The question is prompted by a report in the London Sunday Telegraph May 28 that reported Britain's small, but high quality armed forces are already being stretched beyond their limits by two modest troop deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Thousands of British soldiers in Iraq have had their tour of duty extended from six to seven and a half months because Britain's Royal Air Force does not have enough transport aircraft to move troops out of Afghanistan and Iraq at the same time, the Sunday Telegraph said.

Britain is the only major U.S. ally with significant capability to deploy thousands of troops relatively quickly to trouble spots or for strategic operations around the world. The British military commitments in Iraq and Afghanistan are not even large.

Britain only has 8,500 troops in southern Iraq, a far smaller figure than the number of foreign mercenaries hired by the U.S. Department of Defense through private security companies still operating in that country. And in Afghanistan, the British military presence is significantly smaller than Germany's.

The RAF has fewer than five Tristar troop transporters, each capable of carrying 266 troops at a time and equipped with protective anti-missile defenses, to handle its commitments in the far-flung Iraq and Afghan theaters, the Sunday Telegraph said

"The revelation undermines the claim that Operation Herrick - the deployment of 3,300 troops in Afghanistan - would not affect troops in Iraq," the newspaper said.

The paper said that the transportation and manpower crisis came as no surprise. It said former senior British commanders had claimed that soldiers' lives would be lost if the British Army was constantly asked to "do more with less".

"The problem has arisen because the troops serving in Afghanistan were due to be replaced after six months on operations at the same time that 7,500 troops are serving in Iraq," the paper said.

It said that the troops of 20 Armored Brigade, normally based in Germany, would carry most of the increased burden in Iraq. The unit began arriving in southern Iraq last month and could under normal conditions have expected to return home in October.

The British Ministry of Defense confirmed that a shortage of aircraft meant troops would spend longer in Iraq.

The Telegraph said that the British government was trying to deal with the problem by leasing three U.S. C17 transport planes. However, even so, "the RAF was unable to give assurances that it would be able to cope with transporting more than 20,000 troops over two weeks," it said.

The British dilemma highlights the growing paradox facing the venerable North Atlantic Treaty Organization, founded in 1949. Over the past decade, at the urging of successive U.S. governments and with the enthusiastic support of British Prime Minister Tony Blair, the alliance has dramatically expanded in size so that it now numbers 26 member nations, the largest figure in its history. And more countries, including giant Ukraine, whose population and area are comparable to those of France, are eagerly knocking on its door hoping to get in.

Yet the growth of NATO, far from energizing the alliance, has actually dramatically weakened it in practical military, operational terms. Only three of its member nations, Britain. France and Germany, have proven both able and willing to deploy significant forces out of theater, and none of their commits amounts in size to as much as one seventh of the current U.S. troop commitment in Iraq alone.

Apart from Britain, every other troop deployment by NATO member states out of the European theater has been almost wholly dependent on U.S. aircraft and logistical capabilities to operate.

Yet the United States faces the possibility of military confrontation with Iran, with a population of 70 million compared to the 25 million in Iraq, in the near future. At the same time, U.S. relations China have deteriorated and China has for more than a decade been methodically building a huge troop and missiles deployment to control the Taiwan Strait and deny its use to U.S. nuclear aircraft carrier battle groups in the event of any Sino-American conventional military conflict over Taiwan.

NATO is routinely referred to by both U.S. and European political leaders as the largest, most successful; and most powerful military alliance in history. In terms of the nuclear capabilities of the United States, Britain and France, the power claim is literally true. But in terms of projecting and deploying conventional military forces around the world, NATO's resources are extremely limited.

Some 22 of its 26 member nations are in no condition to "export" any military power and security at all and only three that are -- Britain, France and Germany -- are extremely limited in their conventional military resources and by domestic political considerations from doing so.

The British manpower and logistics crisis is a sobering warning of NATO's hollow shell dilemma. The bigger it grows, the weaker it becomes.

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