Obliged to add troops, army agonizes over costs.

• Author: Erwin, Sandra I.
• Position: Defense Watch

Speculation that the Bush administration, once reelected, would resurrect the military draft to shore up Army and Marine Corps forces in Iraq created much anxiety among voters in last month's presidential election.

In reality, substantive discussions about reviving the draft have not taken place, according to senior Army officials. It is no secret that the services oppose the draft. They point to the success of the all-volunteer force in satisfying the national security needs of the United States.

Army Vice Chief of Staff Gen. Richard A. Cody asserts the issue that should have been more thoroughly debated by political leaders, but has largely been ignored, is not the draft, but rather how the nation will pay for the additional troops the Army requires to keep fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan.

"We don't need a draft. What we need is to have the discussion on how we will pay for the end-strength we need," Cody said.

Specifically, the problem is that the Army must, by law, expand by 20,000 active-duty soldiers beginning in fiscal year 2005. These would not necessarily be new recruits, but soldiers who already have been added to the Army rolls on a temporary basis to meet urgent deployment needs--and are funded by emergency war appropriations, rather than through the Army's personnel budget. The Army's position is that it should keep the 20,000 extra troops, only for the time being, and continue to seek supplemental dollars to cover the expense until the pace of operation slows down.

But Army officials were unsuccessful in convincing Congress to endorse their plan. The defense authorization bill signed by the president in October allows the Army to fund the 20,000 soldiers with supplemental appropriations only through September 30, 2005. But beginning in 2006, these troops will have to be computed into the Pentagon's budget request, which now must cover 502,400 active-duty soldiers, instead of 482,400.

Cody and other Army leaders have been sounding alarms in recent months about the financial consequences of permanently making the force larger.

These officials paint a grim picture. They worry that the cost of adding more soldiers--estimated at $3.6 billion a year for each 10,000 extra troops--will result in cutbacks to weapons programs, research, training and equipment maintenance.

Congress, for its part, has been displeased by the Army's resistance to expand the force. The service's expressed intent to only retain those troops on a short-term...