Iraq puts immense load on military

WASHINGTON -- In the early hours of last March 20, Gen. T. Michael "Buzz" Moseley sat in a high-tech nerve center at a remote Saudi Arabian air base, waiting for the war on Iraq to unfold as planned, when his phone rang.

On the secure line was Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, calling from a White House meeting of President Bush's top national security advisers. A "human intelligence source" had reported that Saddam Hussein was hiding in an underground bunker at a palace outside Baghdad.

Their question for the commander of all U.S. and coalition air forces mustered for the war: "Can you strike him?"

"You bet we can strike him," Moseley, now Air Force vice chief of staff, recalls responding.

Two F-117 stealth fighter-bombers dropped the first bombs of the war into the dictator's bunker. He escaped.

Thus began a military campaign that, three weeks later, appeared to have delivered an astonishingly swift victory. By May 1, Bush was celebrating the "end of major combat." Yet just as the war didn't begin as expected, it hasn't ended as easily as it seemed it might. Iraqi insurgents have sustained a protracted conflict that continues to claim American lives -- one reason the Iraq war is having major effects on the U.S. military.

Three of the most visible are:

A demand for manpower that is driving the Army, the Army Reserve and the Army National Guard to reorganize to ease the strain of keeping more than 100,000 troops in Iraq for what could be years to come.

An Army decision to cancel a two-decade-old $39 billion project to build a new, radar-evading reconnaissance helicopter in light of Iraqi successes using small arms against U.S. attack helicopters.

Budget pressures caused by billions of dollars in unanticipated occupation costs, aggravated by rising deficits, that threaten high- priced procurement programs such as the Air Force's F/A-22 Raptor fighter plane.

"Three weeks was about enough to fight the kind of war we were trained and optimized to fight," judges West Point-trained military analyst Andrew Krepinevich of the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. "We had a military that was designed for sprints."

But in Iraq today, he said, "The problem is that it's not a sprint anymore, it's a marathon."

Three decades after the draft was abolished, the demands imposed by Iraq are putting the all-volunteer Army to its greatest test. Last year, 24 of the regular Army's 33 combat brigades were deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan. This year, 20 will be.

The National Guard and Reserves, meanwhile, are being used more than ever before in their history. As of Feb. 25, officials said, 155,028 Army National Guard and Reserve troops were mobilized -- 21,726 more than were on duty last August. By the time the Army finishes rotating new units into Iraq this spring, 40 percent of American forces there will be National Guard or Army Reserve members.

U.S. officials are worried that many are fed up -- some have been mobilized two or three times since 9-11 -- and will quit when their contracts expire.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and other administration official don't dispute that the force is under strain, but they say they are coping with it.

"We've taken some 25 or 30 steps to find ways to reduce the stress on the force," Rumsfeld said at a recent Pentagon briefing. He noted that he also has used emergency authority to temporarily add 30,000 troops to the Army. Gen. Peter Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, meanwhile, has ordered the Army's 10 traditional divisions of 10,000 to 20,000 troops and its 33 combat brigades reconfigured into 48 smaller brigades that include units such as military police so they can handle the Iraq mission more smoothly.

The Army National Guard and Army Reserves are reorganizing along similar lines.

Rumsfeld contends that the demand for troops in Iraq is merely a "spike" that will subside as sovereignty is handed over to Iraqis this summer and newly constituted Iraqi forces take over security functions.

Other experts note that stabilization and peacekeeping operations have a history of lasting far longer than planned. U.S. troops have been Bosnia for nine years. They were supposed to stay one.

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