Just had a flash:
We let Saddam be tried for his perfidy, and when he's had a fair trial and the Iraqis sentence him to death, we announce that the hanging will be somewhere in the desert, a place well known to terrorists...

A few DOZEN courageous troops there, to start stringing him up... then, when the jihadis stream across the desert to rescue him, we grind them into dust, hour after hour, while televising it on TV.

What a demoralizing spectacle, Saddam with the noose on, waiting for the trapdoor, for hours, while invisible planes miles away keep EVERY TERRORIST from getting closer than the 200 meter mark... hours on end...

Dead terrorists stacking up like cordwood... sigh...

I thought that the 200K number was announced by the Iraqui Interior minister. If it was they need a new Interior minister.

Actually, the 200,000 figure may well have been accurate, then. Numbers have a way of changing, if the bad guys are seen as winning, their numbers go up. If they're seen as losing, those numbers go down.
Further, when the Jihadis were targeting American and other Coallition troops only it was one thing. When Cousin Fatima gets blown to shreds, it's quite another. It's just human nature. Read about someone on the other side of town that we've never met getting murdered, that's when we look up and say, that's a shame. When it's a friend or relative, we get angry. So it may well have been 200,000 then and 13-17,000 now.
The interesting thing will be if the old ratio of ten good guys being tied down by one guerilla will hold true with today's intelligence gathering technology. This ratio was developed in the Banana Wars of the 1920s and '30s. If the ten to one ratio holds true we'll be marking time for quite a while until we train up enough Iraqi troops to pass that ratio. While we are very close to that number looking from the outside, the raw number of bodies in uniform are misleading because of the enormous tail to teeth ratio. Truck mechanics and Chaplain's clerks don't often kill bad guys.
So the question is if the enormous tail make the teeth sharp enough to make the old ten to one ratio obsolete. I believe it will but only time will tell.
How many riflemen is that one guy sitting at the console operating a Predator Drone's cameras worth? That is what we are in the process of finding out.
We've already learned that the old ratio of three attackers of one defender is obsolete when it comes to a fully supported American unit against the Iraqi Army. An Armored Battallion of Iraqis, using old cast-off Soviet Bloc technology will have it's collective ass handed to it by a Mech Infantry Company with Artillery and Air support and todays command, contol and intel.
Sorry for the length, it's an interesting set of questions.

Actually, the 200,000 figure may well have been accurate, then. Numbers have a way of changing, if the bad guys are seen as winning, their numbers go up. If they're seen as losing, those numbers go down.
Further, when the Jihadis were targeting American and other Coallition troops only it was one thing. When Cousin Fatima gets blown to shreds, it's quite another. It's just human nature. Read about someone on the other side of town that we've never met getting murdered, that's when we look up and say, that's a shame. When it's a friend or relative, we get angry. So it may well have been 200,000 then and 13-17,000 now.
The interesting thing will be if the old ratio of ten good guys being tied down by one guerilla will hold true with today's intelligence gathering technology. This ratio was developed in the Banana Wars of the 1920s and '30s. If the ten to one ratio holds true we'll be marking time for quite a while until we train up enough Iraqi troops to pass that ratio. While we are very close to that number looking from the outside, the raw number of bodies in uniform are misleading because of the enormous tail to teeth ratio. Truck mechanics and Chaplain's clerks don't often kill bad guys.
So the question is if the enormous tail make the teeth sharp enough to make the old ten to one ratio obsolete. I believe it will but only time will tell.
How many riflemen is that one guy sitting at the console operating a Predator Drone's cameras worth? That is what we are in the process of finding out.
We've already learned that the old ratio of three attackers of one defender is obsolete when it comes to a fully supported American unit against the Iraqi Army. An Armored Battallion of Iraqis, using old cast-off Soviet Bloc technology will have it's collective ass handed to it by a Mech Infantry Company with Artillery and Air support and todays command, contol and intel.
Sorry for the length, it's an interesting set of questions.

13,000 is a big number if you are using police-like tactics like the UK during the Northern Ireland emergency. 200 hardcore thugs tied down thousands of troops and paramilitary police. But go after them in a military fashion and it's peanuts. Never mind the eight-to-one ratio between the US and the terrorists - there's the twenty to one ratio between the Iraqi security forces and the terrorists.

Another thing to remember is that we don't have to defeat all of them. When things really start to get rough, a lot of them will likely melt back into the woodwork never to be heard from again--the sort who are just in it or the kicks. And the murder. Can't forget the murder. Even better than the dental plan.

That means we've killed more than half of them.

Note to the other half: Don't make any long-term plans.