NEW YORK, July 5: The current burden of fighting wars on two fronts — Iraq and Afghanistan — is prompting planners at the Pentagon to rethink the war strategy since it is limiting the Pentagon’s ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts, the New York Times said on Tuesday.

Instead, the Pentagon is weighing whether to shape the military to mount one conventional campaign while devoting more resources to defending American territory and anti-terrorism efforts, the Times said.

The consideration of these profound changes are at the centre of the current top-to-bottom review of Pentagon strategy, as ordered by Congress every four years, and will determine the future size of the military as well as the fate of hundreds of billions of dollars in new weapons.

The paper said the concern that the concentration of troops and weapons in Iraq and Afghanistan was limiting the Pentagon’s ability to deal with other potential armed conflicts was underscored by Gen Richard B. Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, in a classified risk assessment to Congress this spring.

But the current review is the first by the Pentagon in decades to seriously question the wisdom of the two-war strategy.

The two-war model provides enough people and weapons to mount a major campaign, like the 1991 Gulf war or the invasion of Iraq in 2003, while maintaining enough reserves to respond in a similar manner elsewhere, the paper said.

An official designation of a Counter-terrorism role and a shift to a strategy that focuses on domestic defence would have a huge impact on the size and composition of the military.

In a nutshell, strategies that order the military to be prepared for two wars would argue for more high-technology weapons, in particular warplanes.

An emphasis on one war and Counter-terrorism duties would require lighter, more agile forces - perhaps fewer troops, but more Special Operations units - and a range of other needs, such as intelligence, language and communication specialists, the paper said.

Civilian and military officials are trying to decide to what degree to acknowledge that operations like the continuing presence in Iraq - not a full-blown conventional war, but a prolonged commitment - may be such a burden that it would not be possible to also fight two full-scale campaigns elsewhere.

In effect, the unusual mission in Iraq, which could last for years, has not just taken the slot for one of the two wars; it has upended the central concept of the two-war model. It is neither a major conventional combat nor a mere peacekeeping operation. It does not require the full array of forces, especially from the Navy and the Air Force, of a conventional war, and it takes far more troops than peacekeeping ordinarily would.

The force of 138,000 troops in Iraq is only 13,000 smaller than it was at the height of the offensive on Baghdad two years ago, yet the administration describes the campaign not as a major conventional war, but as the leading effort in the nation’s fight against terrorism.

“The war in Iraq requires a very large ground-force presence,” Loren Thompson, an analyst at the Lexington Institute, a policy research centre in Arlington, told the Times. “War with China or North Korea or Iran, the other countries mentioned in the major review scenarios, would require a much more capable navy and air force.”

Mr Thompson added that ‘what we need for conventional victory is different from what we need for fighting insurgents, and fighting insurgents has relatively little connection to stopping the spread of nuclear weapons. We can’t afford it all.”

The Pentagon’s sweeping study, called the Quadrennial Defence Review, is not due to be completed until early next year, when it will be submitted to Congress with the administration’s annual budget request.