Gates and Marine Gen. James Cartwright, vice chair of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, announced the move at a press briefing Thursday.

Gates reiterated that U.S. troops will not be on the ground in Libya. He also said regime change in Libya was always a political goal, but it will take time.

Speculation for the briefing surrounded the possible naming of Cartwright as the replacement for Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Adm. Mike Mullen when Mullen leaves the post in October.

Watch the live briefing, which started at 3:00 p.m.

Task Force 2010 was conceived by Gen. David Petraeus and Adm. Mike Mullen and is led by Rear Adm. Kathleen Dussault. (St. Petersburg Times/ZUMA Press, navy.mil)

It has an uncertain budget, a team of fewer than two dozen military officers and civilians, and barely a year to make its mark on counterinsurgency in Afghanistan before the U.S. begins its transfer of security responsibilities to Afghans. In that time, a new military task force will attempt to get a handle on one of the thorniest aspects of the way the U.S. military fights its wars: its relationship with the small army of contractors it hires for support.

[Security1] The brainchild of Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, and Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the new task force in Afghanistan, known as Task Force 2010, will “follow the money,” as Petraeus testified to a Senate panel on Wednesday, to ensure that billions of dollars’ worth of Pentagon contracts dispersed to U.S., Afghan and foreign companies don’t end up in the hands of U.S. adversaries or otherwise subvert U.S. strategy.

Task Force 2010 is led by Rear Adm. Kathleen Dussault, a longtime Navy logistics officer who served as senior contracting overseer when Petraeus commanded the U.S. war in Iraq. Dussault arrived in Kabul last week after meeting the week before with John Brummet, the head of audits for the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction, for a briefing on “forensic audits,” something Brummet described as a “data-mining effort to look at financial transaction data” for “various anomalies” indicating waste, fraud or abuse.

While it’s too new to have a specific agenda delineated yet, U.S. officials who would not speak for attribution described Task Force 2010 as focusing on the intersection of contractor money and political power in southern Afghanistan, and giving senior military officers a greater amount of visibility into murky networks of subcontractors using taxpayer dollars than they currently have. Among its areas of focus are the private security companies outside of the U.S. military command’s operational control whose independent activities have sometimes proven problematic for the U.S. in Afghanistan. The task force has established an Armed Contractor Oversight Division to help advise Stanley McChrystal, the commanding general of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, on how to deal with the companies.

“It’s not just about illegal activity for this task force,” said a U.S. military officer familiar with Task Force 2010′s work. “There’s also perfectly legal activity undercutting what we’re trying to do in Afghanistan. Whether it’s prime [contractors] or subs, getting down to power brokers and money lords, it’s absolutely undercutting what we’re trying to do.”

Expect to hear the term “power broker” a lot with regard to Task Force 2010. It’s a politically neutral euphemism for one of the most complex problems that the U.S. faces in Afghanistan, and particularly in southern Afghanistan: how U.S. contract money entrenches local political dynasties, some of which raise or hire independent security forces and can have transactional relationships with the Taliban. Some use their contract money to consolidate their hold on power by providing jobs, thereby emerging as potential obstacles to the overarching U.S. strategy of expanding the Afghan government’s reach, capability and relevance, which McChrystal considers pivotal for securing U.S. interests in the country.

The most important of those power brokers is Ahmed Wali Karzai, the chairman of the Kandahar Provincial Council and the brother of Afghanistan’s president, Hamid Karzai. Ahmed Wali Karzai is widely believed to be a “facilitator” of the opium trade in the south — and a recipient of CIA money. A May 28 report from the Institute for the Study of War co-authored by Kimberly Kagan, an adviser last year to McChrystal, warned that an impending consolidation of private security companies under Ahmed Wali Karzai’s control “compete[s] with state security forces and interfere[s] with a government monopoly on the use of force,” and also undercuts the development of the Afghan National Army and Police. But in a Washington appearance with Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton last month, Hamid Karzai said that the U.S. understood his brother is simply a political fact of life in Kandahar.

U.S. military officials said that Task Force 2010 did not yet have any agenda for what contracts it will study, only an ethic for investigative diligence. It will be “following subcontracting networks wherever they lead, provide that information to the battlespace owner and Gen. McChrystal, and they make a decision about what to do,” said the military officer. In keeping with its early focus on southern Afghanistan, the officer said that the task force will seek to “make as many improvements as possible by the September/October time frame,” aligned with McChrystal’s plan to provide a “rising tide” of security for Kandahar ahead of July 2011, when the U.S. will gradually begin to transition security responsibilities for Afghan control.

Task Force 2010 will synthesize information “already collected” on private security contractor networks in Afghanistan, the officer said, and will “absolutely be linked in to the intelligence community,” but it is “not an intelligence gathering agency.” The task force will have civilian members, including from the FBI, and contributors from international agencies as well. It it unclear if the CIA will contribute any personnel to the task force.

The task force will seek to collaborate with the Afghan government and international bodies. But the U.S. military officer said that it did not have a mandate to reduce corruption within the Afghan government. “We want to improve contracting on our side of things, so when Gen. McChrystal approaches the Afghan government [on corruption] it’s from a position of credibility,” the officer said. “No one here is saying ‘stamp out corruption.’ We’d love to, but corruption was here before the international community arrived [in Afghanistan], and unfortunately, it’ll be here afterward.”

Southern Afghanistan and private security contractors won’t be the only focus of the new task force. It will also seek to understand the murky network of contractors that aid with the training and equipping of the Afghan National Security Forces, the centerpiece of the Obama administration’s post-2011 strategy for securing the country. Earlier this year, a Senate investigation discovered that a shell company established by Blackwater, one of the most infamous private security contractors, diverted hundreds of rifles for its guards’ personal use that were intended for the Afghan police, and other contractors opened fire on Afghan civilians on a Kabul road.

“Any effort that neglected to look at the training effort would miss big part of the puzzle,” the officer said, so Task Force 2010 will “absolutely” examine contractor contributions to the U.S. and NATO training command.

But Task Force 2010′s most immediate task will be to trace the influence of U.S. contract money to help McChrystal execute his strategy, something politically perilous if it threatens the Afghan “power brokers” with whom the U.S. has worked in the south.

“Who knows what we’ll find?” said the military officer. “We see our job as providing information to decision-makers on how we do contracting. Absolutely, there could be large political implications to what we find — there may or may not be.”

Sen. Joe Lieberman plans to introduce an amendment Wednesday to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell." (Pete Marovich/ZUMA Press)

Less than a month after the Pentagon leadership warned it would unwise to abandon the military’s ban on open gay service this year, a fast-moving legislative effort this week has opponents of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” feeling like the law might finally be on the scrapheap.

[Security1] Activists opposed to the law met Monday morning with White House officials ahead of a dual-tracked strategy in Congress to insert a formal repeal of the 17-year old law in next year’s defense funding bill. On Wednesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee will mark up the 2011 Defense Authorization, and Sen. Joe Lieberman (I-Conn.) plans to introduce an amendment repealing “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” He’ll be followed by Rep. Patrick Murphy (D-Pa.), an Iraq war veteran, who said Monday he would introduce a complementary amendment into the House’s version of the bill when it receives a full floor debate later this week. If passed, it would allow the Pentagon a few months’ worth of a grace period so an internal review due in December can guide how the implement overturning the ban.

By Monday evening, activists were announcing what the Human Rights Campaign’s president, Joe Solmonese, said in an official statement was the “brink of historic” action to get rid of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.” While legislative language was not available by press time, several prominent activists cheered the White House for clearing the way for what Aubrey Sarvis, an Army veteran and one of the activists who took part in the White House meeting, called “a dramatic breakthrough in dismantling ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.’”

Peter Orszag, the White House budget director, wrote to Murphy late Monday to say the administration “supports the proposed amendment” on repeal, given that it recognizes the “critical need” for uniformed input to guide how repeal will work in practice. Orszag’s letter did not argue any need for repeal, and reiterated that the administration’s first choice would have delayed getting rid of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” until at least 2011.

The contours of a potential deal paving the way for a legislative repeal this week were first floated by retired Army Gen. John Shalikashvili in the Washington Post on Saturday. Defense Secretary Robert Gates and Adm. Michael Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who expressed his opposition to the law in February, dismayed activists by urging congressional leaders in April to delay any legislative remedies for “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” until a Pentagon working group surveying military attitudes about how to implement any repeal delivers its final report in December.

Shalikashvili, himself a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the dawn of “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell,” proposed cutting the legislative and bureaucratic Gordian Knot. “Congress could repeal the federal statute and return authority to the military to set rules about gay troops, just as the armed services had before ‘don’t ask, don’t tell’ became law in 1993,” he wrote. “Indeed, acting now to remove the constraints imposed by that law is the most faithful response that Congress can offer to the working group’s efforts to engage service members and their families.”

That appeared to offer all sides a way out of the impasse. President Obama will get to keep the promise he made to the LGBT community in his State of the Union address for a 2010 repeal, and the Pentagon will ensure that the recommendations of the working group, led by Army Gen. Carter Ham and top Pentagon lawyer Jeh Johnson, form the basis of a post-”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” future. Michael Cole, a spokesman for the anti-”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” Human Rights Campaign, portrayed a legislative repeal this week as a necessary prerequisite to implementing the working group’s findings. “If the law is not repealed this year, when the implementation study comes down, [the Pentagon will] not able to carry it out,” Cole said.

In their April letter to Congress, Gates and Mullen warned that a legislative fix ahead of Johnson and Ham’s working group report would “send a very damaging message to our men and women in uniform that in essence their views, concerns and perspectives do not matter.” But chief Pentagon spokesman Geoff Morrell sounded more open to congressional action on Monday, however reluctantly. “Given that Congress insists on addressing this issue this week, we are trying to gain a better understanding of the legislative proposals they will be considering,” Morrell said in an e-mail.

Activists are seeking to ensure they don’t waste their congressional opportunity. The Human Rights Campaign is spending millions this week to pressure six senators on the Armed Services Committee who haven’t taken a firm position on repeal but the group believes are persuadable: Robert Byrd (D-W.V.), Jim Webb (D-Va.), Ben Nelson (D-Neb.), Bill Nelson (D-Fla.), Evan Bayh (D-Ind.) and Scott Brown (R-Mass.). Field staff in the states of all six senators are calling the legislators’ district offices, mailing thousands of postcards and scheduling rallies with anti-”Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” servicemembers and veterans demanding an end to the law.

Cole said he anticipated close votes in both the Senate committee and the House floor. But he vowed Human Rights Campaign would “keep up the pressure and remind wavering members that 75 percent of the American people support repealing ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ and this is an issue to strengthen our military and respect LGBT troops at the same time.”

Update: Here is the text of Lieberman’s amendment.

An overwhelming majority of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans say it is personally acceptable to them if gay and lesbian people were allowed to serve openly in the military. Seven in ten (73%) say it is acceptable, including 42% who say it would be acceptable and 31% who would find it acceptable even though they would not like it. Only a quarter (25%) would find it unacceptable. Generational differences exist here as well, but they are not as dramatic as conventional wisdom might indicate. Forty-seven percent of Iraq and Afghanistan veterans under age 35 find it acceptable and would like the policy change and another 30% find it acceptable and do not like it, for a total of 77% who find it personally acceptable if gay and lesbian people were allowed to serve openly in the military. Seventy percent of veterans over age 35 would find it acceptable and only a quarter would find it unacceptable (26%).

Adm. Mike Mullen, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has come out forcefully for repeal. In an odd bit of testimony yesterday before the Senate Armed Services Committee, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. forces in the Middle East and South Asia, said the “time has come” to consider a repeal commensurate with the needs of a military fighting two wars, although he did not enter his full statement on “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” into the Senate record. (He’s in front of the House Armed Services Committee today, but unfortunately I can’t cover his testimony.)

BOB SCHIEFFER: Do you think you can get the Republican votes to close Guantanamo and–and open another facility in this country because that’s going to require considerable amount of-

SENATOR LINDSEY GRAHAM (overlapping): I can’t– I can’t do it by myself. But I think if we could get Khalid Sheik Mohammed and the co-conspirators of 9/11 back in the military commission, it’d go down well with the public. But I’m going to need General Petraeus, Admiral Mullen, people known in public office. I’m going to need people from the Bush administration to try to close Gitmo, to put aside partisanship, rally around this President, stand by his side and say, let’s close Gitmo safely. With that kind of help, that will reassure Americans we’re making a good, logical decision, we can do the things we need to do to getting in back–

But this is support that the White House already has or isn’t going to get. You want Petraeus backing the Guantanamo closure? Here he is. You want Mullen backing the Guantanamo closure? Here he is. It’s not like their positions have changed. The only thing that’s changed is the hardening of Republican opposition to Obama’s plans. Everyone from the Bush administration who really would “put aside partisanship, rally around this President, stand by his side” on Guantanamo already has. Even George W. Bush has said he believes, in theory, that the U.S. ought to close the detention facility. There’s absolutely nothing Graham can unlock if the White House caves on Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. Graham is essentially asking the Obama administration to pay a higher price for a commodity it already possesses.

What’s more: The money to close Guantanamo is in the Afghanistan war funding request, the most politically untouchable package of money the government will ask Congress to approve. That signaled a willingness to play hardball on the closure, and force the GOP to defend blocking money for the troops. It’s no surprise Graham wants the White House to go further. He’s holding a losing hand, and a loss won’t let him position himself as a conservative hero in the guise of a bipartisan dealmaker.

Sen. Joe Lieberman (ID-Conn.) announced Monday that he plans to introduce legislation to repeal of the military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.

“I will be proud to be a sponsor of the important effort to enable patriotic gay Americans to defend our national security and our founding values of freedom and opportunity,” Lieberman said in a statement, noting that he has opposed the policy since it was implemented in 1993 under President Bill Clinton.

“To exclude one group of Americans from serving in the armed forces is contrary to our fundamental principles as outlined in the Declaration of Independence and weakens our defenses by denying our military the service of a large group of Americans who can help our cause,” Lieberman said.

Good for the Connecticut senator who often appears to govern principally in the interests of getting liberals’ goats. He’s going against his friend Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) on this and backing Adm. Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. As it happens, Gen. David Petraeus, the commander of U.S. troops in the Middle East and South Asia, declined to give his personal view on repeal to David Gregory, but backed the process designed to remove “Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell” in a minimally disruptive way — and hinted that he’s pretty much in favor of it:

GREGORY: Do you think soldiers on the ground in the field care one way or the other if their comrade in arms are gay or lesbian?

PETRAEUS: I’m not sure that they do. … You heard Gen. Powell who was the chairman when the policy was implemented, had a big hand in that, who said that yes, indeed, the earth has revolved around the sun a number of times since that period 15 months ago. You have heard a variety of anecdotal input. We have experienced certainly in the CIA and the FBI — I know, I served, in fact, in combat with individuals who were gay and who were lesbian in combat situations. Frankly, you know, over time you said, hey, how’s this guy shooting or how is her analysis or what have you?

See the list after the jump…

1. We’ll know how regimented the Taliban is, and how much pain it can withstand before it sues for peace. The Taliban isn’t a Western-style Army, but most military analysis views its military wing as possessing a hierarchical structure. Baradar, the defense minister in Taliban-run Afghanistan, is at its top. Losing him is probably something the Taliban have planned for at some point, and so now will come a test of how much operational, tactical and even strategic capability the Taliban fighters in southern and eastern Afghanistan lose — or don’t lose — now that he’s in custody. Taliban fighting prowess is likely to be a lagging indicator — by most accounts Taliban tactical commanders have a fair amount of regional autonomy, although their logistics trail looks less certain — but over the next weeks and months, if U.S. commanders don’t notice changes in Taliban fighting patterns, the Taliban will prove to be an even more resilient enemy than the U.S. previously thought. Those emergent patterns will go a long way to telling Gen. Stanley McChrystal how much momentum the Taliban can lose before changing its calculations about reconciliation with the Karzai government.

2. The Pakistanis will go after the Quetta Shura Taliban. Remember all those hand-wringing newspaper stories about the Pakistanis refusing to go after their old proxies in the Afghan Taliban? So much for that. Notice that Baradar wasn’t captured in the tribal areas, but in the southern Pakistani city of Karachi. That means he believed he could travel around Pakistan and be untouchable. No longer. If the so-called ‘Quetta Shura’ Taliban led by Omar thought the Pakistani military and intelligence service still had its back, that’s over, in a very dramatic way. And that almost certainly will impact Omar’s calculations on what the fight will require. Again, that’s not the same thing as expecting him to give up; just that the Taliban can no longer count on shelter by the Pakistani security apparatus.

3. The U.S-Pakistan relationship is working. Amb. Richard Holbrooke, the Obama administration’s special representative to Afghanistan and Pakistan, declined last December to publicly pressure the Pakistanis to go after the Quetta Shura Taliban. He said instead that a long-term relationship, with Pakistan confident that the U.S. was addressing its legitimate interests, would pay dividends. Here’s a very big dividend. The Baradar capture vindicates the Obama administration’s decision to hug Pakistan tightly, with a big new aid package and less public pressure, in the hopes of yielding complementary Pakistani security moves against the Taliban and al-Qaeda (more even than the bloody Swat and South Waziristan campaigns last year) down the road. If analysts were looking for a big, clear sign of Pakistani strategic intent — keep the Taliban on hand as an Afghan Plan B or throw in more heavily with the Americans? — here’s something big and clear.

4. Of course, Barack Obama is soft on terrorism. No, of course not really, but we’re sure to hear this from the Republicans. First Umar Farouk Abdulmutallab is read his Miranda rights and treated humanely and — against every piece of conservative counterterrorism conjecture — he cooperates with interrogators. Then a former Bush speechwriter says Obama shouldn’t be killing so many terrorists with drone strikes; he should be capturing more of them. Well, look at what just happened! Which Republican will be intellectually honest enough to credit the Obama administration here? And who will jump to say the administration has just proved — somehow — it doesn’t know how to handle terrorism?

5. Will the Obama administration allow Baradar to be tortured? As I wrote on my personal blog, it’s crucial that the U.S. and the Pakistanis show that a high-level Taliban commander be treated respectfully if it hopes to induce more surrenders and impact the Taliban’s calculus on continuing to fight. Interrogations of Baradar are, reportedly, a joint Pakistani and U.S. venture. But the Pakistanis torture. Will the Obama administration, in its first big overseas capture, successfully convince the Pakistanis to treat Baradar humanely?

Update: Also see smart analysis from Jason Burke, Josh Foust and Gregg Carlstrom.

They wouldn’t. Gates, looking a bit displeased, said that the administration had been “clear that this is the beginning of a process” that was “based on the conditions on the ground.” President Obama “clearly sees July 2011 as an inflection point for drawing down with a view to transferring control” to the Afghan security forces over a “period of two to three years” although Gates was cut off before he could finish saying “years.” As far as I have seen and heard, that’s the first I’ve seen the administration address how long it envisions the transition period lasting. Clinton added that she thought it would take “five years” before the Afghans would be “responsible for their entire security.” But it wasn’t clear — at least not to me — whether she meant five years from 2011 or five years from now, the latter of which would be in line with Gates’ statement.

Menendez was very displeased. He said the dates set by the Obama administration, particularly the July 2011 transition date, “as solid as quicksand and at best aspirational.” It wouldn’t be responsible of him to tell his constituents that the war would be winding down any time soon, and pointedly warned Clinton, Gates and Mullen of the need to be “honest in our assessment.”

I asked Specter if he wanted to see the Obama administration embrace an exit strategy for the eight-year war. “I think there ought to be an exit strategy,” Specter said, which ought to be “geared toward our expectations as to what we’re looking to accomplish.” But he demurred on seeking a timeline for winding down the war. “I would want to see the administration’s proposals, and see what people on the ground over there think,” Specter said. “It’s hard to answer that with any specificity.” He added that he endorsed the Obama administration’s style of decisionmaking, defending the “very thoughtful” president against charges of “dithering” lodged by former Vice President Cheney.

Josh Rogin of Foreign Policy’s The Cable asked how a troop increase would go over in Congress. “If they talk about 40,000 troops, which the generals want, I think it’ll be pretty cold,” Specter said. He added that there would be a greater appetite in the Senate for a proposal issued by Sen. Carl Levin (D-Mich.) to instead emphasize the training of Afghan soldiers and police.

Specter claimed that his opponent in the Pennsylvania Democratic senatorial primary, Rep. Joe Sestak, was calling for a “major measured increase” in troops — Sestak himself, however, has said he endorsed a “measured increase” in a recent Fox News interview — but when I asked if politics was playing any role in his position, he replied, “None. None.” When I asked why it seemed he was only speaking out lately despite years of deterioration in Afghanistan, Specter replied that he had expressed concern about the Afghanistan war “several months ago,” which I think is a reference to this September Senate floor statement that indeed raised questions about “the prospects for military success in Afghanistan against al-Qaida and the Taliban.” He continued to say that “as Afghanistan has become a hot topic over the course of the last several months” and has become “relevant for congressional response, I have made it.”

Update: After being contacted by Sen. Specter’s staff, I went back to my recording and indeed hear Specter describe Sestak’s position as a “measured” and not “major” increase, despite initially hearing it as “major.” My apologies to the senator.

In the Situation Room meetings and other sessions, some officials have expressed deep reservations about President Hamid Karzai, who emerged the victor of a disputed Afghan election. They said there was no evidence that Mr. Karzai would carry through on promises to crack down on corruption or the drug trade or that his government was capable of training enough reliable Afghan troops and police officers for Mr. Obama to describe a credible exit strategy.

Officials said that although the president had no doubt about what large numbers of United States troops could achieve on their own in Afghanistan, he repeatedly asked questions during recent meetings on Afghanistan about whether a sizable American force might undercut the urgency of the preparations of the Afghan forces who are learning to stand up on their own.

“He’s simply not convinced yet that you can do a lasting counterinsurgency strategy if there is no one to hand it off to,” one participant said.

Blink and you’ll miss the implicit premise of the Obama administration’s strategy. Obama has described a long-term commitment to Pakistan and Afghanistan, something both countries arguably require for reassurance before doing all these things we want. But he also doesn’t want an open-ended war — all of which is ostensibly designed to “disrupt, dismantle and defeat” al-Qaeda. But what gets the United States from fighting in Afghanistan to a long-term commitment to Afghanistan without fighting? Capable Afghan security forces. OK, then.

But notice what that strategy doesn’t do. It doesn’t, on its own terms, have anything to do with al-Qaeda. The presumption is that a stable Afghanistan won’t be a place that provides strategic depth for al-Qaeda in Pakistan. And that might be right. But it’s not an offensive strategy against al-Qaeda. For all the strategy presumes, al-Qaeda could do absolutely nothing for the next few years while the U.S. trains Afghan soldiers and police. And then once the security handoff occurs, the U.S. could have a plausible transition to a peacetime relationship with Afghanistan — assume for a moment that’s realistic — with al-Qaeda still intact in Pakistan. What then?

On the one hand, a strategy that cares for the needs of an at-risk population — for security, for justice, for economic opportunity, for cultural expression — is one that probably provides a more durable obstacle to al-Qaeda, since it handles the “demand side” of why al-Qaeda attracts the passive support necessary for its survival. But on the other hand, that’s a very long term and indirect strategy on its own, akin to stopping the nutrient flow in the soil in order to kill a tree. The United States’ offensive tools against al-Qaeda in neighboring Pakistan are either direct CIA drone strikes or indirect attacks by the Pakistani military. If both countries shift to a posture of U.S. support over the next few years, then we’re looking at the real contours of Obama’s endgame in Afghanistan: containment. It might work, it might not. But no one’s describing it in these terms.

*Right, about that 30,000-troop number. Notice The Times doesn’t specify whether it includes any support troops, which will tick the number upward. As I wrote in my piece on Monday:

It is possible that support and logistical units could increase any troop number that the administration cites as the total estimate, as happened when President Bush announced a troop surge to Iraq of about 20,000 troops in January 2007 but about 28,000 new troops actually deployed.