Of the 150,000 or so US soliders in Iraq. What is the division of labor amongst them? How many soliders (and/or civilians) do you need to back up X amount of soliders doing the warrior end of the business? How spread out are these people? It seems like a vast number, but given the size of the country…just wondering what kind of coverage 150,000 provides.
Oh, and how many more could we have had there in the beginning of this misadventure, even if assuming they weren’t all staying and assuming we didn’t completely pull out of other big tasks (like Korean border and Afgn.).
I don’t recall seeing a detailed breakdown of what troops are doing what in Iraq, but as a rule of thumb, the Army says it needs about 2.5 soldiers outside of a combat division or brigade to support each soldier who is in combat. We should also add in about 20,000 troops in Gulf states supporting the Iraq mission, so think of it as 170,000 troops in or supporting the Iraq deployment.
Now, that 2.5:1 ratio was common figure in the mid-to-late '90s, and I would imagine that it may have dropped a bit because of increasing use of contractors for things like food services, construction, and so on. Lacking any specific figures, I’d guestimate roughly 50,000, maybe 60,000, front line combat troops in Iraq.
As far as how many we could have put in Iraq at the beginning for the war, the only practical limiation would be how many troops we wished to keep elsewhere, and how long it would take to get them to the Persian Gulf area. For a short term, pulling out all the stops type of surge, that figure could well be up to something like 900,000 troops.
BUT — that would be extremely poor planning. The number of troops that can be sustained for an appreciable amount of time is a fraction of that. There are tons and tons of variables here, but if a deployment were to stretch into months or years, the current rule of thumb is that you’d need roughly 3.5 to 4 units to maintain each one in the field. That’s because you’ll have one or two in training to be deployed, one just coming back from being deployed, and one basically in reserve. If the military were to deploy some enormous number of troops, like 600,000 or something, there could be a disasterous drop in readiness and fighting ability of the military within a year. That would not be desirable.