U.S. military ill-prepared for other conflicts: report

Four years after the invasion of Iraq, the great and growing demand for U.S. troops there and in Afghanistan has left ground forces in the United States short of the training, personnel and equipment that would be vital to fight a major ground conflict elsewhere, The Washington Post reported Monday.

More troubling is the fact that it will take years for the Army and Marine Corps to recover from what some officials privately have called a "death spiral," in which the increasingly rapid pace of war-zone rotation has consumed 40 percent of their total gear, wearied troops and left no time to train to fight anything other than the insurgencies now at hand, the report said, quoting senior military and government officials.

The risk to the country is serious and deepening, because the U.S. military now lacks a large strategic reserve of ground troops ready to respond quickly and decisively to potential foreign crises, senior officials warned.

"We have a strategy right now that is outstripping the means to execute it," Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, Army chief of staff, said in a testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee last week.

Gen. Peter Pace, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has said the unexpected demand for more troops in Iraq -- from the 10 brigades that commanders projected last year they would need by the end of 2006, to the 20 brigades scheduled to be there by June -- prompted him to recommend permanently adding 92,000 troops to the Army and Marine Corps.

The recent increase of more than 32,000 U.S. troops in Iraq and Afghanistan has pushed already severe readiness problems to what some officials and lawmakers consider a crisis point, the report said.

The troop increase has also created an acute shortfall in the Army's equipment stored overseas -- known as "pre-positioned stock" -- which would be critical to outfit U.S. combat forces quickly should another conflict erupt, officials said.

The U.S. Army should have five full combat brigades of such equipment: two stocks in Kuwait, one in South Korea, and two aboard ships in Guam and at the Diego Garcia base in the Indian Ocean. But the Army had to empty the shipboard stocks to support the troop increase in Iraq, and the Kuwait stocks are being used as units to rotate in and out of the country. Only the South Korea stock is close to complete, the report quoted military and government officials as saying.

Equipment is also lacking among Army units in the United States, the vast majority of which are rated "not ready" by the Army, based on measures of available gear, training and personnel, according to senior military officers and government officials.