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The Army is facing a personnel crisis as experienced soldiers retire and new recruits become more difficult to find, putting the future of the country's all-volunteer force at risk, the service's top general said Wednesday.

"By no stretch of the imagination is it a hollow Army or a broken one, but it is out of balance," said Army Chief of Staff Gen. George Casey. "We are so consumed by the current [wars] that we can't do the things we need to do to prepare for the future." The effects of seven years of continuous war is cumulative, he said, and it is wearing down the Army.

The service has a plan to rebalance and repair itself, but it will take three to four years to fully implement, said Casey at the Association of the U.S. Army's Institute of Land Warfare breakfast meeting in Washington. Relief for soldiers stressed by repeated combat tours can only come once troop levels in Iraq decline.

"The surge has sucked all the flexibility out of the system" and has complicated the Army's efforts to provide a large enough pool of units to rotate through Iraq without extending combat tours, he noted. When the surge strategy was announced last year, tours were lengthened from 12 to 15 months and soldiers have only a year between deployments.

Casey said that as the surge winds down and more soldiers begin to come home, the Army will be able to return to the standard 12-month combat tour. The plan is for troops to spend two years at home for every year spent in a combat zone.

In addition, the Army is building more brigade combat teams as part of its modularity initiative to increase the number of available units in the rotation pool. By 2012, the service plans to have 76 combat brigades, 48 in the active component and 28 in the National Guard.

Casey said the Army was concerned about losing experienced mid-level officers and senior noncommissioned officers. To counter the loss, the service will be spending $1.4 billion from the 2008 supplemental war spending bill on additional support to family members, including better housing, child care and health care, and education opportunities.

Casey is fully committed to the Army's controversial flagship modernization program, the $200 billion and climbing Future Combat Systems, which will create a suite of new armored vehicles, sensors and weapons tied together by a sophisticated battle command network. Troops will begin field testing hardware and software prototypes, and FCS' first vehicle, a new mobile cannon, will be rolled out this summer, he said.

The Army also will unveil a new doctrine manual next month, according to Casey. It will move the service in new directions on structure and troop training to battle future enemies, employing a mix of tactics and weapons. Instead of fighting either a conventional or irregular campaign, the Army will confront a complex mix of both, battling nonstate enemies and armed groups embedded among the population in the world's urban centers.

"We will be fighting more among the people" in the 21st century, he said, and soldiers won't have the "luxury" of moving noncombatants away from the battlefield as in past conventional wars. Combat in urban areas will demand better intelligence, both human and technical, and precisely delivered firepower to avoid harming innocents while fighting "in the unblinking eye of the 24-hour cycle."

It also will require all the elements of national power, military, economic and political, coming together to be successful in these conflicts. "There is not a military solution" to the complex wars of the type seen in Iraq and Afghanistan, Casey said.

The complexity of future wars demands an agile Army, he added, "and we are not very agile as an institution." The new doctrine manual will place a primacy on intellectual officers who can find solutions to complex battlefield challenges.

Casey sees a long-term ideological struggle brought on by globalization between the world's haves and have-nots and a competition for scarce resources. His biggest concern is weapons of mass destruction falling into the hands of one of the world's 1,200 terrorist groups that are actively trying to acquire them.

The ungoverned territories, where governments are absent, are breeding grounds for terrorist groups, he noted, and the military must partner with other nations' forces in counterinsurgencies.