After months of merely following this blog, the present interactiveness has finally convinced me to create an account.

Anyway, I figure there will be 19,999 US mil personnel. 10k below your estimation and one below the - by then magic number - of 20k.
BTW, does that include F-16 maintenance crews and Navy SEALS doing the dirty work? :)

best from the lowest of low countries!

A field commander asking for more forces. What's this world coming to?

That's my WAG.

Mr. Ricks is a little low on his numbers, they will get down to that eventually and go lower after that. We are not leaving and would not be shocked if we eventually have a small, permanent military footprint here.

Wait 4 years to see who wins...come on now. Not fair. Besides I already have two signed copies (thank you again for that).

The man print size is subjective to what kind of a brigade the good General has in mind to put in place up north. And I agree, this might have been slightly clumsy of Big Ray testing the waters prior to the March Iraqi election - Ike would have known better! : )

However, one key point: last year I recall the president was down at Camp Lejeune, NC and made mention "tens of thousands" (certainly not Xenophon's 10,000) would probably remain, which is a subjective number also, and so my prediction is 45,000 - and will be tied into the training, advisory, and contractor protection role, for political duck and cover.

Besides, anecdotally, we need to control the air-space to ensure Israel doesn't feel they have carte blanche to use the skys above Iraq as the short safest route into Iran.

...that Odierno gets his way and draw down continues slowly. I'll go with 33,125.

Since we're all making cracks about trainers and mechanics and SEALs, let's define "military personnel." Maybe this is obvious and I'm just thick, but who counts as military personnel and who doesn't?

And which is "the lowest of low countries?"

What makes anyone think the Iraqi's will be willing to renegotiate the SOFA?

Do the media realize that we currently have 210,000 forces (troops plus contractors) in Iraq -- best December estimate by the Congressional Budget Office.

What are those 210,000 doing? With the distraction of Aghanistan, Pakistan, and Yemen, we are getting no reporting on that.

If Obama allows the militarists to force him to break one more campaign promise, his base (what's left of it) will disolve beneath his feet. This is a big promise - to end our involvement in a war we should never have started. Iraq has a government that has been in place since 2005, it will shortly have another round of 'democratic' elections and, for better of for worse, we need to let the Iraqis have the government and the civil society they deserve. Obama said as much during his campaign.

As for the suggestion that we renegotiate the 2008 SOFA, those were originally negotiated by his predecessor in office, and hung around his neck when he took office. It would be fitting if the Iraqi government - which has made a lot of noise about wanting US troops out - holds us to those commitments. If we break those agreements, we deserve the firestorm that will follow, and we will be complicit in any civil disturbances that erupt in Iraq's society thereafter. We will also deserve the humiliating end that will come when the Iraqi's tell us they are fed up with our occupation.

As for the inevitable "who lost Iraq?", when the he** was it ever ours to begin with? We need to get over this obsession with thinking it is our right or our responsibility to remake the world as we would like it.

Well let's see....50,000 are supposed to stay in Iraq for advisory purposes after this summer. The elections will probably go sour, the sectarian divide will grow, and the status of Kirkuk will remain unresolved. So with civil-war once again on the table- but with American patience with Iraq running out- I'm going to put my bet on 40,000.

http://www.depetris.wordpress.com

... your smart friend Eliot Cohen, who I am sure also wishes to lengthen the already too Long War. America is broke. Time to come home.

Tom puts a column out this weekend this weekend saying we might have to stay in Iraq with additional forces, adjust the SOFA......

Story breaks Today that Gen. Odinero is officially requesting to keep additional forces in Iraq.

Timing....CNAS is press agent for?????

I've learned (partly from links gleaned here) to ask 'why here, why now'. The numbers WAGuessing game is a misdirect, especially with 'deployed' and 'troops' so plastic and undefined. Frequently, even a friendly leak becomes something of a spoiler, as happened with Barnett/Fallon.

Tom, you discounted the WIthdrawal/Temporary SOFA when it was negotiated under Petraeus/Crocker, ignored it for the last two years (as it's been implemented), and now stand ready to pronounce it superceded by events that are not yet in evidence? Either your sources are so great that events haven't caught up, or you and your sources have something of a blind spot when it comes to an Iraqi and American need to see the way out as the way forward.

Extending Bush's occupation is bitter-toxic, and not just in Iraq.

Rand gets my shout for analyses that seems to be tracking events. Barzani's cloudy intention is what's driving the Mosul-Kirkuk speculation and contingency plan leaks. Petraeus' mesopotamean war, like Jonah's mission, seems to keep coming back to Ninevah. How did that work out for Jonah, anyway?

http://www.rand.org/news/press/2009/07/28/
snip>
"The study finds that the greatest threat to Iraqi stability and security comes from a possible Kurd-Arab armed conflict over contested areas, which in turn could result in armed intervention by Turkey if steps are not taken to avoid such strife.

So my guess is 1.

I may be a total moron, but I read this article twice. Why do we want to keep more troops there? What are they going to do? There is one reason in the US interest I can think of. That is they are alot closer to Iran. Other than that is it to keep Iraqi Sunni's, Shia's and Kurd's from killing each other? Why do I care? They were wanting to do that before the US changed the regime. Only a strong dictator stopped it. The sooner the US gets out of the way that person can rise up and take over.

Some say Gitmo is a great recruiting tool. What about a foreign imperialist colonial army occupying a Muslim Nation.

We should not have invaded and we should leave, now.

I am going with 500...marines in the embassy, advisors in the NCO and Officer schools

The probability for continuance at high levels is great. However, requests that don't come up through the chain and get put out like this are going to piss off a lot of folks, arguably.

As far as "leaving stupidly", two things.

One, we should be asking whether we have commitment bias. The question isn't, "should we stop trying", it is, "if we came upon a similar political-military situation as is, would we engage?"

Second, the notion that the Iraqis are going to stand up and we are going to stand down seems almost mythical. [Is there historical precedent, for that?]

It seems more real-worldish that we will either leave before everyone agrees that's it's "safe" to do so or we will be kicked out (directly or by circumstance, such as a spiraling civil conflict or regional one).

32,747.

Take note that half of soldiers in an infantry battalion are not "combat troops". If you just count trigger pullers, we can keep 200,000 troops in Iraq, yet fewer than 50,000 will be combat troops.

Take note that troops in their camps are not in "combat" so perhaps we just count trigger pullers on duty, so we get down to 10,000.

Is 50,000 total of all military. Logistics takes an awful lot of people.

... that this is all a distraction? While we're pondering a supposed request for more troops in Iraq, the real story has been exposed by Frank Gaffney:

"Team Obama’s anti-anti-missile initiatives are not simply acts of unilateral disarmament of the sort to be expected from an Alinsky acolyte. They seem to fit an increasingly obvious and worrying pattern of official U.S. submission to Islam and the theo-political-legal program the latter’s authorities call Shariah."

http://biggovernment.com/fgaffney/2010/02/24/can-this-possibly-be-true-new-obama-missile-defense-logo-includes-a-crescent/

Get real, guys. By the time January 2014 rolls around, you won't be able to even read Tom's blog because an executive order will have mandated that all publications must be printed in Arabic!!! And we won't even know if it's Tom writing it because whoever's in the picture at the top will be covered in a burkha!!! And by then, the entire question of US troops in Iraq will be moot, because they'll all, US and Iraqi and Afghan troops alike, be conscripted into the Revolutionary Janissaries of the Universal Caliphate!!!

All of this is going on all around us right now, and no one even utters a peep. How typical. I always knew all those "Better red than dead" posters with the sexy faux Indian girl back in the '60s would have their enervating effect. Just like the fluoride that communist Eisenhower put in our water ....

Netherlands.

Mr. Ricks, I'm looking through the security agreement. I must have the wrong copy. It doesn't say anything about troop levels. Can you point me in the right direction?

The real question is not how many there will be 4 years from now, it's how many there will be 20 years from now.

34,250. Almost none of which will trigger-pullers on paper. Really though, the bottom line isn't how badly we need more troops in Iraq, it's whether Obama thinks he can risk it politically.

I have no idea what the 2014 levels will be- I HOPE that it is zero. It won't be because there is something intoxicating about building or maintaining the American Empire. So for years to come we apparently are expected to recycle relatively small numbers of soldiers into this Middle East mess until- when ?
Until Iraq has the political maturity and stability of Norway ? Not happening.
Several years ago Andrew Basevich suggested withdrawal of American forces followed- perhaps- by a civil war which we do not have the power to stop.

15,770. That includes SOF and support troops, but not, like someone above thinks, contractors or DoD Civilians--who no matter what you think are NOT "forces". I think most of you have no idea how much we're willing to let the Iraqis run with this...it is going to happen.

42. It's the answer to Life, the Universe and Everything