Lieutenant General James Helmly said the 205,000-strong US Army Reserves has so far met its recruitment and retention goals but it was uncertain whether that will hold next year amid the accumulating pressures of a long military engagement.

"We have had the all-volunteer force for 30 years," he said. "It is an immensely strong, capable, robust force. But we have never placed it under the stresses that we're placing on it today, active and reserve."

The army reserves and the larger army national guard force are crucial to operations in Iraq. They now account for about a third of the 140,000 US troops in Iraq.

Reserve units provide combat support services such as truck drivers, military police and civil affairs that by design are in short supply in the regular army.

But meeting recruiting and retention goals is taking more time and effort, Helmly said. His force is providing the army with 350 additional recruiters, and wants to offer re-enlistment bonuses and other incentives to keep the numbers up.

"Next year is a period that will begin to answer that question" of whether the reserves' current strength can be sustained, he said. "I can only tell you...that, frankly, for me manning the force is the single most pressing function I worry about."

Helmly acknowledged that the army reserve, designed for rear area support duty in a conventional theater wars, was caught unprepared for the wars in Afghanistan and particularly in Iraq that followed the September 11, 2001 attacks on the United States.

He said reserve units, among them military police implicated in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal, were insufficiently trained prior to deployment.

"A funny thing happened on the way to the play," he said. "We all got sidetracked by a much more intense operation in Iraqi Freedom."

"So the reality of the world has fast forwarded and caught up with us and exposed frankly some weaknesses, which often make front page news in your various media," he said.

The Iraq war exposed shortages of body armor and armored Humvees, and in training for combat duty.

Many reservists signed up when the reserves' slogan was "one weekend a month, two weeks in the summer," only to find themselves on extended tours in a war zone with no frontlines.

A recent army mental health study showed an "astounding" percentage of veterans of Iraq duty say they witnessed the deaths or wounding of fellow soldiers and civilians or say their positions came under enemy fire, Helmly said.

"My point is it is a reflection of that fact there is no more a secure rear area," he told reporters here.

"Driving that truck is one of the most hazardous damnned occupations we have in Iraq. Our truck drivers and MPs have become frontline troops," he said.

All truck companies now get live fire counter-ambush drills before deploying, he said.

Since September 11, 2001, 58 army reservists have been killed in combat, Helmly said.

"There is a ripple effect from that," he said.

"That is not nearly as high as the regular army or army national guard, with all due respect. But the number of wounded or fatalities is higher in our force than at any time since the Korean war," he said.

The reserve force also has been stressed by unpredictable deployments, he said. The army "sent shock waves" through the force by extending tours first from six months to a year, and then even longer for some soldiers after fighting surged in Iraq in April, Helmly said.

Added to that were family stresses -- many reservists are married with children -- and a computerized pay system that Helmly said was found to have a 95 percent error rate.

Since the creation of the all-volunteer army in the 1970s, reservists have mobilized either in small numbers for military operations like the invasions of Grenada and Panama, or for relatively short periods of time, as in the 1991 Gulf war.

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