Ed Wheat’s ambulance races through the streets of Newark en route to yet another GSW. Coolness under pressure and his experience with gun and knife wounds makes him the perfect candidate for another job, one the Army and Marine Corps are more and more desperate to fill. A few months ago, Wheat and several of his colleagues were approached by a Navy recruiter who promised a “tax-free $120,000 bonus” if they agreed to sign on as medical consultants with a Marine Corps unit in Iraq.

The Defense Department quietly asked Congress on Monday to raise the maximum age for military recruits to 42 for all branches of the service. The Pentagon’s request to raise the maximum recruit age to 42 is part of what defense officials are calling a package of “urgent wartime support initiatives” sent to Congress Monday night prior to a Tuesday hearing of the House Armed Services military personnel subcommittee.

As the violence in Iraq persists, so has pressure to maintain the number of American boots on the ground. This is a problem, since lately, the Army hasn't come close to meeting its recruitment goals. So it's been drawing from a pool of semi-retired soldiers called the Individual Ready Reserve, and it's a sign that it needs able (and not so able) bodies to fill the gap.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has consistently rejected any contention that the Army is stretched too thin in fighting simultaneous wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. But a new Army study has concluded the service is so strained that the U.S. will soon "need to decide what military capabilities the Army should have and what risks may be prudent to assume."

Mark Allen, a spokesman for the National Guard Bureau at the Pentagon, said another factor was that a declining number of soldiers at the end of their regular Army commitment were joining the National Guard. Allen said traditionally half of the National Guard was soldiers with prior military service, but the figure was now 35 percent. "If you left the Army today and the reason you left was because of the overseas deployments, if that was a negative for you, why would you get in the Guard and face the same thing?" Allen asked. The Army National Guard missed its annual recruiting goals in fiscal 2003 and 2004 by about 13 percent each year, Krenke said.

Congressional critics of President Bush's stay-the-course commitment to the war in Iraq argued Wednesday that the administration lacks sufficient troops on the ground to mount a successful counterinsurgency. Sen. John McCain, maintained that "one of the very big mistakes early on was that he didn't have enough troops on the ground, particularly after the initial victory, and that's still the case."

The Army, already likely to miss its recruiting goal this year, may have even more trouble filling its ranks next year, the service's chief of staff said Thursday. "We've got enormous challenges," Gen. Peter Schoomaker told the Senate Armed Services Committee.

THE United States would "have to face" a painful dilemma on restoring the military draft as rising casualties saw the number of volunteers dry up, a senator warned today. Joseph Biden, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, made the prediction after new data released by the Pentagon showed the US Army failing to meet its recruitment targets for four straight months.

Ike Skelton, the ranking Democrat on the House Armed Services Committee, and other lawmakers are concerned that continued fighting in Iraq with no end in sight is causing long-term damage to the army. Some have even suggested a possible return to a military draft.

A House bill to reinstate the draft finally made its way to the Armed Services Committee. Emile Milne, a spokesman for Rep. Charles Rangel (D-NY), who sponsored the controversial draft bill, said this is the type of bill “no one likes to touch” without a consensus of all branches of government.