A changed military emerges from Iraq war

General Abizaid admitted that there was a lesson for the military in the fact that troops were unprepared to combat improvised explosives and other guerrilla weapons.

"We have to design our armed forces for the 360-degree battlefield and not the linear battlefield," he told House Armed Services Committee members.

And deployments - plus tough fighting - are clearly affecting the military's ability to attract and retain troops. Prior to September 11, 2001, the Department of Defense had about 250,000 uniformed personnel stationed overseas at any one time. Now that figure is 400,000.

Polls show that many potential enlistees, and their parents, have become concerned about the possibility of ending up in an Iraqi firefight. Last month the Army missed its target of 7,050 new active duty recruits by almost 2,000.

"We anticipate that recruiting challenges will continue in 2005," Charles Abell, principal deputy undersecretary of Defense for personnel and readiness, told Congress recently.

Yet Iraq - and more broadly, the fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan - is also providing the military with opportunity for comprehensive change. The US may have gone to war with the Army it had, to paraphrase Secretary Rumsfeld. But it's likely to leave the war with armed services that are considerably different.

Take the Navy. In the old days it had a strict 18-month cycle for ship deployments, notes Thompson of the Lexington Institute. This meant six months at sea, followed by six months downtime, and six months spent preparing for the next deployment.

That's been changed so that deployments are less automatic, and more responsive to events in the world. Such tactics as switching crews while ships remain at sea in effect increases the Navy's size, as it can lower the number in port.

The Navy "now has a completely new model based on surging in response to threats," says Thompson.

The Air Force, for its part, is inevitably becoming less fighter-centric. The most important airplane in Iraq, according to Abizaid of Central Command, has been the C-17 airlifter. For this reason, plus budget pressure, the projected numbers of the new F-22 fighter are dwindling.

Then there's the Army. With the Marines, it has shouldered most of the Iraqi fighting, and suffered many of the casualties.

Iraq has given the Army an opportunity to test and change its new Stryker brigades, which, with their wheeled armored vehicles, are intended as a lighter and faster-acting fighting force. It has put the service on notice of its need for greater modularity - in which each division might be less unique, with interchangeable smaller units.

"The Army has been through very tough times in the last four years. What has come out is a determination to really completely change its organization," says Mr. Thompson.

Right now the US military is embarking on a new Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR) process, a periodic exercise in which the Pentagon leadership sets down a broad vision for the structure and use of US forces in the world.

If nothing else the QDR this time may allow the Pentagon and the Congress to draw on the Iraq experience and decide how to balance the demands of peacekeeping and war-fighting in the modern age.

"We need as a nation to decide what we want our military to be," says Jack Spencer, a military analyst at the Heritage Foundation.

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