WASHINGTON, Dec 14: The US Army’s chief on Thursday said a bigger army and recurrent access to reserve forces were needed to keep pace with deployments that will otherwise break the active force.

Gen Peter Schoomaker said the army was incapable of meeting the demands of the “war on terror” and other contingencies without expanding both its active and reserve forces. “At this pace, without recurrent access to the reserve components, through remobilisation, we will break the active component,” Schoomaker said in testimony to a commission on the national guard and reserves.

He said developments in the Middle East and elsewhere made it ill-advised to assume that demands on the military will recede in the future. The US, he warned, is “on a dangerous path”.—AFP