WI: Iraq Invasion With Over 500,000 Troops

What if instead of the force that invaded Iraq in 2003, 500,000 actually were sent in for the occupation instead like many military advisers at the time wanted?
 
What if instead of the force that invaded Iraq in 2003, 500,000 actually were sent in for the occupation instead like many military advisers at the time wanted?

The U.S. didn't have the ground forces to do that and hold it for the 10 year period the Joint Chiefs chairman said was needed. And, he was the lone voice among the top brass at the time calling for it and he didn't explain himself well why a much larger force was needed for such a time. It would have taken Bush after 911 increasing the size of the army to late 80s levels to do that.

Here is the thing, we didn't need that many for that long but we needed more with a plan for how we were going to secure the country. Starting out at 400K-350K for the first year while keeping and reconstituting more of the Iraqi Army and intelligence apparatus, dropping it down to 300K for the second year and keeping it there for about a year and a half with a mission to help build the Iraqi Army and root out the jihadists and then start dropping it again. That would have worked better, but still not well because it was easy to plant an IED to kill Americans back then in our Humvees riding around Iraq and the U.S. Army didn't really as an organization know how to deal with the war of the flee in 2003. They had ideas, many of which didn't translate well into practice.
 
If the USA had repurposed the surviving Iraqi Army instead of disbanding them, how much of a difference would that have made? Or would that simply make things worse via green on blue incidents?
 
If the USA had repurposed the surviving Iraqi Army instead of disbanding them, how much of a difference would that have made? Or would that simply make things worse via green on blue incidents?

It would have helped if we reconstituted the army faster. But, you would have run into the same problem of Back to Faith Iraqi officers fleeing to Monotheism and Jihad which became AQI after Zarqawi made up with Bin Laden and is today IS.

IS top command dominated by ex-officers in Saddam's army

BAGHDAD (AP) -- While attending the Iraqi army's artillery school nearly 20 years ago, Ali Omran remembers one major well. An Islamic hard-liner, he once chided Omran for wearing an Iraqi flag pin into the bathroom because it included the words "God is great."

"It is forbidden by religion to bring the name of the Almighty into a defiled place like this," Omran recalled being told by Maj. Taha Taher al-Ani.

Omran didn't see al-Ani again until years later, in 2003. The Americans had invaded Iraq and were storming toward Baghdad. Saddam Hussein's fall was imminent. At a sprawling military base north of the capital, al-Ani was directing the loading of weapons, ammunition and ordnance into trucks to spirit away. He took those weapons with him when he joined Tawhid wa'l-Jihad, a forerunner of al-Qaida's branch in Iraq.

Now al-Ani is a commander in the Islamic State group, said Omran, who rose to become a major general in the Iraqi army and now commands its 5th Division fighting IS. He kept track of his former comrade through Iraq's tribal networks and intelligence gathered by the government's main counterterrorism service, of which he is a member. It's a common trajectory.
...
One initiative that eventually fed Saddam veterans into IS came in the mid-1990s when Saddam departed from the stringent secular principles of his ruling Baath party and launched the "Faith Campaign," a state-sponsored drive to Islamize Iraqi society. Saddam's feared security agencies began to tolerate religious piety or even radical views among military personnel, although they kept a close watch on them and saw to it they did not assume command positions.

At the time, the move was seen as a cynical bid to shore up political support among the religious establishment after Iraq's humiliating rout from Kuwait in the 1991 Gulf War and the Kurdish and Shiite uprisings that followed.

"Most of the army and intelligence officers serving with IS are those who showed clear signs of religious militancy during Saddam days," the intelligence chief said. "The Faith Campaign ... encouraged them."

In the run-up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion, Saddam publicly invited foreign mujahedeen to come to Iraq to resist the invaders. Thousands came and Iraqi officials showed them off to the media as they were trained by Iraqi instructors. Many stayed, eventually joining the insurgency against American troops and their Iraqi allies.

http://hosted.ap.org/dynamic/storie...ME&TEMPLATE=DEFAULT&CTIME=2015-08-08-02-59-24

You still run into the problem of moles and a large segment of the former army that has been religiously fanaticized and quickly became interested in joining Zarqawi or already did so in the case of the officer above when major combat operations were going on.

The easiest way to circumvent that and still topple Saddam is to up the time the invasion comes. It occurring in say early 2002 would mean Zarqawi doesn't have almost a year to get situated and build a network and connections in Iraq to prepare the ground for an insurgency.
 

Ian_W

Banned
What if instead of the force that invaded Iraq in 2003, 500,000 actually were sent in for the occupation instead like many military advisers at the time wanted?

The problem wasnt in the US military and the invasion itself.

The problem was the lack of planning for the postwar, added to disbanding the Iraqi Army, aded to the clusterfuck that was the CPA, added to the long-term issues in Iraq.
 
The problem wasnt in the US military and the invasion itself.

The problem was the lack of planning for the postwar, added to disbanding the Iraqi Army, aded to the clusterfuck that was the CPA, added to the long-term issues in Iraq.

The fact that military failed to secure Iraqi army depots didn't help post war situation either....
 
The problem wasnt in the US military and the invasion itself.

The problem was the lack of planning for the postwar, added to disbanding the Iraqi Army, aded to the clusterfuck that was the CPA, added to the long-term issues in Iraq.

They should have either kept the army intact, or disarmed them when they disbanded it. They chose the worst option.
 
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