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Army Chief of Staff Gen. Peter Schoomaker on Thursday argued that the Defense Department must lift restrictions governing the mobilization of National Guard and Reserve troops to meet current demands in Iraq and Afghanistan and ease pressures on active-duty troops.

Schoomaker, who also left open the possibility of significant increases in the size of the Army, painted a dire picture of ground troops' ability to respond to worldwide operations should current mobilization policies remain intact.

"The situation in the Middle East and rest of the world leads me to conclude we are on a new long-term plateau of high operational demand," Schoomaker told the independent Commission on National Guard and Reserves during a hearing on Capitol Hill. "And, in my view, we are on a dangerous path that dictates we must increase our strategic depth, increase readiness and reduce our operational risk."

Current policies on mobilizing reserve units are "more restrictive than need be" and hamper the Army's ability to fight the war in Iraq, Schoomaker said. "If left unchanged, these policies will perpetuate the dilemma we are facing," he added.

The Pentagon now protects Guard and Reserve troops from repeated involuntary mobilizations, promising to limit deployments of reservists to once every five or six years -- a practice Schoomaker said should be revisited. With many Guard and Reserve troops unavailable for combat rotations, the Army has been forced to pull troops from several different units to compile deployable brigades.

"In my view, we must deploy our force as cohesive units, not as individual volunteers," Schoomaker said. "This will require us to remobilize units and reserve component soldiers, and this position is strongly endorsed by our reserve component leaders."

But Lt. Gen. Clyde Vaughn, director of the Army National Guard, cautioned to reporters that Guard members, who have provided much of the combat power in Iraq, should not be deployed overseas for longer than one-year rotations. Vaughn also stressed that Guard troops should have at least four years at home for every one year they are deployed.

During the hearing, Schoomaker also left open the possibility of increasing the size of the total Army beyond the 30,000 additional troops authorized over the last several years. The Army has 507,000 troops, with the authority to grow to 512,000 soldiers using supplemental wartime appropriations. He said the Army could add between 6,000 and 7,000 more soldiers each year.

But Schoomaker cautioned that increases to troop levels, a costly endeavor, should not come at the expense of the Army's technological transformation program or the other services' budget shares. "My view is the nation can afford to increase the defense top line," he told reporters.