WASHINGTON – With 250,000 troops deployed in more than 120 countries around the world, the U.S. Army is under great stress at the moment, the director for strategic plans and policy in the office of the deputy chief of staff for operations, said Oct. 3.

“More missions, fewer soldiers, we are incredibly busy and our government seems to have no limit on its appetite of what it wants us to do,” Maj. Gen. Keith Dayton told an Association of the U.S. Army panel on the Army’s role as a strategic force.

“The Army, if you include the National Guard and Reserves, is about 1 million strong right now, we’ve got about 250,000 overseas in 120 countries,” Dayton said. “If you had a quarter of your strength deployed, you are under extreme stress.”

As a result, he said, the United States has “a very stressed Army right now as a strategic instrument of policy.”

Over all since 1989, he said, the Army has had 43 major deployments, including ongoing operations in Iraq, Afghanistan, the Sinai, the Philippines, Kosovo and Bosnia.

Dayton showed a number of slides, including one that he described the “failed assumption slide,” which showed the expected troop levels in Iraq over time since the conflict began. The first set of assumptions showed a massive drawdown of troops at the end of major combat operations, the second set had U.S. forces out of Iraq by the end of this year. The current set of assumptions includes 17 combat brigades currently in Iraq, potentially spiking up for elections.

“The point is, the stress on the force does not go down; it’s constant,” he said.

“Some of these entire divisions, including the 101st Airborne, the 4th Infantry Divisions, will have all of its forces there shortly and the 10th Mountain Division split between Afghanistan and Iraq,” he said. “Next year we’re hoping for relief, but we’re not sure we’re going to get it. We’ll find out here in the next month.”

Dayton was one of five panel members addressing various aspects of the strategic role of the Army globally. Other panel members included Lt. Gen.Larry Dodgen, Strategic Command’s commander of space and missile defense, who updated on the status of the integrated missile defense effort; Lt. Gen.John Kimmons, the Army’s deputy chief of staff for operations who discussed the threats currently facing U.S. forces, most particularly “an extremist, Salafist insurgency that seeks to become a worldwide insurgency,” which is fueled and sped up by globalization; Maj. Gen. Marilyn Quagliotti, the vice director of the Defense Information Systems Administration who discussed the challenges of net-centric warfare and Brig. Gen. Dick Newton III, who talked about Strategic Command’s evolution over the last couple of years.