US military stretched to breaking point

Andrew Krepinevich, a former army officer who wrote the report, said that the army could not sustain the current pace of deployments - which was likely in the end to discourage recruitment.

"This is the central, and as yet unanswerable, question the army must confront. Vigorous efforts should be make to enable a substantial drawdown in US force levels. The army ... cannot sustain the force levels desired to sustain the momentum needed to break the back of the insurgent movement," the report says.

Mr Krepinevich, who runs a Washington thinktank, the Centre for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments, also suggested the administration lacked a clear strategy.

In his report presented as "an interim assessment" of the Iraq, he writes: "Without a clear strategy in Iraq it is difficult to draft clear metrics for gauging progress. This may be why some senior political and military leaders have made overly optimistic or even contradictory declarations regarding the war's progress."

The secretary of defence, Donald Rumsfeld, said he had not read the report, but said from what he heard of it, "It's just not consistent with the facts."

Mr Rumsfeld said that there were 1.4 million Americans currently in active service, of which only 138,000 were in Iraq. He said the army was in the process being streamlined, to create a more agile and combat-ready force.

However, a group of senior Democrats issued their own report yesterday accusing the Bush administration of putting "our ground troops under enormous strain that, if not soon relieved, will have "highly corrosive and potentially long-term effects on the force". The report, presented by Senator Jack Reed, the former secretary of state, Madeleine Albright and Bill Clinton's first defence secretary, William Perry, called for an increase in deployable army forces of at least 30,000 troops. It argued there was a danger that America's enemies could exploit its vulnerable state. "Although the United States can still deploy air, naval, and other more specialised assets to deter or respond to aggression, the visible overextension of our ground forces could weaken our ability to deter aggression."

More
http://www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,,1695002,00.html