From: http://www.tcf.org/Publications/InternationalAffairs/legionsrc.pdf

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As shown in Figure 1, the U.S. Army is dug in deeply around the globe. In December 2001, slightly more than 100,000 army personnel were stationed abroad, mostly serving in long-standing deployments in continental Europe and Korea. By contrast, the army today has more than 333,000 soldiers deployed overseas, primarily in the Persian Gulf, Europe, South Korea, Afghanistan, and the Balkans. In 2004, twenty-six of the army’s thirty-three active combat brigades will deploy overseas at least once. Between 2003 and 2004, all thirty-three will have been deployed. This pace of operations is extremely high by the standards of recent history.

In contrast to the army-specific data above, Figure 2 shows that the share of all active U.S. forces (army, navy, air force, and marines) deployed overseas has nearly doubled when compared to the period immediately preceding the invasion of Iraq. From a longer-term perspective, as Figure 3 shows, today’s military is substantially smaller than it was throughout the cold war and even during the first Persian Gulf War in 1990.

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Given the current force size, these ongoing missions will be difficult to sustain. If the number of troops were to erode further, some current operations would have to be either reduced substantially or dropped. Unfortunately, there are signs that recruitment and retention among active-duty and reserve army personnel may be hurt by heavy deployments. A survey by the Army Research Institute for the Behavioral and Social Sciences reported in January 2004 that more than one in three army reservists planned to leave or to transfer to the inactive reserve when their current enlistments ended. Only a quarter said they planned to reenlist.

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A final indicator of looming personnel problems is the military’s heavy reliance on stop-loss orders—mandates from the Pentagon that involuntarily prolong the duties of a service member whose enlistment is expiring. Congress first authorized the Pentagon to issue stop-loss orders after the Vietnam War, but that power was not exercised until the buildup for the Persian Gulf War in 1990. Stop-loss orders were not issued again until November 2002.

As of spring 2004, the Pentagon had issued 24,000 stop-loss orders for active duty service members and 16,000 for reservists. In June 2004, the army significantly expanded the stop-loss program, preventing all soldiers whose units were scheduled for deployment to Iraq or Afghanistan from retiring or leaving the service as scheduled. Despite stop-loss orders, the army fell well short of its retention goals in the first half of the military’s 2004 fiscal year.

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Brookings Institution defense expert Michael O’Hanlon has written that “avoiding a personnel crisis in the all-volunteer military has become the chief force management challenge for Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld or his successor.” The army’s personnel challenge raises a number of possible policy options:

* The United States could reduce its commitments around the world and thus ease demand on its military resources. Defense analysts have argued for some time that the “two-front war” readiness doctrine is outdated and needs to be revisited.

* The administration could work harder to engage partners, whose forces could be used to supplement ours. Despite the prominence of alliance building in the 2002 National Security Strategy, few would dispute the contention that our major strategic alliances have been weakened over the past four years.

* We could invest in a larger voluntary force. In summer 2004, the House Armed Services Committee authorized a 30,000-soldier increase in the size of the army. The Senate Armed Services Committee approved a 20,000- soldier increase, which Senate staff estimated would cost an additional $1.7 billion per year.14 President Bush signed the 2005 defense spending bill in early August. But it is unclear how the administration will implement Congressional authorization of an additional 20,000–30,000 new troops to the U.S. military. Whether even that many new troops would relieve the current stress on the force remains in dispute.

* Some members of Congress are exploring the reinstatement of the draft to respond to the stress on our current force. Representative Charles Rangel (D-NY) and Senator Ernest Hollings (D-SC) introduced bills in the House and Senate to revive the draft.

* The next administration has an important choice to make. Whether we spend more money and expand the army’s ranks or make the strategic decision to reduce the number and size of deployments, the resolution of the force manpower and readiness problem is central to America’s national security.