Rumsfeld and his team are quick to point out that retention remains basically strong. But there are signs of slippage: Last fiscal year the U.S. Army Reserve didn't meet its retention goals. And USA Today reported that through the first half of this fiscal year, the active Army is on a pace to come up short of its retention goal.

Even allies of Rumsfeld admit that the current retention figures are distorted because the Pentagon has made liberal use of "stop-loss," a power that lets it prevent troops from leaving the service when their time is up.

Indeed, a wealth of recent anecdotal and statistical information suggests serious problems for the Army. A survey last summer by the Army Surgeon General's Office found that 52 percent of soldiers reported low personal morale and 72 percent reported that their unit had low morale. The survey also found that unit cohesion was low. "The most important reported deployment stressors included uncertain redeployment date, long deployment, separation and lack of communication with family," the Operation Iraqi Freedom Mental Health Advisory Team reported last month. "These operational stressors were significantly correlated with low morale, low cohesion and behavioral health problems." The Pentagon's decision to hold 20,000 troops in Iraq for an additional three months can only have intensified these conditions.

A separate survey of military families conducted by the Washington Post, the Kaiser Family Foundation and Harvard University found that fully half of military spouses predicted "major retention problems" in the Army.

"The family members that I've talked to basically have said that when Tom, Dick or Mary comes out, they're going to stay out," says Rep. Ellen Tauscher, D-Calif., a member of the House Armed Services Committee. "The high personnel tempo, the high 'op-tempo' alone, is grinding down the military. The fact that we are breaking our promises, the fact that we are not being straight with people, naturally is going to cause problems not only with recruiting but with retention."

Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., who sits on the Senate Armed Services Committee, expressed the same fears at a hearing in which he questioned Rumsfeld in February: "From my conversations with the Guard and reservists around the country, you are going to see a very large exodus of the members of the Guard and Reserve because of the incredible deployment and a burden that has been laid upon them."

One solution that Tauscher and others favor is to increase the size of the U.S. Army, relieving the stress on existing troops by spreading the burden.

"Ten divisions is a very small force for a nation of 300 million people," says Robert Scales, a retired two-star Army general and former commandant of the U.S. Army War College. "For a great power, that's probably the smallest percentage of infantry in the history of the world, including the Romans. The Roman Empire had more infantry than the U.S."

At least one prominent member of the Bush administration agrees. Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage, a former naval officer, told the Washington Post's Bob Woodward that he feared that the Army is too small for the Bush administration's grandiose agenda. "Though [Armitage] believed they would put down the insurgency [in Iraq] and win in the end, the U.S. military was going to pay for ten years or more. The Army, in particular, was stretched too thin," Woodward writes in his new book, "Plan of Attack." "They were fighting three wars really -- Afghanistan still, Iraq and the continuing global war on terrorism. It was not logical nor was it possible, in Armitage's view, that this could be accomplished with a force of the same size that existed during the Clinton administration in peace time. But that was what the Bush administration was attempting."

In the wake of the Cold War, the United States cut the size of the military from 18 active divisions to 10. (Each division has roughly 15,000 to 18,000 troops.) When Rumsfeld came into office, it was widely rumored that he wanted to cut two more divisions. Instead, in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks, Afghanistan and Iraq, he's fighting a losing battle to avoid permanently expanding the size of the military.

At the end of January, Rumsfeld conceded to his critics by approving an emergency increase in the size of the active U.S. Army of 30,000 troops above its congressionally approved limit of 482,000. In theory, the increase will last four years while the Army reorganizes.

Fundamentally, the Army is still structured in a Cold War mold, though in a trimmed-down version. It moves in division-size units suitable for facing Soviet divisions but less useful in a world where speed is salient. The Army also has an outdated mix of units: too much artillery, easily replaced with air power, and not enough civil affairs or infantry personnel.

Gen. Peter Schoomaker, a former head of the U.S. Special Operation Command whom Rumsfeld pulled out of retirement to replace Shinseki, wants to make the brigade, which typically has 3,000 to 5,000 soldiers, the Army's main unit of action. Schoomaker is in the process of remixing the kinds of units the Army has in its active and reserve forces. Under his plan, the Army will go from 33 brigades to 48. At the end of the four years, the Army will revert to its limit of 482,000 active troops, but will remain at 48 brigades through the magic of eliminating unnecessary positions.

These moves are widely applauded by military experts who see the reorganization as a long-overdue reform. But many experts believe they do not go far enough in addressing the underlying issue of the need for more troops.

John Grady, spokesman for the Association of the U.S. Army, the Army's civilian lobby, called the moves "a good first step" but said "the continuing commitments of the Army worldwide speak to the need of the Army having to have another 30,000 to 40,000 permanently."

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