Rumsfeld takes hard line against boosting Army troop strength

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld took a hard stand this week against Senate efforts to expand the size of the Army by 10,000 soldiers, part of a bipartisan amendment introduced Wednesday by Sens. Jack Reed, D-R.I., and Chuck Hagel, R-Neb., to the president's $87 billion emergency supplemental spending package.

In a letter Wednesday to Senate Appropriations Committee Chairman Ted Stevens, R-Alaska, Rumsfeld said the additional troops would cost too much and take too long to train and equip for deployment to Iraq.

"The addition of Army end-strength is not a near-term solution to the current stress on the force," Rumsfeld wrote. "It takes a great deal of time to recruit, train, organize, and equip new forces."

Rumsfeld wrote, "The current cost estimates for an additional Army end-strength of 10,000 forces are imprecise, but I am told they could be between $500 million and $1 billion per year." He added that the troop increase proposed in the amendment could take two years to fully integrate into deployable forces.

Senate Republicans Wednesday failed to defeat the amendment, intended to provide more troops for an occupation force, according to statement by Reed. Specifically, the increase would create additional military police, light infantry, special operations and civil affairs units.

Reed and Hagel said they believe the Army is stretched too thin to handle a protracted commitment in Iraq that could last as long as 10 years, although Rumsfeld argued in his letter that "adding long-term end-strength to address what we hope will prove to be near-term stresses on the force" is not the answer.

Reed, in his statement, said there is an urgent need for Congress to take steps to provide the Army the tools needed to rotate troops in and out of Iraq "without sending the same units again and again."

He also said Congress must ensure that the United States is "prepared to face potential future crises around the world in countries such as Iran, North Korea and Syria while continuing our occupation in Iraq and fighting the war on terror in Afghanistan."

The amendment is intended in part to expand the number of active military personnel in an effort to avoid plummeting recruitment and retention rates in active, Reserve and National Guard units in the future.

Reed and Hagel said the end strength increase would be paid for through the Iraqi Freedom Fund, a discretionary Pentagon account. The fiscal 2004 supplemental would add $1.9 billion to the fund.

But Rumsfeld, who has resisted efforts to increase end strength in the past, said that if Congress wants to assist the Pentagon with long-term management of military personnel, "the single most important thing the Congress could do now would be to pass the House version of the 'National Security Personnel System' reforms that the president proposed in his legislative submission."

Rumsfeld contended the controversial personnel reforms would provide the department with greater flexibility in the management of civilian personnel that would end the use of active duty military personnel for tasks that could be assigned to civil servants.

"Unfortunately, outdated civil service laws make it too difficult to hire, transfer, assign, and otherwise manage civilian personnel, so the department has fallen into the longstanding practice of using military where civilians would be equally or more appropriate," he wrote.

Rumsfeld cites studies done during the Clinton administration that concluded there are some 320,000 such positions, and that even if only 20,000 of these jobs could be converted, the department would significantly improve long-term military availability and reduce stress on the force without the need to increase end strength.

During Wednesday's floor debate, Stevens offered a motion to table the Reed-Hagel amendment.

Stevens' effort failed, but because he cast a tactical vote against his own motion, he was allowed to offer a motion to reconsider. The state of the amendment remained in play at presstime late Thursday.

Last year, Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., and former Sen. Max Cleland, D-Ga., won Senate approval for an amendment to the FY03 defense authorization bill increasing total active-duty military end strength by 12,000. And the House Armed Services Committee under former Armed Services Chairman Bob Stump, R-Ariz., attempted to raise end strength for all of the active duty services and the reserves by 12,552.

Rumsfeld resisted these attempts as well, and a compromise was reached in the authorization conference to allow the Defense secretary discretionary authority to exceed current end strength by 3 percent.

It was unclear whether lawmakers intended the increase to be temporary or permanent. But a December 2002 Congressional Research Service issue brief on end strength stated that the Congressional Budget Office estimated the increase would have cost over $1 billion annually in the Pentagon's personnel accounts to fully train, equip and sustain additional troops.

However, Pentagon analysts also have said that Rumsfeld's proposed reforms to military personnel management would take just as long to implement and would not yield any immediate lessening of the burden on troops, particularly those now in Iraq and Afghanistan.