An Army of Lots More Than One

THE ARMED FORCES of the United States are too small to support the missions required of them in the post-9/11 world. In many of the situations we now face, using troops on the ground is nonnegotiable, and America has too few of them. If that assertion seems counterintuitive given the impressive performance of the U.S. military in Afghanistan and Iraq, two numbers may help drive it home: Of the 495,000 troops in the U.S. Army, 370,000 are already deployed around the world.

The destruction of Saddam Hussein's regime in Iraq has always been rightly seen as only the first step in a reorientation of America's security policy toward the Middle East. If the United States proves to have eliminated the Baathist regime in Iraq only to replace it with chaos and violence, we clearly will have failed to enhance our security. The threats, to be sure, will be different. The imminence of Saddam's development of weapons of mass destruction posed a clear and present danger to the United States and its citizens at home and abroad. Chaos in Iraq will pose a less obvious threat, but the danger to Americans will be no less substantial.

We have already seen how chaos and civil war in Afghanistan in the 1990s provided the breeding ground for terrorists and a haven for the bases where they trained. If U.S. forces are reduced or withdrawn too soon, similar conditions in Iraq will nurture the al Qaeda operatives of the future. The U.S.-led attack could end up bringing about the very threat that prompted it in the first place--the proliferation of Iraqi weapons to terrorist organizations--if we do not finish what we have begun by establishing a stable and peaceful regime in Iraq.

This will not be accomplished, however, without the prolonged deployment of significant numbers of American ground forces. Smart weapons cannot keep peace. They cannot get schools and hospitals running, or keep electricity and water flowing, or keep hostile neighbors from attacking one another, or provide a police presence to deter looters and criminals, or hunt down and capture individual terrorists, interrogate them, and learn from them the nature of the organizations to which they belong, or find traces of a WMD program hidden carefully in a country the size of California. Only soldiers and marines can accomplish these tasks, and, given the size and complexity of the country, only in fairly large numbers. Given the unrest and political chaos that currently engulf Iraq, it is hard to imagine that the United States will be able to withdraw any significant portion of its 146,000 troops from that country in less than a year without compromising our vital objectives.

The problem is that we cannot maintain such a large force in Iraq for a year without seriously damaging the Army and harming our ability to pursue other critical objectives. Given the normal requirement to have two units at home for every one deployed, the 11-division-equivalent U.S. Army could support a three-and-two-thirds division commitment to Iraq indefinitely--at the cost of having no forces available for operations anywhere else in the world. But the current deployment is the equivalent of more than five divisions (the 101st Airborne, 4th Infantry, and 1st Armored divisions, two brigades of the 3rd Infantry Division, the 2nd and 3rd Armored Cavalry regiments, the 173rd Airborne Brigade, and elements of the 1st Infantry and 10th Mountain divisions).

In addition, more than 200,000 reservists and members of the National Guard have been called up to support the efforts in Iraq and Afghanistan and on the home front. Some of these troops have been deployed for more than a year, many of them earning a fraction of their civilian pay. There is reason to fear that the hardship on them and their families may damage recruiting for the Guard.

Within months the U.S. leadership will face a difficult choice: reduce the commitment to Iraq regardless of whether the country is ready for such a reduction, or extend the deployment of many of these units indefinitely. The first choice is unacceptable because it may well compromise our ability to achieve our objectives in Iraq. The second will do great harm to the Army.