That is a notion that Rumsfeld and the rest of the administration absolutely resist. Why? Because they want their toys.

"If we permanently increase statutory end strength, we'll have to take the cost out of the DOD top line," Rumsfeld testified to the Senate Armed Services Committee in February. "That will require cuts in other parts of the defense budget, crowding out investments and the programs that will allow us to manage the force better and to make it more capable."

The Pentagon's budget has increased from $312 billion at the end of the Clinton administration to $469 billion in the past fiscal year (including various supplemental spending bills passed by Congress), according to the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments in Washington, but the money's going to machines, not men.

"The real question is: What business is the U.S. military in?" says the Lexington Institute's Goure. "Is it in the war-winning business and counterterrorism and preemption and all those things? Is it in the occupation and nation-building business? Because at the present time, with the kind of money we want to spend, you can do one or the other. You can't do both. Because you can either spend the money on equipment, transformation, all those words, or you can spend it on people."

Rumsfeld and Bush want to spend it on equipment, including "Star Wars" missile defense and an F-22 fighter aircraft that looks an awful lot like it was designed to take on the next-generation Soviet jet that is never coming.

"The defense budget has taken no sacrifice whatsoever, including a number of weapons systems that are Cold War relics and that are not attuned to what everyone acknowledges is the new asymmetric threat," Rep. Tauscher says. "Even if we just slow-walked national missile defense, we could take $1.6 billion out of this year and we could buy 10,000 Army troops."

But the Bush administration is making no plans to choose people over bigger and bigger toys. A decision to increase the size of the Army would require a trade-off, a sacrifice somewhere else in the defense budget, and neither Bush nor Rumsfeld has shown any inclination in that direction. Instead they are clinging to the idea that the combat-phase success of the transformed Army -- lighter, faster, more lethal -- can be translated into the hard slog of post-combat operations. So the crisis confronting the Army, weary and understaffed, hunkered down in an unstable Iraq, is deepening, and so is the danger to every soldier.

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