Is The Army Stretched Too Thin?

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An obvious solution to the problem is simply to add more troops. Rhode Island Senator Jack Reed, a Democrat and West Point graduate who served with the 82nd Airborne, argues that the Pentagon needs to convert seven National Guard brigades--some 20,000 troops--into active-duty forces. Reed, an increasingly influential player in Congress on defense matters, thinks that would give the military the margin it now lacks in case North Korea or some other nation acts up. Another approach would be to create a new division from the ground up--not the kind that seizes ground and flanks the enemy but one specially designed for peacekeeping, a role the Army has traditionally been reluctant to perform, in large part because very few people in the service have spent time studying how to do it. In fact, the Army War College announced just before the Iraq war that it would close its decade-old Army Peacekeeping Institute in Carlisle, Pa. (officials tell TIME the decision is likely to be reversed).

But with the price of the Iraqi occupation running $1 billion a week, the Administration is reluctant to do anything that would boost that bill. And adding soldiers of any kind is not cheap. While young G.I.s earn about $16,000 annually in base pay, fringe benefits and bonuses can drive the actual cost as high as about $60,000. Two new active-duty divisions of any kind would add another $10 billion a year to the Pentagon's $400 billion annual budget. Funds for any increase in the head count would probably come directly from the sacred hardware accounts that senior officers are always quick to defend.

In any case, the Army believes, as it almost always does, that no drastic reform is needed. To prove that it has the postwar period mapped out, it has released a plan identifying the specific units that are to move in and out of Iraq into 2004. But to fill the slots, the Army is doing two things it has rarely done since the grim days of the Vietnam War. It has begun rotating officers and senior NCOs out of Iraq, which means replacing seasoned commanders with freshly arrived officers who don't know the country or the troops they are leading. And it is telling enlisted soldiers that they will be spending a year in Iraq, not the six months they expected. This is likely to hurt recruitment and make it tougher to hang on to troops when they consider re-enlisting. Those moves hurt morale in Vietnam and will probably do the same in Iraq.

Some critics say the argument over enlarging the military misses the point: the country needs not a bigger Army but a different foreign policy. "This nation cannot deal effectively with the combination of terrorism, rogue states and weapons of mass destruction in all places and every time through the unilateral use of U.S. military force," says Lawrence Korb, a senior Reagan-era Pentagon official who is now with the Council on Foreign Relations. Working more cooperatively with other nations, he says, would ease the strain on the U.S. military while marshaling international support for the actions ultimately taken.