WASHINGTON, Jan 17: United States military officers in Iraq are telling colleagues in their country that they believe more American troops will be needed on the ground, the US media reported on Monday.

The Washington Times quoted an unnamed retired four-star army general as saying that he had received several e-mails from US military commanders in Iraq expressing strong disagreement with the Pentagon's position that Washington did not need to send more troops.

"Senior army officers in Iraq have told me we need more troops to do this mission," said the retired general, who asked not to be named because he does business with the Pentagon. "They are not bemoaning. Not griping. It's just what they feel they need," he said.

He said the most-often repeated figure was six to eight more brigades, or more than 50,000 more troops. But a retired air force general, Thomas McInerney, told the daily that the Pentagon's policy of encouraging Iraqi troops to take over more and more duties from American soldiers made more sense.

"American forces won't win this conflict. The Iraqis will. You always defeat an insurgency with indigenous forces, not foreign forces," the general said. The US goal is for a nation wide security force of 273,000 Iraqis. About 122,000 are now in the field.

The Bush administration has settled on a total American force of 150,000 troops in Iraq for the Jan 30 election, an increase of 12,000. The US hopes that the election of an assembly, coupled with advances in fielding Iraqi security forces, will allow Defence Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld to authorize a drawdown in late 2005.

A senior defence official said the topic of troop numbers in Iraq had been debated periodically in the Pentagon's 'tank,' the secure meeting place of the joint chiefs of staff.

The official said the most frequently broached rationale for not sending sizable reinforcements was that it would create an array of new targets around the country for insurgents to go after. It would also require billions of dollars to set up new camps and international supply lines, said the official.

A senior military officer in Baghdad told the newspaper that even with more troops the US would not be able to stop or negate all terrorist acts in a large country like Iraq.

Ken Allard, a retired colonel and author of four books on national security, told the newspaper that America needed to expand its military if it wanted to continue to shoulder its responsibilities abroad.

According to him, the current strength of 500,000-troop active force was not enough to fight wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and to deter aggression in Europe and South Korea.

"I would start adding forces until it is demonstratively too much," Mr Allard said. "What happens if somewhere something else goes wrong ... We are eating seed corn. In an 18-division requirement, we have a 10-division force," he said.