How Will the U.S. Know When to Pass the Baton?

In addressing Congress and the nation this week, President Bush spelled out his idea for an “exit strategy” from Iraq: U.S. troops can begin pulling out as soon as new Iraqi security forces are strong enough to keep the peace themselves.

But U.S. officials acknowledged Thursday that they were still struggling with the crucial element of that plan: how to measure the progress of Iraqi troops to determine when the point of self-sufficiency has been reached.

Critics in Congress have grown impatient, demanding to know how Washington will gauge when the Iraqis are ready to take over. The military’s top uniformed commander offered few details.

“We’re going to have to move to a way where we can start tracking the capability” of Iraqi forces, Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Thursday.

“This is not easy,” he said. “We’ve spent a lot of decades trying to perfect our way to track our true U.S. military capability, and you have to realize in that country, without a robust Ministry of Defense, without a robust Ministry of Interior ... this will be difficult.”

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, at a news briefing Thursday, acknowledged that many of the goals for a successfully trained Iraqi military were “qualitative things as opposed to quantity.”

An effective chain of command, intelligence operations and coordination between civilian and military authorities remain difficult to gauge, although that could improve over time, he said.

“The more you do something, the better you get at it,” Rumsfeld said.

Myers and Rumsfeld spoke Thursday with Army Lt. Gen. David H. Petraeus, who heads the training effort in Iraq, to begin establishing a set of measurements. Pentagon officials say that although setting uniform training standards is important, the only real test of Iraqi troops is how they perform under fire.

“When they get shot at, do they run?” said a senior Defense Department official.

Pentagon officials argue that progress can’t be gauged solely by the number of Iraqi security forces, especially since the abilities of units vary widely based on the amount of training they have received and the officers leading them.

“A number does not give you capability,” Rumsfeld said. “It gives you numbers.”

In testimony Thursday to the Senate Armed Services Committee, Deputy Defense Secretary Paul D. Wolfowitz said Pentagon planners hoped to reduce U.S. troop levels in Iraq by 15,000 within the next six months.

“I think we’ll be able to come down to the level that was predicted” before Iraq’s election, he said, noting that the level had been boosted to cover the balloting.

“We believe that we can come down by that 15,000, which I think would bring us ... to about 135,000,” Wolfowitz said.

In the months after the fall of Baghdad in April 2003, officials cited ever larger numbers of Iraqi security forces as the best evidence that the U.S. training program was getting results. The figures proved hollow last April, when Iraqi forces melted in the face of enemy fire.

Senior U.S. commanders in Iraq have been heartened by the troops’ more recent performance.

According to Pentagon statistics, 136,000 Iraqi soldiers, national guardsmen and police are now equipped and trained, roughly half the goal of 271,000. But there is disagreement among senior military officials about what percentage of those is capable of taking on the insurgents.

For instance, although Pentagon figures show that more than 53,000 police are on duty in Iraq, some senior U.S. commanders have complained that the Interior Ministry, which has oversight of the police, is largely dysfunctional.

During his congressional testimony Thursday, Myers estimated that fewer than one-third of the trained and equipped Iraqi forces were capable of fighting the insurgents.

“About 40,000 can go anywhere in the country and take on any threat,” Myers told the Armed Services Committee. “That does not mean the rest of them aren’t useful.”

Kalev Sepp, a professor at the Naval Postgraduate School who, as a Special Forces soldier in the 1980s, helped train El Salvador’s military to fight leftist guerrillas, said the standards by which Salvadoran troops were judged changed as the soldiers became more competent.

As the units improved, Sepp said, U.S. trainers eventually were able to measure their progress by the number of desertions, which decreased over time.

Experts say there are many ways to measure the progress as well as the setbacks of Iraqi troops, from marksmanship to the number of enemy engagements to the number of times they accidentally discharge their weapons.

The U.S. military has decades of experience training foreign armies. But not since the Vietnam war has it attempted an operation on the scale of the effort in Iraq, while trying to beat back a deadly insurgency.

Because of this, experts say, it is unlikely that the Iraqi army will be ready to stand on its own any time soon.

“The Americans in Vietnam started their training effort in 1959. It wasn’t until the so-called Vietnamization of the war when the South Vietnamese units were really ready to go out on their own,” Sepp said. “That was a 10-year effort, with a lot of mistakes along the way.”