by Frank James
The deaths of at least 14 U.S. service members in two days, including five killed today by a road side bomb, came up, as one would expect, at today’s Pentagon press conference featuring Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Joints Chiefs of Staff chair Gen. Peter Pace.
What did it mean? a reporter asked. Were insurgents using larger bombs or had they picked up the pace of their activity? What explained the spike?
The number of attacks actually appeared stable, Pace said, given the number of additional brigades in the field as part of the military’s surge operations. So, yes, there are more casualties but that’s because there are more brigades.
Given this logic, the U.S. could have twice the number of brigades and twice the number of casualties but since they would be spread out over double the number of brigades, the casualty level would remain stable. That’s not likely to get a lot of traction on Capitol Hill.
GEN PACE: I asked the question just the other day, tell me about the numbers of incidents per day; what is it now compared to what it was back in January, for example?
And it was interesting that based on the number of U.S. brigades operating on the battlefield, the number of contacts with the enemy has remained relatively constant, of a low of about five contacts with the enemy per day per brigade, up to a high of about seven contacts with the enemy per day per U.S. brigade of about 3,500 folks.
So when you add the additional five brigades, the number of instances have gone up, but the number of contacts per brigade has been relatively stable in that five-to-seven range. That’s a data point.
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Clearly, the kinds of IEDs that happened yesterday, where we lost five soldiers in one attack and four in another, those are the kinds of attacks that our enemy would like to impose on us. When you look at the trend of June compared to May, it’s not as high in June as it was in May. However, every death is significant to us, and our enemy knows that it’s significant to us.
But as we do these sweeps in areas that we’ve been through before but now we’re going to go in and hold, as we’re taking the fight to the enemy with the additional troops, we can expect that there’s going to be tough fighting ahead.
And we can expect that our enemy is going to want to impact the psyche here in the United States with regard to the number of significant incidents that they’re able to pull off and the total numbers of casualties that they’re able to produce. So it is an expectation that this surge is going to result in more contact and therefore more casualties.
Is another way of stating what Pace said is that the enemy wants to inflict more casualties on U.S. troops and that the current policy of deploying more U.S. brigades into neighborhoods in Baghdad and elsewhere, gives them precisely what they want?