According to the Pentagon, the primary goal of this year's Quadrennial Defense Review is to apply the important lessons learned from more than four years of war against a global network of violent extremists so that it can ready itself for a long war against this enemy. Judged by that criterion, this version of the QDR is a colossal failure.

What the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq against these violent extremists have demonstrated is that the Army is too small. It is already stretched to the breaking point and is in danger of doing long-term harm to its capability to carry out its responsibilities.

Yet, rather than expanding the Army, the QDR actually calls for reducing it to its pre-2001 level of 480,000 people.

The Pentagon's civilian leadership tries to disguise this reduction by noting that it will be increasing the number of special forces by 15 percent, or 7,800 people; the number of troops assigned to psychological warfare and civil affairs units by one-third, or 3,700 people; and the number of combat brigades from 33 to 42. While all the steps are necessary, they are not sufficient.

If the number of soldiers is reduced, the troops will not get to spend sufficient time at home before being sent back to the combat zone, and the Army National Guard and the Army Reserve will continue to be overused. To put it bluntly, in this long war there's no substitute for boots on the ground. And in a counterinsurgency campaign, numbers are as important as capabilities. Our efforts in Iraq continue to suffer from the failure to put enough troops on the ground following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein.

According to studies conducted for the Pentagon by the Defense Science Board, and retired Col. Andrew Krepenivich, as well as analyses done by the Congressional Budget Office and former Secretary of Defense William Perry, the military does not have sufficient ground forces for the nation's war-fighting and peacekeeping demands.

The question is why the Pentagon continues to resist adding troops to the Army, even when Congress has authorized the Army to increase its active and reserve force by 50,000. Yes, the Army is having trouble meeting its recruitment targets despite lowering its educational and aptitude standards, increasing the age for initial enlistment, nearly doubling the number of waivers it gives and increasing the enlistment bonus to $40,000.

But the real reason the Pentagon resists adding troops is that it would cost money, and in this budget-constrained environment, adding troops to the Army would force the Pentagon to cancel cherished programs such as the F/A 22 or the DD(X) destroyer, which deal with threats from a bygone era, and slow down the deployment of the untested National Missile Defense system and reduce the number of unnecessary strategic nuclear weapons significantly.

But the QDR did not cancel a single weapons system or reduce the number of strategic weapons. In the fiscal 2007 defense budget, funding for these new weapons increased by more than $6 billion, and spending on nuclear forces will be close to $20 billion.

Since every 10,000 troops added to the Army would cost about $1.5 billion, the QDR proposal for increasing the size of the special forces and psychological warfare and civil affairs units, and keeping the Army end strength at its current level of 490,000 troops, would add some $3 billion to the Army budget. But even these increases are not enough.

The special operations and psychological warfare and civil affairs forces should be doubled, and two peacekeeping and stabilization divisions should be added, bringing the Army end strength to 575,000. This size Army would come at an annual additional cost of $11 billion, money that can easily be found in the procurement account.

The Pentagon is right that this will be a long war. But if the Army, which does the vast majority of the actual fighting in this war, breaks, we cannot win. Our technological superiority is not enough to guarantee that our forces will prevail in battle and in securing the peace.

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