The Pentagon PM Report

It’s been a full day at the Department of Defense. In the morning Secretary of Defense Robert Gates held a round table with the press. He said that given all available evidence points to plans of the U.S. to reduce troops significantly in the next six months continuing to what he hopes will be 100,000 by the time President Bush leaves office. He also responded to an article in the Los Angeles Times saying that an upsurge in Marines to Afghanistan is not a reflection of dissatisfaction with the military performance of NATO allies there. His comments in The LA Times about concern that NATO troops were not well trained in counterinsurgency, sparked off an international reaction to his public criticism, an unusual move for Gates. The secretary was forced to back peddle today, praising allies and speaking specifically about the commitments of Canada and the Netherlands.

This afternoon the second in command in Iraq, Gen. Ray Odierno spent an hour with the press via video conference in Baghdad. Odierno gave an overview of progress made in Iraq in 2007 complete with charts, maps and graphs. His evaluation of the surge was a positive one, taking into account the number of attacks, specifically of IEDs (improvised explosive device), which significantly decreased after the surge began tot fully take effect over the summer. Taking note of the different scales of a chart showing coalition military casualties and Iraqi civilian deaths shows that while both are declining the lowest point for coalition causalities per month had dipped below 100 and civilian deaths had broken a floor of 1,000.

The topic of troop reduction came up often in questions with the press, he said that he wants to step down brigades gradually. He said that all troop reductions should be conditions based.  “…if we continue to see aceelerance denied, if we continue to see attacks at the same level or lower levels, if we see Iraqi security force capacity then we will decided whether we can reduce [troops] further. ”

“What I hope to see as I look ahead here is that we just  do this in a very deliberate fashion. What we don’t want to do is suddenly pull out a whole bunch of U.S. forces and suddenly turn things over to Iraqis I would like to see it done very slowly over time,” he said.