"THE THIN GREEN LINE"

I've written about this before (here and here).

Study: Army stretched to breaking point
By ROBERT BURNS
AP Military Writer
Jan 24, 5:30 PM EST


Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.

He wrote that the Army is "in a race against time" to adjust to the demands of war "or risk `breaking' the force in the form of a catastrophic decline" in recruitment and re-enlistment.

George Joulwan, a retired four-star Army general and former NATO commander, agrees the Army is stretched thin. "Whether they're broken or not, I think I would say if we don't change the way we're doing business, they're in danger of being fractured and broken, and I would agree with that," Joulwan told CNN last month.