Back to Stanley Kurtz's article. I don't find any real evidence for his main point, not enough troops. It seems to boil down to a single sentence, "Clearly, our military planners underestimated the likelihood and effectiveness of resistance from Saddam's irregular loyalists." If this is an error, it is hardly of such consequence as to form the basis for Kurtz's following broad argument against Donald Rumsfeld's program of transformation of the military.

The problem seems to be that the war plan calls for a rolling deployment, under which new troops continue to enter the theater in stages and also that the unexpected refusal of Turkey to allow us to stage troops there has resulted in our having to send the Fourth Infantry around through the Suez Canal and up through Kuwait. How this leads to the main criticism of transformation, which emphasizes more high tech armaments and fewer soldiers, remains beyond me. I've been hearing this since the Crusader artillery system was scrapped by Rumsfeld on the grounds that it is too heavy to move rapidly to where it is needed. That decision drew a lot of criticism from within the Pentagon and from retired officers.

I'm no more of a military theorist than Kurtz is, and I don't have his sources, but it seems to me that this is really insider baseball and essentially a matter of opinion. So I have a few questions:

1. Can we man a larger military without a draft, and could we count on a draft to supply personnel of sufficient quality to man the higher tech equipment?

2. How much more difficult would it have been to launch this attack with say 200,000 more troops on the ground?

3. Given that a large percentage of our casualties so far have come from traffic accidents and friendly fire, wouldn't having more troops there create even more such casualties, and wouldn't that be likely to sour support at home? From my limited perspective, it seems that the casualties so far haven't created revulsion here at home, but I have to say that if the accidental casualties were higher, that might not be the case.

4. We're being spread more thinly all the time, and will probably have to keep troops in Afghanistan and other places as the war against terrorism continues, seems to suggest that we may have to cover greater areas with few troops in the future. How quickly can we add and train them?