Is The Army Stretched Too Thin?

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Even if the assault on the U.N. mission in Baghdad, apparently by a suicide truck bomber, would not have been prevented by a greater military presence in Iraq (troops can never guard every potential target), there are other signs that the U.S. Army is stretched too thin. More than a few heads snapped when Peter Schoomaker, the yanked-from-retirement general who is now the Army Chief of Staff, said in his confirmation hearing in late July that he "intuitively" thought "we need more people." His gut feeling apparently changed after Rumsfeld howled that Schoomaker's remarks had been distorted. "There's no daylight between the Secretary of Defense and me on this issue," Schoomaker told TIME. "We need to have more time to formally assess this issue." But the General Accounting Office, in its assessment released two weeks ago, warned that the Pentagon's "current mission approach is significantly stressing U.S. forces." If changes are not made, the report said, U.S. troops may be operating at an "unsustainable pace that could significantly erode their readiness to perform combat missions and impact future personnel retention."

Though the Pentagon does not acknowledge the crunch, it is acting on it. Defense officials announced in early August that they were canceling their longstanding biennial, multilateral "Bright Star" exercise in Egypt because of a lack of available troops. The September game was to feature more than 70,000 troops from about a dozen countries practicing war in the Egyptian desert. In Iraq, the Army's 101st Airborne Division, exhausted and only halfway through its yearlong tour, already has the Pentagon fretting over a replacement. The Department of Defense is pondering what some officials think is a radical step: dispatching U.S. Marines--the nation's pre-eminent quick-and-dirty warriors--to Iraq early next year to replace the 101st. "We're short infantry, we're short chem-bio [specialists], we're short military police," says General John Keane, the Army's No. 2 officer. "Clearly, we're stretched."

America's military has been shrinking for the past 35 years. Since the height of the Vietnam War in 1968, the number of American men and women in the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marine Corps has fallen, from 3.5 million to 1.4 million today. The active-duty Army, the service most needed for labor-intensive peacekeeping missions, has fallen from 1.6 million troops in 1968 to 480,000 today. All four services have been cut in strength, and leaders of both parties have overseen this decline. President Bush's father reduced the number of Army divisions from 18 to 14; Bill Clinton cut it further, to 10.

Making the military bigger was not what the second Bush Administration had in mind when it took control of the government 32 months ago. Bush dismissed "nation building" during the 2000 campaign and was not thrilled with the idea of performing peacekeeping missions. The Bush team's vision for the U.S. Army involved making it leaner, faster, more efficient and more open to change. This made a lot of sense at the time. For the previous half-century, the Army, more than the other armed services, practiced, procured and prepared for a large European ground war with the former Soviet Union and put less emphasis on more contemporary threats.

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