A Huge Postwar Force Seen

Peacekeeping and humanitarian operations after a war with Iraq would probably require “several hundred thousand soldiers,” the Army’s chief of staff said Tuesday -- a force approaching the number of U.S. troops massing for a possible war in the Persian Gulf.

Gen. Eric K. Shinseki told the Senate Armed Services Committee that the Bush administration would need to keep a large force in Iraq even after the war to curb ethnic tensions and provide humanitarian aid. Asked to name a figure, the four-star general said: “I would say that what’s been mobilized to this point, something on the order of several hundred thousand soldiers.”

The general’s comments came as chief U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix said Tuesday in New York that Iraq has offered its first signs of “substantive cooperation” by turning up two bombs, one possibly filled with a biological agent.

Blix said he has received eight letters from Iraq in the last several days with information on past weapons programs, including the recent discovery of two R-400 aerial bombs at a site where Iraq had disposed of biological weapons before. One of them is filled with “a liquid that appears to be biological” and would be tested soon, he said. Blix said the information on past programs includes discovery of handwritten documents about the disposal of prohibited weapons in 1991.

The general’s statement that a peacekeeping force approaching the estimated 200,000 Americans now forming an arc around the Persian Gulf would be required after a war stunned some lawmakers. One senior Democrat questioned whether the Bush administration could go forward with a war that would require such a force after combat unless it received more support from the United Nations Security Council. So far, only three of the other 14 council members have indicated support for the administration’s plans.

“It would be a huge proportion of the deployable force,” Sen. Carl Levin of Michigan, the ranking Democrat on the committee, said in an interview. “It reinforces the importance of trying to keep the Security Council together.... There’s no way we can keep 200,000 troops in Iraq for a substantial time. That’s too large a force.”

Troops from other countries would be needed for such a large peacekeeping operation, Levin said. The Army, the branch usually called on for such missions, puts the number of troops available to be deployed abroad at 293,000, out of a total of 480,000.

“What Shinseki is saying is that if we don’t have allies in Iraq, peacekeeping could employ the entire deployable army,” said Loren Thompson, a defense analyst at the Lexington Institute, an Arlington, Va., public policy group.

Shinseki and Gen. John P. Jumper, Air Force chief of staff, told the committee that some parts of the military already were strained because of current deployments in Afghanistan, South Korea, the Sinai and Bosnia-Herzegovina. In 1997, the Pentagon estimated that U.S. troops would be out of Bosnia within a year; several thousand soldiers remain there.

“They are stressed,” said Shinseki, who noted that the special operations units were particularly affected. “We are using them on multiple missions that a few years ago [were] not anticipated.”

The Pentagon appeared to downplay the estimate immediately after the hearing. Army officials cautioned that Shinseki was merely offering a rough estimate. One senior defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that the general simply “misspoke.”

Another senior defense official from a service other than the Army noted that Shinseki, who retires in June, does not have a reputation as a grandstander. “He’s always been a stand-up guy and a pretty straightforward guy,” the official said. “That’s probably a good-faith estimate.”

During the hearing, the uniformed chiefs of all four military services said they were prepared for war. “This force is ready, and it is the most ready that it has been in my entire military life,” Adm. Vern Clark, the chief of naval operations, said of the Navy.

But the possible size of the postwar commitment came as a surprise, in large part because estimates from outside organizations had suggested that a smaller force would be needed.

One estimate, by Steven M. Kosiak of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, a Washington public policy organization, suggested that although 150,000 troops would be in Iraq for six months, only 20,000 to 90,000 would remain over five years, for a total cost of $25 billion to $105 billion. Another, by defense analyst Anthony Cordesman, suggested that the number would drop below 100,000 within “several months to a year.”

“We’re not really talking about occupying Iraq, we’re talking about establishing security until Iraq works out its own initial issues,” said Cordesman, a former Pentagon official who is now a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. “But the fact is that we have to win the peace just as much as we have to win the war, and if it takes a large U.S. presence to allow the Iraqis to create some kind of a stable federal republic then we’re going to have to provide whatever it takes.”

Shinseki said he based his estimate on the need for a large force to maintain security in a nation with “ethnic tensions that could lead to other problems.” Iraq has multiple ethnic groups with long-standing grievances, analyst Thompson said, and some might seek to seize land and settle scores.