All of these challenges relate in some way to what defense analysts are calling "overstretch," and although the issues involved are complex and difficult to tie together, all require immediate attention:

-- Challenge One is the extent to which strategic and planning problems have created the present strains on our forces. It is important to remember that major failures in planning and policy can put serious strains on virtually any force.

-- Challenge Two is the challenge of determining the level of burden on the national economy and federal spending: We must put defense spending in context, and to determine what level of national effort is affordable and justified.

-- Challenge Three is the challenge of meeting the needs of our active and reserve military. We not only face serious recruiting and retention problems, we have violated the unwritten "social contract" that makes an all-volunteer military possible.

-- Challenge Four is the challenge of measuring the extent to which we have too few forces or the wrong forces.

-- Challenge Five is the challenge of determining what kind of force transformation is affordable and needed, and the extent to which it can or cannot deal with the other aspects of overstretch.

-- Challenge Six is the challenge of dealing with the legacy of Cold War transformation programs and past efforts at force transformation that are fundamentally unaffordable.

-- Challenge Seven is the challenge of creating effective Iraqi forces and Iraqi capabilities for effective governance. It is the need to determine the extent to which we can and cannot create effective allied capabilities for asymmetric warfare, counter-insurgency and counter-terrorism.

-- Challenge Eight is the challenge of creating an effective interagency capability to perform national security missions

-- Challenge Nine is the challenge of dealing with the problem of alliances, international cooperation, and interoperability.

We need to be careful about the way we talk about what is happening in Iraq in terms of our U.S. force posture and what is and is not "overstretch." We must not confuse the burden that our strategic mistakes in Iraq have imposed on our forces with "overstretch" in terms of the proper size and nature of our forces.

Our force posture has been pushed to the limit of what some elements of our forces can do. But parts of today's problems are the result of major mistakes in planning the war, and in our initial approach to stability operations and war fighting. Others are the result of the fact that there are many aspects of our military posture that require transformation.

Let's begin with the mistakes we made in planning and conducting the war. We did demonstrate that we could fight the war we planned to fight: a conventional regional war with remarkable efficiency, at low cost, and very quickly. The problem was that we chose a strategy whose goals were unrealistic and impossible to achieve, and we only planned for the war we wanted to fight and not for what was almost certain to follow.

The fact that we failed to plan effectively for stability operations and nation building is a major strategic mistake, and though it is not overstretch in the normal sense of term, it created much of today's strain on our forces.

-- The military operation concentrated almost exclusively on defeating main force Iraqi conventional units, not for securing the country as U.S. forces advanced, preventing looting and dispersion of weapons, or even the effective protection of rear areas and the U.S. logistics and support system.

-- A State Department-led Interagency process proved able to diagnose many of the problems that were likely to emerge in Iraq, but failed to create an operational capability to deal with them in the field. Under pressure from neo-conservative ideologues in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, we let the Interagency process collapse, and effectively excluded it from the actual execution of stability and national building operations in Iraq. At the same time, both the U.S. military and Office of the Secretary of Defense chose to focus almost exclusively on the effort to defeat Iraq's conventional forces, and planned for instant liberation and not for meaningful stability and national building operations.

-- We originally planned for a short period of occupation, with major reductions beginning three months after the fall of Saddam Hussein; we did not have a meaningful plan for economic and military aid, and we ignored the need to help the Iraqis deal with their lack of political experience and capable governance. As a result, virtually the entire effort had to be improvised after the fall of Saddam and after it became clear that our original approach, as exemplified in the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Assistance's small staff and resources, was unworkable.

-- Our miscalculations about United Nations support, NATO and coalitions, and transit through Turkey all have their legacy in terms of the failure to provide the forces needed to prevent looting, suppress potential insurgents, and establish security throughout the country.

-- Our failure to handle de-Baathification properly and to focus on creating effective Iraqi military, police and security forces until mid-July 2004 placed a major and avoidable burden on the U.S. forces.

-- So did our failure to honestly assess the nature and size of the Iraqi insurgency as it grew and became steadily more dangerous.

-- We ignored the warnings of the Interagency community before the war. We did not provide, or even have, anything like the civilian elements in other agencies we needed, and much of the capability we did have was not willing to take risks in the field.

-- We recruited short-term civilian teams, many chosen for ideological and political reasons and without area expertise to make up for the lack of trained and experienced personnel and rotated by civilians and military through the country far too quickly to develop the expertise, interpersonal relations with Iraqis and other skills they needed and then have the time to use them effectively.

-- We compounded our problems by improvising a massive aid problem after the fall of Saddam and our initial occupation that sought to transform Iraq's economy on American terms using outside U.S. and other contractors and relying on private security forces. The result was a hopeless flawed effort we could not plan or manage, that failed to efficiently substitute dollars for bullets, and that has had to be repeatedly restructured and reprogrammed because of its inherent impracticality.

-- We tried to improvise a contractor approach to key elements of stability operations where it was clear that we did not have the talent necessary to manage the program and the contractors lacked core competence; and we then tried to force the contractors to hire mercenaries to protect themselves.

We need to decide very clearly what strategy we intend to pursue in the future before we decide whether we face "overstretch" in any given area of our forces.

(Anthony H. Cordesman holds the Arleigh A. Burke Chair in Strategy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington.)

(United Press International's "Outside View" commentaries are written by outside contributors who specialize in a variety of important issues. The views expressed do not necessarily reflect those of United Press International. In the interests of creating an open forum, original submissions are invited.)