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More troops are heading into Iraq; those already there are being told they may have to stay a bit longer than expected. It looks like General Shinseki was right -- and maybe even a bit too optimistic -- about what it's going to take to police our new Middle Eastern colony.

And, as in George Orwell's classic essay, "Shooting an Elephant" (a memoir of his days as a Burma policeman) the troops are discovering that supervising the natives can involve some fairly bizarre duties.

Oh well, white man's burden and all that.

But for our imperialist planners here at home (i.e. the neocons) the trend has to be alarming -- as if the streets of Baghdad were quickly filling with quicksand. Uncle Sam only has so many bodies to throw into the quagmire. And the Defense Secretary, who has some fairly strong views on the subject, is eager to reduce, not increase, the kind of old-fashioned infantry units that supply those bodies. A clash of priorities looms.

Update 5/19: Let's Get Small!

Defense experts and some military officers cite the Pentagon's determination to fight the war and maintain the peace with as small a force as possible, noting it reflected Rumsfeld's determination to use the war in Iraq to support his vision for "transforming" the military by showing that smaller and lighter armed units, supported by Special Forces and air power, could prevail on the 21st century battlefield.

"It's very important that you built this thing small," one senior Defense official with extensive peacekeeping experience said. "It validates Rumsfeld's view of the future."

Send Lawyers, Guns and Troops

As students of Vietnam, the neocons must realize that demands for reinforcements tend to become open-ended, and can be politically dangerous to refuse. This is particularly true now, since there isn't (as yet) an army of eligible draftees and their families putting pressure on the politicians to keep the troop commitments down.

The more I think about it, the more I begin to understand why Wolfowitz and the gang tried to stomp on Shinseki's windpipe as soon as he made his famous pre-war prediction that an occupation force of "several" hundred thousand troops would be required to pacify Iraq.

In the imperialism business, troops equal money, and the neocons are under-capitalized. The Iraq deal was sold and leveraged on the assumption that the invasion and "stabilization" forces could be drawn down relatively quickly after Saddam was gone.

But now the deal is starting to go south. The debt service costs are threatening to eat the neocons alive. At some point they're going to have to tell the CEO, and then the board of directors. The regulators (voters) may be slow, but even they may figure it out sooner or later. Heads could roll.

I'm not a military expert. I'm not even a particularly well-informed amateur. But I don't think you have to be to understand the jam the necons may have gotten themselves -- and by extention, the United States -- into.

Roll Call

We start with the fact that the United States is backing into its new imperial role in the Middle East with a remarkably small number of ground troops. The active duty Army consist of ten divisions, plus a small assortment of armored regiments and infantry brigades. The Marines add another three divisions. All told, about 650,000 troops.

That sounds like, well, a not-so-small army. But most of those bodies -- something like 7 out of every 10 (a little bit lower for the Marines) -- are support personnel: file clerks, supply specialists, computer technicians, mechanics, etc. etc. Lots of etc. etc. The modern Army is technology-heavy, logistics-heavy and combat troop-light.

Americans have always preferred to fight wars this way -- and for a very good reason: it saves lives (on the U.S. side, anyway) But when it comes to pulling occupation or counter-insurgency duty in a violent Third World country like Iraq, this military configuration makes raw troop strength a misleading indicator of effective policing power.

When it needs back up, the active-duty Army does have the National Guard and the Army Reserve to call on. These days, the guard and the reserves play critical wartime roles, since they provide many of the skilled support units (the etc. etc.) that the active-duty force needs to do its thing, which is killing people.

My understanding, however, is that the guard and the reserves are not designed or equipped for long-term, independent deployments overseas. When reserve units do deploy, they do so in conjunction with the active-duty units they've been paired with. And they're supposed to rotate back stateside on a fairly quick schedule. They may not be weekend warriors (to use the pejorative term) but they aren't full-time soldiers, either.

The escalation in U.S. military operations that began with Bosnia and Kosovo, and drastically accelerated after 9/11, has strained the guard and reserve system, maybe close to the breaking point -- at least according to this article. Deployments are becoming more frequent; rotations are getting longer. Recruitment and retention are down, particularly in the skilled fields the Army needs most.

"I think it would be fair to call the situation an emerging crisis," said Loren Thompson, a military analyst with the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., defense research organization. "The active component has become so dependent on the Reserves, it may be paradoxically destroying the Reserves."

Thompson, like other defense policy experts, fears that reservists will burn out from so much time away from their families and civilian jobs.

"It can't go on like this. The reserves will simply stop re-enlisting," he said. "Reserve duty is supposed to be emergency duty, not duty over and over again, year after year."

This means the active-duty force may have to bear the brunt of our longer-term imperial commitments in the Middle East. But the following list illustrates how overdrawn the neo-cons are getting at the troop bank.

Order of Battle

The list shows the major active-duty units and their current status -- as best I can determine from a sweep through the Internet. It's not complete and may not be entirely accurate, but I think it does give a sense of how badly the Army (and the Marines) have been stretched:

• 82nd Airborne Division: 3,000 combat troops in Iraq; an even larger contingent in Afghanistan.

• 101st Airborne Division: In Northern Iraq.

• 173rd Airborne Brigade: In Northern Iraq.

• 1st Infantry Division: Elements deployed to Iraq. Other elements in Kosovo.

• 2nd Infantry Division: Permanently deployed in Korea.

• 3rd Division: In and around Baghdad.

• 4th Division: In central Iraq.

• 10th Mountain Division: Elements deployed to Iraq. Other elements in Afghanistan and Uzbekistan.

• 25th Light Infantry Division: In Hawaii.

• 172nd Separate Infantry Brigade: In Alaska.

• 1st Armored Division: Deploying to Iraq.

• 1st Cavalry Division: In Texas.

• 2nd Armored Regiment: In and around Baghdad.

• 3rd Armored Regiment: In Western Iraq.

• 1st Marine Expeditionary Force: In southern Iraq.

• 2nd Marine Expeditionary Force: Elements in Iraq, scheduled to return to Camp Lejune in June. Other elements in the Horn of Africa region.

• 3rd Marine Expeditionary Force: Elements in Iraq, elements in the Phillipines, the rest in Okinawa.

And that's all there is. Which means something close to half of the active-duty force already has been deployed to Iraq, with the remainder largely tied down by previous commitments in Korea, Afghanistan, Kosovo. (And this doesn't include the National Guard Units in Bosnia, or the special forces and/or advisors operating in the former Soviet republics, Columbia, Panama and Kenya.)

On the Short List

If my list is reasonably accurate, then the only major active-duty units now available for new deployments (in Iraq or elsewhere) are:

1st Cavalry
25th Light Infantry
Elements of 1st Infantry Division
Elements of 2nd and 3rd Marine Expeditionary Forces

Call it three divisions -- maybe four. But, of course, much, if not most, of the logistical and support infrastructure needed to support those divisions is still tied up in Iraq.

Meanwhile, according to this article, Secretary Rumsfeld already is champing at the bit to get back to his "transformation" agenda -- which in large part consists of "transforming" the budgetary resources currently devoted to heavy infantry and armored divisions into high-tech contracts for the aerospace industry.

So the neocons would seem to have gotten themselves into a something of jam. They wanted a short war -- and they got it. But they also wanted a short occupation, with a relatively quick hand off to their favorite son: Ahmad Chalabi and his Free Iraqi Forces.

But with the Free Iraqi Forces looking more and more like potential roadkill on the highways of post-Saddam Iraq, what was supposed to be bridge financing (remember: troops = cash) may have to be rolled over into a long-term mortgage.

Meanwhile, until Rumsfeld's contractors figure out how to build robots that can patrol the slums of Baghdad, the Army is stuck with some very labor-intensive occupation duties. The Army also has to keep a nervous eye on some other potential hot spots -- places were old-fashioned tanks and old-fashioned infantry also might be needed in a hurry. Places like the Korean peninsula.

Let's hope Kim Il Jung sticks to the porno sites when he surfs the net.