Before Sept. 11, 2001, the Joint Chiefs told Congress that troops and their families were overstressed by high deployment rates. Since then:

• the United States has called up more than 500,000 Guard and Reserve members for the global war on terrorism;
   
• many Guard and Reserve units are on their second or third combat tours. They’re not a “reserve force” any more — they’re essential to meet the everyday mission;
   
• thousands of active duty troops have had — and will have — less than a year at home between multiple combat tours;
   
• recruiting has been in the toilet, and standards have been adjusted to take more recruits in the lowest mental category and without high school diplomas;
   
• the Army is so thin on captains and majors that nearly all of them are being promoted to the next grade;
   
• more married soldiers report rethinking careers that require such extended, repeated family separations; and
   
• DoD leaders acknowledge we’re in a “long war” against terrorism, with no end in the foreseeable future.

In 2005, Army leaders said they need 77 brigades to meet expected mission requirements,but the Defense budget proposed for FY 2007 claimed the Army only needs 70 brigades (including six fewer in the National Guard) to meet its future missions.

After major protests by Congress and Guard leaders (who had no hand in building the budget), the Pentagon now says it will fund the extra troops if the Guard can recruit them.

But where would the money come from? DoD leaders aren’t asking Congress for it — so they’d have to rob it from other readiness requirements in the middle of a war.

Do more with less? Been there, done that. It doesn’t work.

One percent of the country — military members and families — is absorbing the entire burden of national wartime sacrifice, and this high-risk budgeting only piles additional sacrifice on the already overburdened.

Our superb Army isn’t broken. But that’s only because hundreds of thousands of America’s finest continue to take one — and another, and another — for the team.

We can’t keep demanding that or the all-volunteer force will be headed for the ditch.

What’s broken is the thinking behind the Defense budget. Our forces are being sized to meet the budget, not the mission. That’s wrong, wrong, wrong.

Military leaders know it. Congress knows it. The whole country knows it. But nothing gets done about it.

Broken thinking is officially contagious.

Col. Steve Strobridge, USAF-Ret., director of MOAA government relations