Or, another guy, an Air Force colonel at the War College thinks that you could conceivably argue that a ratio of 1 trooper to 80 -to-100 civilians is imaginable given the proper use of surveillance and communication technology. Which would put the number of US troops at around 280, 000 or 300,000. Which is what, 150,000 more than we've got now, and you gotta know theyre not gonna be training them like they do in peacetime. Theyre gonna be pretty green, most of them. Hardly the highly skilled counterinsurgency type of people that our air force colonel is talking about. I think it takes something like five years to really train and season a special forces person..