An army under stress: a tale of two green lines.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: DEFENSE WATCH

An upcoming decision on whether to begin drawing down U.S. troops in Iraq sets the stage for yet another round of inside-the-Beltway wrangling on the burdens this war is piling on the armed services.

At issue is the long-term impact the war will have on the Army, particularly, and whether the demanding troop-rotation schedules are draining the service to the breaking point.

In this debate, the vantage points are as diametrically opposed as they can be. On each flank are seemingly irreconcilable views of what the Army is today--a "thin" green line that could buckle any day, or a "solid" green line that has not been this strong since the dark post-Vietnam days.

As often is the case in a politically charged polarizing polemic, the truth probably is somewhere in between.

By all accounts, the Army today is showing a determination to complete its job in Iraq, and to finally silence those critics who persistently have accused the service of resisting change and holding on to its Cold War grandeur.

To its credit, the Army has, in a relatively short four years, begun to come to grips with the ugliness and the indignities of fighting in cities--after many of its top leaders acknowledged that their forces had not been trained or equipped for counterinsurgency guerilla warfare before the invasion of Iraq in 2003.

"It amazes me how well the Army has held together in spite of these incredible stresses," says retired Army Maj. Gen. Robert H. Scales. The Army's ability to keep up with the troop commitments required in Iraq, says Scales, is "not due to any great set of policies. It's due principally to the enormous resilience of the American soldiers."

But serious questions remain about how long this can last. Or whether the unpopularity of the war eventually will make it politically too costly for the administration and Congress to continue to pour the enormous sums of money required not just to keep the troops there but also to pay for the expanded array of financial incentives now needed to retain and recruit soldiers and Marines.

The nation has to fear that the Army eventually will break, says former Defense Secretary William J. Perry. "We believe that the Bush administration has broken faith with the American soldier and Marine--by failing to plan adequately for post-conflict operations in Iraq, by failing to send enough forces to accomplish that mission at an acceptable level of risk, and by failing to adequately equip and protect the young Americans...