G.I. woe: three years ago, George W. Bush charged that U.S. troops were being intolerably overburdened. Today, our men and women in uniform are stretched even thinner--and it's about to get much worse.

• Author: Confessore, Nicholas

DURING THE FALL OF 1999, GEORGE W. Bush, then the governor of Texas and a leading candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, introduced what would become a staple of his stump speech over the following year. Appearing at The Citadel military academy, Bush painted a grim picture of the U.S. armed forces under Bill Clinton. "Not since the years before Pearl Harbor has our investment in national defense been so low as a percentage of GNP," Bush told the crowd that day. "Yet rarely has our military been so freely used." Bush accused the Clinton administration not only of underfunding the military--a perennial conservative complaint--but also of overburdening it with unnecessary deployments. "Resources are over-stretched," he charged. "Frustration is up, as families are separated and strained. Morale is down. Recruitment is more difficult. And many of our best people in the military are headed for civilian life."

There was an element of truth to his charge. By the late 1990s, the number of active-duty men and women under arms had decreased from more than 2 million during the Gulf War to just under 1.4 million, much of it due to planned post-Cold War drawdowns begun under Bush's father. Yet during the same period, the military had faced a major new deployment roughly every six months--most of them operations, like Haiti or Somalia, that were layered on top of the post-Cold-War requirement that the Pentagon be able to fight two major regional wars at once.

All these deployments profoundly changed the lives of tens of thousands of soldiers, including Brian Wells, a staff sergeant with the 10th Mountain Division. Wells joined the 10th Mountain in 1998, moving his family to the division's home base at Fort Drum, N.Y. The following year, as U.S. forces bombed Kosovo, he spent a month away from his family at Fort Polk, La., participating in the arduous war games that bring soldiers to peak preparedness. Immediately after, he was deployed to Bosnia for four months; on his eldest son's first day of kindergarten, Wells was on peacekeeping duty outside Tuzla. A year later, he headed back to Louisiana for more exercises. Like most soldiers, Wells enjoyed being in the military. But between his deployment, exercises, training, and time spent at battle schools, military life was becoming grueling. His wife and two sons, now aged 2 and 6, didn't see him as often as they'd like. "With all the different situations around the world with different countries," Wells told me last January, speaking in the clipped cadence of a 10-year military veteran and the flat vowels of his native Chicago, "it just kept adding on and adding on and adding on."

Bush gained office in part by pledging to relieve soldiers like Wells from the onerous burdens the Clinton administration had imposed by, among other things, reconsidering the U.S. presence in the Balkans. Yet military life hasn't gotten easier since Bush took office; indeed, it's gotten measurably harder. For Wells, the war on terrorism has meant "more frequent deployments, less time at home"--not just more missions, but more time training for them and the constant pressure of being on a permanent war footing. "Since the war on terrorism has expanded so quickly and so vastly, you never know when, or where, you're going to go," he says. Wells spent five months in Afghanistan after September 11 and did yet another stint in Louisiana this past fall. "I missed all four of our birthdays, the anniversaries, major holidays. 2002 gone. No birthday parties, no Christmas, nothing" Orders to deploy to the Middle East could come any day.

More military spending, it turns out, hasn't made life any easier. The extra $70 billion a year the Bush administration has pumped into the Pentagon has bought more smart bombs and slightly fatter paychecks. But it hasn't bought a much bigger military force. There are only about 27,000 more active-duty troops today than in 2000--and even with those additions, the military is more overstretched now than it was when Bush took office. During the first three months of this year, the United States had more than twice as many troops on overseas missions at any given time as it did in 2000. It's getting harder to recruit new soldiers, and, on the whole, harder to keep the ones we have. The Army is so short of some specialties that it has imposed stop-loss on about 50,000 troops--that is, refused to let them retire or resign--while in January, the Marine Corps imposed a 12-month stoploss order on the entire service. Large swathes of the U.S. military thus no longer meet the definition of a volunteer force. Nor, increasingly, do the reserves. Since September 11, thousands have been serving for long stretches, far from home, to meet the country's growing homeland-security requirements and to fill in the gaps left by active-duty soldiers deployed elsewhere in the world. Their employers are grumbling, and their families are griping.

The average man in uniform, in other words, is more frustrated and overburdened today than he was two years ago--affecting not just the soldiers themselves, but their ability to protect the rest of us. "The great majority of Army combat units are not ready for combat without significant additional training," wrote Lt. Col. Tim Reese, a respected commander who led a U.S. tank battalion in Kosovo, in Armor magazine last summer. Our capability and security has already begun to suffer. Because. Army troops weren't able to deploy quickly enough, the first ground forces in landlocked Afghanistan last year were Marines, specialists in amphibious assault. During the U.S.-led battle at Tora Bora and Operation Anaconda, the brass was both unwilling and unable to deploy enough troops to encircle the enemy, allowing hundreds of Taliban and al Qaeda fighters to escape to neighboring Pakistan, including, possibly, Osama bin Laden.

Things are about to get much worse. During the last two months, President Bush has ordered some 87,000 of America's overstretched soldiers to the Persian Gulf, where they joined a force of roughly equal magnitude already preparing for war in Iraq. As many as 250,000 U.S. troops will take part in an eventual invasion of Iraq, on top of those already peacekeeping, battling terrorism, and guarding American interests around the world. Fighting a war, of course, is the military's primary purpose. But when the shooting stops, about 75,000 of those soldiers will need to stay behind--twice as many as are currently stationed in South Korea to deter an invasion from the North, and more than 12 times the dwindling number serving in Bosnia and Kosovo.

That can only mean decreased readiness, shrinking re-enlistments, lower morale, and, quite possibly, more mistakes like the one at Tora Bora. Today's military is "like a football team playing back to back games in overtime with no practice or rest time," says Maj. Donald Vandergriff, an ROTC instructor at Georgetown University and a leading expert on the military's personnel crisis. "They may win one week, but they can't win the next week because they're exhausted" Today's force...