- Tim Fernholz