Breaking the American army

After criticising the Clinton administration for overdeploying and overusing the country's military in the 1990s, the Bush administration is now doing exactly the same thing - on a much larger scale. Hordes of active-duty troops and reservists may soon leave the service rather than subject themselves to a life continually on the road.

The problem is most acute for the army. While most marines, sailors and air force personnel go home to a grateful nation, the army still has more than 185,000 troops deployed in and around Iraq. Another 10,000 are in Afghanistan. More than 25,000 troops are in Korea; some 5,000 are in the Balkans; and dozens here and hundreds there are on temporary assignments around the world.

Nearly all of these soldiers are away from their home bases and families. Deployment demands are likely to remain great, even if Rumsfeld and Bush hope otherwise.

The problem is so severe that we must approach it from several angles:

* Temporarily add 10,000 to 20,000 more troops to the army.

* Approach a broader range of allies, especially larger countries such as France and Germany and even Japan and South Korea, for substantial troop contributions. Each of these countries can provide roughly 5,000 troops; we should also be able to solicit more help from those South and Southeast Asian states with peacekeeping experience.

* Make the marines a full partner of the army in peacekeeping, not just fighting. This means substantially reducing the marines presence in Okinawa; it also means asking marines to accept a temporarily higher global deployment pace themselves.

* Finally, as Rumsfeld and General James Jones of European Command draft their plans for relocating many American forces from Germany, they need to bear the overdeployment problem in mind.

Rather than creating new facilities where troops are sent primarily on temporary assignments, they should try to establish new bases in Eastern Europe that permit troops to bring their families.

It would be the supreme irony, and a national tragedy, if after winning two wars in two years, the U.S. army was broken and defeated while trying to keep the peace. Unfortunately, the risk that this will happen is all too real.

The writer is a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution<