Iraq duty stretches U.S. Army to its limits

WASHINGTON — Its equipment and troops battered from fighting in Iraq, the Army will allow four of its divisions returning from combat duty to fall to readiness levels that would make them not fully combat-ready for as long as six months, a senior Army official said Friday.

The divisions — which together make up more than 100,000 soldiers, 40 percent of the army's combat troops — are reeling from year-long deployments fighting first a war and then a counterinsurgency that have wreaked havoc with everything from tank treads to helicopter roters to nerves.

By permitting the units to, in effect, drop their guard and recharge, the Pentagon is taking a calculated risk that it won't be forced to fight a war with a major adversary such as North Korea on short notice. Not since the all-volunteer military was established in 1973 has the army allowed so many of its units to fall to such low readiness levels.

"We have a non-negotiable contract with the U.S. people that our army will always be ready to fight and win its wars," said the senior army official who briefed a small group of reporters on the plans Friday on condition of anonymity, after the Army's plan was disclosed in the Wall Street Journal. "But this is a fact of life. What we are seeing now is, the operational tempo of our army is going to require time to reset our equipment, reset our training, reset our soldiers so we can build this army back up."

The four divisions — the 82nd Airborne, the 101st Airborne, the 1st Armored and the 4th Infantry — will be replaced by four other divisions beginning in February as part of a nearly complete rotation of troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.

President Bush could take political heat for the decline in readiness. During his run for president in 2000, he struck hard at the Clinton administration for permitting two small divisions just back from missions in the Balkans to lower their readiness levels for four months.

Because of the toll that Iraq has taken on the Army's equipment — not to mention its personnel — it could take six months to bring some units returning from the war zone back up to speed, the senior Army official said.

On Capitol Hill, lawmakers said the news is indicative of an Army stretched too thin by a war it was not prepared for or designed to fight.