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As the Bush administration ponders deploying U.S. soldiers to help secure peace in Liberia, the notion of sending more troops abroad has sparked a political question at home: Is the U.S. military already doing too much with too little?

U.S. forces are 1.4 million strong, and an additional 1.2 million individuals serve in the reserves. But the troops already are committed in 136 countries across the globe — a problem that is most acute for the Army, which is only a third of the U.S. force, but which plays a disproportionate role in peacekeeping operations.

Army commitments include nearly 135,000 still in Iraq, 44,800 in Kuwait, 32,000 in South Korea, 11,400 in Afghanistan, and 2,150 in Kosovo and Macedonia. All of these missions could wind up lasting years, not months.

While current estimates suggest as few as 500 U.S. troops could be sent to the war-ravaged, yet tiny West African nation of Liberia, some analysts are using the prospect of the deployment to raise a general alarm about what they see as an increasingly overextended, exhausted fighting force.

"The Liberia mission is worth doing anyway, because it can be kept very small and relatively short. We've already broken the camel's back," says foreign policy scholar Michael O'Hanlon, "and we're going to have to repair that back with major surgery."

Reluctance Revisited

The potential mission to Liberia also is noteworthy because it appears to mark a real change in President Bush's philosophy on U.S. engagement in world affairs.

Just three years ago, then-presidential candidate George Bush told ABCNEWS' Sam Donaldson he would oppose such use of American force. Even in the case of another Rwanda — where hundreds of thousands were killed by tribal warfare in 1994 — Bush said he "would work with world organizations and encourage them to move, but I would not commit our troops."

"The president must set clear parameters as to where troops ought to be used and when," Bush said at the time. "We should not send our troops to stop ethnic cleansing and genocide in nations outside our strategic interest."

Such reluctance was likely borne of ugly memories — particularly of a failed 1993 mission to intervene in the civil war in Somalia in which 18 U.S. servicemen were killed in just one gruesome incident. The event later was memorialized in the book and movie, Black Hawk Down.

Africa has rarely been perceived as vital to U.S. interests, said Herman Cohen, a 38-year foreign service veteran and former assistant secretary of state for African affairs.

"I found the Defense Department and especially the Joint Chiefs of Staff very reluctant to do anything in Africa," Cohen told ABCNEWS last week. "We want to save what we have for important places," he said of their mentality.

Yet for many Americans, Sept. 11, 2001, changed the definition of "strategic interest."

Today, "one wants to be careful about permitting conditions of failed states to create conditions in which there's so much instability that you begin to see greater sources of terrorism," National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice said Friday.

Price of Deployment

Some analysts worry that overextension could "break" the military.

"People will quit the army; they'll choose not to re-enlist," predicts O'Hanlon. "It's one thing to be asked to serve overseas every third or fourth or fifth year, but it is not acceptable to put these people overseas more than half the time."

But strategic thinking, O'Hanlon argues, needs to go beyond the question of how many troops go where.

"You need balance in the American military. You do want to push for some new ways of fighting," he said. "You do want to look for ways to win wars with smaller forces. But at the same time, you don't want to cut too far, because there are missions out there that still require a lot of boots on the ground."

The administration last week seemed to settle on terms for its involvement.

"I have made up my mind there needs to be stability in Liberia," President Bush announced Friday. "And one of the conditions for a peaceful and stable Liberia is for Mr. Charles Taylor [the Liberian president] to leave the country."

"Charles Taylor needs to leave, because Charles Taylor is the problem," Rice concurred.

Taylor said Sunday that he has agreed to step down and will accept exile in Nigeria. He also said the United States should send peacekeepers.

The first U.S. military experts arrived in Liberia today, to study the situation in the country and help the administration determine whether to send troops.

Yet few observers have forgotten that the last time the administration took aim at a foreign leader, more than 250,000 American troops were sent to topple Saddam Hussein.

The as yet undetermined outcome of that mission will most likely define the American people's appetite for intervention elsewhere.

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