The massive force, numbering 300,000 men according to DRC authorities and 210,000 according to UN figures, "is for many reasons incapable of guaranteeing security" in a country five times as large as France, a military expert here said, requesting anonymity.

"First of all, its soldiers are poorly paid, if at all, and they regularly rob civilians or extort money from them," he said.

Even worse is the absence of "a real chain of command," which the military expert said made the army's operating problems "practically insurmountable."

In the latest test of the army's quality, fighting has broken out near the eastern town of Kanyabayonga, where UN officials in Kinshasa reported an attempted incursion from neighbouring Rwanda.

Kanyabayonga is in Nord Kivu Province near the border with Rwanda, which backed two waves of rebels, in 1996 and 1998, the first of which toppled the dictator Mubuto Sese Seko. The second rebel movement agreed in 2003 to join the government and army of President Joseph Kabila.

Today the national army is in the throes of being restructured to incorporate the ex-rebels.

But the military expert said the army "does not have the resources to force these combattants to disarm and integrate, which is nevertheless the only way to neutralize the leadership of the former rebel movements."

Since Sunday, the government has been sending reinforcements from an army garrison in Beni, in northern Nord Kivu province, to bolster troops who are encountering resistance from armed men in Kanyabayonbg, further south.

A diplomat in Kinshasa observed: "While the Congolese army strains to send troops to Nord Kivu, those they are up against lack nothing. Weapons come in, thanks to collusion within local governments, from certain neighboring states."

He said the army has had chronic operating problems, in contrast to opposing forces who are much better equipped and experienced in guerrilla tactics in the hilly forested terrain of the eastern DRC.

A DRC officer based in Beni was quoted by the UN mission in the DRCas saying: "The army is having difficulty sustaining the siege of Kanyabayonga mainly because of an equipment supply problem."

Another officer said the soldiers from the south of the province, mostly drawn from a rebel group formerly backed by Rwanda, see the reinforcements from Beni as a "threat" that could deprive them of their relative autonomy -- or their only remaining base should they decide to take up arms again against Kinshasa.

"They lack everything: money, uniforms, food, means of communication and transportation ... so they don't want to join the national army without compensation," he told AFP, also requesting anonymity, by telephone from the provincial capital Goma.

On Tuesday dignitaries from the province's main ethnic group, the Nande, exhorted President Kabila to supply "appropriate means" to the army, slamming Kinshasa for "pompously announcing the deployment (of reinforcements) without sufficiently equipping or feeding the troops."

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