US military overstretched, morale at risk: Experts

"There is no question that the force is stretched too thin," said David Segal, director of the Centre for Research on Military Organisation at the University of Maryland.

"We have stopped treating the reserves as a force in reserve. Our volunteer army is closer to being broken today than ever before in its 30-year history," Segal said.

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Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and US commanders concede that the 1.4 million-member active duty armed forces, which have been cut by about a third since the end of the Cold War, are stretched by deployments in South Korea and Europe as well as post-2001 wars in Afghanistan and Iraq.

But Rumsfeld says he has seen no evidence so far in a major ongoing Pentagon study to support calls from analysts and some Army officials to boost the service's strength by perhaps 20,000 troops to 500,000.

Signs of strain are appearing, however. Segal said the National Guard finished last year around 10,000 below its recruitment target and he predicted more severe recruitment and retention problems next year.

To stem losses, the army has started offering reenlistment bonuses of up to $10,000 to soldiers in Iraq, Afghanistan and Kuwait. At the same time, it is preventing soldiers rotating home from retiring or leaving the service for up to 90 days after returning to their home bases.

The Army alone has blocked the departure of more than 40,000 soldiers, about 16,000 of them National Guard and reserve members who were eligible to leave the service this year, the Washington Post reported this week.

The Pentagon said that 187,746 National Guard and Reserve troops were mobilized as of Dec. 31, 2003. About 20 percent of the troops in Iraq are reservists or Guard members but this proportion is expected to double next year.