"Surge" may be double size Bush claims

TPM Muckraker has the skinny on the Congressional Budget Office's estimate of the number of troops actually being sent to Iraq. It's not the 21,000 or so the Prez has been telling us. Those are only the combat forces. Together with support troops, the "surge" is an escalation of 35,000 to 48,000 troops.

To reflect some of the uncertainty about the number of support troops, CBO developed its estimates on the basis of two alternative assumptions. In one scenario, CBO assumed that additional support troops would be deployed in the same proportion to combat troops that currently exists in Iraq. That approach would require about 28,000 support troops in addition to the 20,000 combat troops—a total of 48,000. CBO also presents an alternative scenario that would include a smaller number of support personnel—about 3,000 per combat brigade—totaling about 15,000 support personnel and bringing the total additional forces to about 35,000.

Just where the hell these guys are going to come from is an interesting question.