It was Keane who protected Petraeus's interests in ensuring the maximum number of troops in Iraq against the efforts by other military leaders to accelerate troop withdrawal in 2007 and 2008.
In any case, American counterterrorism interests in Afghanistan appear to argue for something far more restrained than our current commitment there, maybe 20,000 Western troops maximum.
The Security Council authorized on Feb. 7 an expansion of the mission to a maximum of 11,100 troops, including the 260 military observers who are already deployed.
President Obama has yet to decide how fast he will withdraw troops from Afghanistan, and the longer he delays, the more he enables military commanders who want to keep the maximum number of troops for the maximum amount of time.
The orders were drafted to give the troops maximum warning about their possible duty and to ensure that the bulk of them had not already been called up since Sept. 11, 2001, senior Pentagon officials said.
Mr. Obama has yet to decide how fast he will withdraw the remaining troops, and the longer he delays, the more he enables military commanders who inevitably want to keep the maximum number of troops in Afghanistan for the maximum amount of time.
In passages likely to add kindling to the debate over whether sufficient troops were committed to battle in Iraq and to the continuing postwar operations, General Franks writes that several of the evolving campaign concepts written before the war projected a maximum of 250,000 troops at the end of the combat phase and into the postwar mission.
Obama wants a maximum of 6,000 troops by the end of 2015, and 1,000 by the end of 2016.
In April, Pietraru met with the Provisional Government's Alexander Guchkov, and an agreement was reached regarding the maximum total of troops to be enlisted in the Romanian Corps.
Armies in Age of Empires II can consist of a maximum of 40 troops.
Most officials have focused on his request for 40,000 troops to avoid failure in Afghanistan, but some of them confirmed Friday an ABC News report that his maximum request outlined a troop buildup that was substantially larger than that.
