Hello readers: Between the torture memos and the news out of Pakistan, things are busy over at N&S, but I wanted to comment briefly on testimony from Gen. Peter W. Chiarelli, the vice chief of Staff of the Army. He appeared before the Senate Armed Services subcommittee on readiness and management Wednesday to discuss the state of Army. He gave Capitol Hill a blunt assessment, one that I thought was worth sharing.  Simply put, he said the Army cannot continue to operate at this level of stress. For me, his testimony got at not only Army readiness but the possible implications of sending more soldiers to Afghanistan, given the state of the force.

Two wars, he said have lead to “increased deployments, shorter dwell and insufficient recovery times for our soldiers, their families and our equipment. Today as has been previously reported to this subcommittee, the Army remains out of balance.”

He reminded senators that there are still soldiers serving 15-month deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan, saying that the last of those units won’t be done with their extended tours until June. And more broadly, he said that despite the Army push to expand its size to 547,400 soldiers, the Army is an exhausted force that is not always getting what it needs between repeated deployments.

It was supposed to be that the U.S. Army would refit as they call it once the forces starting coming home from Iraq, but now with the Obama administration’s push into Afghanistan, the stress of the force will continue for at least another year. Indeed, to meet the president’s order for 17,500 combat troops plus 4,000 trainers, the Untied States military must draw down in Iraq.  But violence has been ratcheting up in Iraq; more than 75 people were killed today.

What happens if the Iraqi government asks the U.S. forces to stay longer in places like Mosul? That is, given the stress on the force as Chiarelli described, and the surge of troops headed into Afghanistan, isn’t the biggest worry now that Iraq might disintegrate slowly, enough to require more U.S. troops to stay in Iraq even as Army is surging in Afghanistan? At that point the United States could find itself with a sizeable force still in Iraq and a growing one in Afghanistan. Imagine the stress on the force in that scenario?