Now, that battle is beginning again.
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates disclosed on Thursday that he had instructed the top officer in Iraq, those responsible for the broader Middle East and those back at the Pentagon in charge of worldwide deployments to prepare to make their cases about the best way to proceed.
The process is meant to allow President Bush to balance troop requests from Gen. David H. Petraeus, the senior American commander in Iraq, against other pressing national security needs, whether in Afghanistan or for a crisis elsewhere.
The overwhelming question is whether Mr. Bush will decide to halt the drawdown in July, when the number of troops is scheduled to revert to the 130,000 or so in place before the current troop “surge” began, or instead decide to order that the reductions continue, which would help ease strain on the overall force.
The answer will influence both the level of American commitment to Iraq and the future shape of the Army.
At a session on Wednesday sponsored by the Association of the United States Army, Gen. George W. Casey Jr., the Army chief of staff, made clear his service’s desire to reduce those burdens, which have forced the lengthening of Army tours in Iraq to 15 months, three months longer than the service would like.
General Casey, who was General Petraeus’s predecessor in Iraq, said the ground force was “being so consumed” by deployments to Iraq and Afghanistan that the Army was having “difficulty sustaining the all-volunteer force.”
By contrast, General Petraeus’s principal goal no doubt will be to seek sufficient troops to guarantee that security gains under the surge do not slip away, even as he reshapes the military commitment to focus more on training, supplying and otherwise helping Iraqi forces take over the country’s security.
Lee Adds: Let us advise Congress to allow our military to do its job with no pressure from men who know nothing about war!
