Strains on the Army from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become so severe that Army officials say they may be forced to make greater use of the National Guard to provide enough troops for overseas deployments.
Senior Army officers have discussed that analysis — and described the possible need to use more members of the National Guard — with Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld’s senior adviser on personnel, David S. C. Chu, according to Pentagon officials.
While no decision has been made to mobilize more Guard forces, and may not need to be before midterm elections, the prospect presents the Bush administration with a politically vexing problem: how, without expanding the Army, to balance the pressing need for troops in the field against promises to limit overseas deployments for the Guard.
The National Guard has a goal of allowing five years at home between foreign deployments so as not to disrupt the family life and careers of its citizen soldiers. But instead it has been sending units every three to four years, according to Guard officials.
The question of how to sustain the high level of forces abroad became more acute this week as General John P. Abizaid, the senior American commander in the Middle East, said that the number of troops in Iraq, currently at more than 140,000, could not be expected to drop until next spring at the very earliest.
That disclosure comes amid many signs of mounting strain on active Army units. So many are deployed or only recently returned from combat duty that only two or three combat brigades — perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 troops — are fully ready to respond in case of unexpected crises, according to a senior Army general.
An internal Army document that was provided to The New York Times notes that the demand for troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has greatly exceeded past projections that predicted earlier troop reductions. According to the document, the Army needs $66.1 billion to make up for all of its equipment shortfalls. Referring to the units that are to deploy next to Iraq and Afghanistan, or are in training, the document shows a large question mark to indicate their limited readiness.
The Army had to offer generous new enlistment bonuses of up to $40,000 to attract recruits into such dangerous jobs as operating convoys in Iraq. It was able to meet its active-duty enlistment goals this year with the addition of 1,000 new recruiters.
Enmeshed in negotiations with Bush administration officials over its spending request for next year, neither Gen. Peter Schoomaker, the Army Chief of Staff, nor any of his top Pentagon aides would agree to be interviewed about the personnel stresses they are confronting. But Army officials have shared their concerns with retired Army officers and members of Congress, and quietly distributed budget tallies, including the internal document on troop and equipment demands, to their supporters. Military officers and civilian Pentagon officials interviewed for this article would discuss the issues only on condition of anonymity.
An examination of the Army’s plan for deploying its force shows some of the ways it has been overextended.
In overhauling its structure, the active-duty Army is growing to 42 combat brigades. Army officials have said they want to establish a pattern in which an active brigade spends two years at home for each year it is deployed overseas.
But so many units are needed for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan that combat brigades are generally spending only a year at home for each year they are deployed. Military analysts concluded that this has severely reduced the number of forces that are available for other contingencies.
“The continuing frequent deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan have stretched the U.S. Army so thin that there are few brigades ready to respond to crises elsewhere,” said Lynn Davis, a senior analyst in the Arroyo Center, a division of the RAND Corporation that does research for the Army.
Ms. Davis said that there was no quick fix for the limited number of troops. The longer-term solution, she said, was to rely more on the National Guard or to increase the number of Army brigades, a move that would cost billions of dollars.
Gordon R. Sullivan, the former Army chief of staff and president of the Association of the United States Army, said in an interview that the Army was simply too small for the many responsibilities it faced and should be expanded from about 500,000 in the active force to some 560,000. It also needs to make greater use of the National Guard, he said.
“The biggest challenge is manpower,” General Sullivan said.
Barry R. McCaffrey, the retired four-star Army general, also asserted that the armed forces needed to be expanded. “We cannot sustain the current national security policy with an Army, Marine Corps, Air Force lift capability and Special Operations forces of this size,” he added. “They are clearly inadequate.”
The pace of deployments and financing shortfalls, he said, had taken a toll of units in the active duty Army and the National Guard. “One third is completely ready to fight, and two-thirds are severely impaired,” he said.
Asked if it was true that only a handful of combat brigades not currently deployed were immediately ready for a crisis, a spokesman for the Army said he could not address specifics because the information was classified.
Mr. Rumsfeld has not favored substantially expanding the Army, concluding that such a step would draw money from programs he favors to overhaul the military and calculating that the high level of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan will prove temporary. Congress, however, has mandated a temporary 30,000-soldier increase for the Army.
As for whether any decision on mobilizing more members of the Guard can be expected, Mr. Chu, the Pentagon’s chief personnel officer, declined through a spokeswoman to be interviewed on Army discussions about how to meet its needs.
But active commanders have highlighted the issue. At a recent conference at Fort Benning, Ga., Gen. Dan K. McNeill, the head of the Army’s Forces Command, which oversees training and mobilization for all Army forces in the continental United States, suggested that the service needed to make greater use of the National Guard if the United States was to pursue what the Bush administration has described as a “long war” against Islamic terrorists.
“If we are going to prosecute this long war, we need relatively unencumbered access to the citizen soldier formations,” General McNeill said.
The equivalent of several Guard brigades are deployed today in Iraq, Afghanistan, Sinai, the Horn of Africa and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. Sending more Guard units to Iraq is politically sensitive because of complaints from families and employers while the Guard and Reserve were used extensively in Iraq and Afghanistan in 2004.
Restrictions on the use of the Guard are a matter of interpretation. Guard officials said that under President Bush’s current mobilization order, its members may not be called up if they have served for 24 consecutive months. But a conflicting Defense Department policy interprets the order as limiting the call-up of those who have tallied 24 months of total service, regardless of the length of time served consecutively. That view would put more Guard members off-limits for remobilization without a new order from the president.
If the military cannot deploy enough members of the Guard by following either interpretation of the rules, officials may be forced to propose that Mr. Rumsfeld advise President Bush of the need to sign a new mobilization order that would reset the clock for many Guard members who have already served overseas.
Lt. Gen. H Steven Blum, the head of the Guard, said his forces would be prepared to meet current requirements and to send more forces if needed.
“Can I sustain that?” General Blum said. “I say the answer is, ‘Absolutely’ — if three things remain, three critical things.”
He said Guard members must continue to feel that what they are doing is important and that they have the support of the American people. Finally, he said, “We’ve got to give them some predictability or some kind of certainty so they can balance their civilian life, with their employers and their family, with their military service to the nation.”
Given the lengthy lead time required for calling up, training, equipping and deploying Guard forces, Pentagon officials said that if more Guard members were mobilized, it would probably be for a rotation that begins in 2008.
Even so, Pentagon and military officials said that it was unlikely that any decision on a Guard mobilization would be necessary for several months or even into next year, which would place any announcement beyond the November mid-term Congressional elections.
To take on a greater load in Iraq and remedy existing equipment shortfalls, the Guard needs $23 billion over five years, Guard officials say.
“There is no brigade in the United States Army active, Guard or reserve that is completely ready back at home,” General Blum said. “That is to ensure that every brigade overseas is completely ready. And by ready I mean completely equipped. Right now, the key to readiness of the total force is equipping it, resetting it and modernizing it. It is a function of time and money.”
The stress of wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have prompted senior Army officers to pass a colorful hand card around Capitol Hill explaining that it will take $17.1 billion in extra spending over the next year to repair and replace tanks, trucks, radios and other equipment for the total force. The card indicates that another $13 billion is needed each year for the following five years to fix and replace equipment.
One Army official said this week that the service is seeking about $138 billion for the next fiscal year, compared with the $112 budget request the Army submitted last year.
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