Wider mission stretches military

The legislation provides $550 million toward paying for the manpower increases. It allocates the Army a 1 percent hike of 4,800 active-duty people over current levels, while giving the Navy slightly less than 1 percent with a boost of 3,500, and the Air Force a half-percent increase, or 2,000 people. The Marine Corps – the only branch to win an increase from Rumsfeld – fares the best. It gains 1.5 percent, or nearly 2,400 people, who are needed to establish a new Marine Antiterrorism Brigade. The sub- committee also proposed allowing the services to exceed Congress's mandated "end strength" numbers by 1 percent next year without the Defense secretary's approval.

Not so fast, says Rumsfeld, who is worried that the "enormously expensive" expansion of active-duty forces could sap funds from other priorities, such as developing new high-technology weaponry and transforming the military to face future threats. It costs about $50,000 to recruit, train, and pay a new enlistee in the first year, while costs for a new officer run about $90,000.

"I am very reluctant to increase end strength, if I can avoid it," Rumsfeld told a meeting of troops in Illinois two weeks ago. "Resources are always finite, and the question is, would we be better off increasing manpower or increasing capability and lethality?"

Instead, Rumsfeld seeks to use the personnel crunch to goad the services into scaling back on non-military duties – such as overseas peacekeeping and US homeland security – that siphon resources from fighting war. It is, he admits, an uphill battle. "I'm a little alone in my view on this," he said in Kyrgyzstan this weekend.

Using manpower as a carrot, Rumsfeld has asked each of the services to come up with "a reasonable program ... to bring people who are doing nonmilitary functions, back into the military." In return, he says he will grant them the flexibility – but not necessarily the money – to increase their ranks by 2 percent.

High on Rumsfeld's list of targets for cutbacks are international peacekeeping missions, popular under the Clinton administration, such as in the Balkans and Sinai Peninsula. Partly at his urging, the United States has started a process of drawing down its 7,500 troops currently serving as peacekeepers in Bosnia and Kosovo.

As for US involvement with the multinational force sent to the Sinai two decades ago, Rumsfeld speaks of it as an anachronism. Of the 800 troops there, "some three or four hundred of them are simply cooks and doing administrative things which could be contracted out," he says. "The idea that we have to leave people in the Sinai for 22 years seems to me to be a reach."

If peeling potatoes on the Red Sea does not rank highly with Rumsfeld as a military mission, neither do many civilian jobs performed by US forces at home – from border patrol and airport security to immigration and customs. Currently, some 7,600 National Guard troops are engaged in those duties, a role Rumsfeld seeks to end.

Military personnel officials agree that many jobs not essential to combat could be handled by private contractors or transferred to other government agencies. "This is about trying to 'right size' so you can fight, but not have so many people cutting lawns, because you don't need someone to cut lawns in combat," said one military official. "They have other ways of defoliating," he quipped.

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