50K by Spring 2009? Posted by Ilan Goldenberg

No.  It's not Dennis Kucinich's plan.  It's not Barack Obama's plan.  It appears to be coming from the Defense Analysis Group at the Naval Post Graduate School in Monterey, which is proposing it as part of a Pentagon sponsored study.

Expected to be completed in about a month, it will recommend that U.S. forces be reduced to as few as 50,000 by the spring of 2009, down from about 150,000 now. The strategy is based on a major handoff to the increasingly successful Iraqi Army, with platoon-size U.S. detachments backing the Iraqis from small outposts, with air support. The large U.S. forward operating bases that house the bulk of U.S. troops would be mostly abandoned, and the role of Special Forces would increase.

Is this plan likely to get adopted?  I'd be pretty surprised.  Petraeus opposes it and I can't see Bush supporting it.  But still.  When you have serious military experts inside the Pentagon saying that this is a possibility it sure as hell blows a hole in the argument that somehow Obama's plan, which would take a whole year longer than this is somehow logistically impossible.