The Army's top officer withheld a required 2008 budget plan from Pentagon leaders last month after protesting to Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld that the service could not maintain its current level of activity in Iraq plus its other global commitments without billions in additional funding.

The decision by Gen. Peter J. Schoomaker, the Army's chief of staff, is believed to be unprecedented and signals a widespread belief within the Army that in the absence of significant troop withdrawals from Iraq, funding assumptions must be completely reworked, say current and former Pentagon officials.

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Schoomaker failed to submit the budget plan by an Aug. 15 deadline. The protest followed a series of cuts in the service's funding requests by both the White House and Congress over the last four months.

According to a senior Army official involved in budget talks, Schoomaker is now seeking $138.8 billion in 2008, nearly $25 billion above budget limits originally set by Rumsfeld. The Army's budget this year is $98.2 billion, making Schoomaker's request a 41% increase over current levels.

"It's incredibly huge," said the Army official, who, like others, spoke on condition of anonymity when commenting on internal deliberations. "These are just incredible numbers."

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In recent weeks, however, Schoomaker has become more publicly emphatic about budget shortfalls, saying funding is not enough to pay for Army commitments to the Iraq war and the global strategy outlined by the Pentagon.

"There's no sense in us submitting a budget that we can't execute, a broken budget," Schoomaker said in a recent Washington address.

Strains on the Army from the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan have become so severe that Army officials say they may be forced to make greater use of the National Guard to provide enough troops for overseas deployments.

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The National Guard has a goal of allowing five years at home between foreign deployments so as not to disrupt the family life and careers of its citizen soldiers. But instead it has been sending units every three to four years, according to Guard officials.

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Barry R. McCaffrey, the retired four-star Army general, also asserted that the armed forces needed to be expanded. “We cannot sustain the current national security policy with an Army, Marine Corps, Air Force lift capability and Special Operations forces of this size,” he added. “They are clearly inadequate.”

The pace of deployments and financing shortfalls, he said, had taken a toll of units in the active duty Army and the National Guard. “One third is completely ready to fight, and two-thirds are severely impaired,” he said.

Asked if it was true that only a handful of combat brigades not currently deployed were immediately ready for a crisis, a spokesman for the Army said he could not address specifics because the information was classified.

The Pentagon yesterday delayed for six weeks the return home of about 4,000 U.S. soldiers in Iraq's volatile Anbar province -- the second extension of U.S. forces in the country in two months -- as the insurgency and rising sectarian violence exert heavier demands on a stretched American ground force.

A brigade of the Army's 1st Armored Division, operating in Anbar's contested capital of Ramadi, has been ordered to stay on for 46 more days. Another brigade -- from the 1st Cavalry Division based at Fort Hood, Tex. -- will depart a month early, in late October, for a year of combat duty in Iraq.

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According to a Pentagon announcement, the shift is necessary to "maintain the current force structure in Iraq into the spring of next year." That confirms an assessment last week by Gen. John P. Abizaid, the senior U.S. commander in the Middle East, that no cuts in the more than 140,000 U.S. troops in Iraq are likely before next spring.

It also demonstrates the increasingly tough trade-offs U.S. commanders face between the imperatives of war fighting and the need to retrain and recuperate the taxed Army and Marine Corps.

In this case, commanders had to choose between extending thousands of U.S. troops serving in one of Iraq's deadliest cities -- the 1st Armored Division brigade in Ramadi -- or requiring another combat-hardened unit that has already served two tours in Iraq, a brigade of the 3rd Infantry Division, to return to the desert after less than a year at home. They opted for the former.

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The Army set a goal in 2003 of allowing active-duty soldiers to spend two years at home for every year overseas. But that aim has proved elusive because of the limited number of active-duty combat brigades available to deploy -- currently 36 -- as well as the continued high troop levels in Iraq and Afghanistan. More than 20,000 U.S. troops are now serving in Afghanistan, according to Army figures.

Active-duty soldiers today can expect to spend no more than a year at home between deployments, said Lynn Davis, a senior Rand Corp. analyst and lead author of a 2005 report on Army deployments titled "Stretched Thin." The number of Army combat brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan would have to fall by about half -- to 10 -- to achieve the Army's goal of two years at home, she said. In contrast, soldiers in today's armored, mechanized and Stryker brigades, which are most in demand, can expect to be away from home for "a little over 45 percent of their career," she said.

[...] Col. Tom James, who commands the division’s Second Brigade, acknowledged that his unit’s equipment levels had fallen so low that it now had no tanks or other armored vehicles to use in training and that his soldiers were rated as largely untrained in attack and defense.

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The enormous strains on equipment and personnel, because of longer-than-expected deployments, have left active Army units with little combat power in reserve. The Second Brigade, for example, has only half of the roughly 3,500 soldiers it is supposed to have. The unit trains on computer simulators, meant to recreate the experience of firing a tank’s main gun or driving in a convoy under attack.

“It’s a good tool before you get the equipment you need,” Colonel James said. But a few years ago, he said, having a combat brigade in a mechanized infantry division at such a low state of readiness would have been “unheard of.”

Other than the 17 brigades in Iraq and Afghanistan, only two or three combat brigades in the entire Army — perhaps 7,000 to 10,000 troops — are fully trained and sufficiently equipped to respond quickly to crises, said a senior Army general.

Most other units of the active-duty Army, which is growing to 42 brigades, are resting or being refitted at their home bases. But even that cycle, which is supposed to take two years, is being compressed to a year or less because of the need to prepare units quickly to return to Iraq.

After coming from Iraq in 2003, the Third Infantry Division was sent back in 2005. Then, within weeks of returning home last January, it was told by the Army that one of its four brigades had to be ready to go back again, this time in only 11 months. The three other brigades would have to be ready by mid-2007, Army planners said.

Yet almost all of the division’s equipment had been left in Iraq for their replacements, and thousands of its soldiers left the Army or were reassigned shortly after coming home, leaving the division largely hollow. Most senior officers were replaced in June.

In addition to preparing for Iraq, the Army assigned the division other missions it had to be ready to execute, including responding to hurricanes and other natural disasters and deploying to Korea if conflict broke out there.

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“I’m confident two of the four brigade combat teams would say, ‘O.K., let’s go,’ ” General Lynch said in an interview. “The Second and Fourth Brigades would say, ‘O.K., boss, but we’ve got no equipment. What are we going to use?’ So we’d have to figure out where we’re going to draw their equipment.”

[...] Some combat-skills training not likely to be used in Iraq has been shortened substantially, said Col. John Charlton, the brigade commander. “It’s about taking all the requirements and compressing them, which is a challenge,” he said.

The timetable also leaves officers and their soldiers less time to form close relationships that can be vital, several officers said.

And soldiers have less time to learn their weapons systems. Many of the major weapons systems, like artillery and even tanks, are unlikely to be used frequently in a counterinsurgency fight like Iraq.

The division has only a few dozen fully armored Humvees for training because most of the vehicles are in use in Iraq. Nor does it have all the tanks and trucks it is supposed to have when at full strength.

The Army has always waived these standards to let in a small number of applicants. But since the Iraq war, this number has risen substantially. In 2001, just 10.07 percent of Army recruits were given moral waivers—i.e., were allowed into the Army, even though they had committed misdemeanors or had once-prohibited problems with drugs and alcohol, records of serious misconduct, or disqualifying medical conditions. By 2004, this number had risen to 11.98 percent. But in 2005, it soared to 15.02 percent. And as of April 2006, according to a fact sheet obtained from an Army officer, the number has leapt to 15.49 percent.

Our military is low on parts, pay and morale. If called on by the commander-in-chief today, two entire divisions of the army would have to report "not ready for duty, sir."

GOV. GEORGE W. BUSH: Two weeks ago in this very city, I said what I'm going to say again. The current administration inherited a military ready for the dangers and challenges facing our nation. The next president will inherit a military in decline. As a percentage of the GNP, our investment in national security is at the lowest level since World War II. Overall in the armed services, commitments around the world have tripled, while our forces have been reduced by 40 percent.

America's military is the strongest in the world, confident, proud and willing to carry out every mission we give them. But we've got a serious problem in our military today. And that problem is not with our men and women in uniform; it is a problem of leadership at the very top of the chain of command.

The [...] administration has used our military too much and supported it too little.

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Yet rarely has our military been used so freely -- more commitments, less resources. It is a short-sighted policy with long- term consequences.

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The vice president doesn't even want a discussion on the state of our military. He says that just stating these facts is somehow running down America's military. Those are his words, "run down America's military."

So let's get something straight right now. To point out that our military has been overextended, taken for granted and neglected, that's no criticism of the military. That is criticism of a president and vice president and their record of neglect.