Is The Army Stretched Too Thin?

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Sept. 11 forced military minds to take another look at their assumptions. No longer were the chief threats to the U.S. other states with giant armies. Now the enemy was stateless organizations with secret, unseen soldiers living in lawless lands overseas or possibly even living right at home among us. Tanks and submarines weren't much use in either theater. It was a new kind of war, Bush said. Within a few months, the Bush team developed a novel strategy that held that the U.S. could no longer wait to be attacked but would have to root out terrorists wherever they were hiding. And the U.S. would have to deny its new enemies access to unconventional weapons by taking down rogue regimes that consorted with terrorists.

The invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan have taught the Pentagon two very different and seemingly contradictory lessons. First, as Rumsfeld likes to argue now, the U.S. does not need huge forces to invade and win. For almost two decades, U.S. war planners were guided by Colin Powell's doctrine of using overwhelming force. But the wars so far in the second Bush era have been fought and won with notably smaller invading armies, U.S. air power and special forces having been married to terrifyingly precise effect. Pentagon officials boast that they toppled Saddam Hussein with only 60% of the troops their war plans said they would need. "Overmatching power kind of is replacing overwhelming force," Rumsfeld told TIME.

But if the U.S. needs smaller armies to invade targeted countries, it needs bigger armies to occupy them when the shooting stops. The challenges in post-Saddam Iraq have caught the Pentagon literally off guard. Bush officials predicted that G.I.s would be welcomed as heroes in the streets of Baghdad. "Like the people of France in the 1940s, they view us as their hoped-for liberator," said Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz a week before the war began. As late as May, the Pentagon predicted that U.S. troop levels would fall to 30,000 by September. Today there are 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq (plus more than 20,000 allied forces).

Peacekeeping is not what the U.S. troops were trained to do. Soldiers whose combat edge has been honed inside an M-1 tank are not well equipped to provide a war's victims with food and water. And the longer soldiers spend as occupiers, the less ready they feel for pure combat and the more unhappy they become. "The worst thing you can do, in terms of retention, is to have square pegs stuck in round holes," says David Chu, the Pentagon's personnel chief. "The guy or gal who doesn't get to do what he or she signed up to do is the most dissatisfied soldier."

MORE TROOPS OR MORE REFORM?