“You go to war with the Army you have, not the Army you might want, or wish to have,” Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld told U.S. soldiers in Kuwait 22 months ago.

The ugly truth is that Rumsfeld had it backwards. You don’t recklessly march into war with too few troops just because the Army you have might not be readily equipped for a larger military footprint.

Rumsfeld is the antithesis of a responsible commander.

His war on the cheap allowed Iraqi weapons to join antiquities in a looting free-for-all – and ironically has pushed the U.S. military to the wall because of the difficulty in sustaining the constant pace of new combat deployments.

Many Marines and special operations forces are on their third combat tours overseas. Guard troops and reservists are at or close to their 24-month call-up limit and must be induced to volunteer to go overseas with promises of extra pay and other benefits. Hundreds of thousands serve repeatedly out of duty and patriotism, yet at a cost, both for their families and their long-term mental health.

The enlistment age limit has been raised to 42, yet the Pentagon still doesn’t know where it will get all the reservists, National Guard, special operations and specialist forces it needs to fill out deployments through 2009, according to a recent Government Accountability Office study.

Equipment, too, is stretched so thin that most Guard units and many Marines are leaving their gear in place in Iraq.

Should war break out somewhere else, or an attack or natural disaster require another major mobilization at home, these shortfalls could be telling.

A responsible commander doesn’t do this to his Army, or start a war without making sure his military is prepared for the fight.

Yet Rumsfeld browbeat generals to discard longstanding Iraq war plans that required hundreds of thousands of troops, and found yes-men willing to craft a leaner model without regard to post-war consequences.

Combatant commanders who worried about post-combat security were reassured that Iraqi army units would be there to help keep order.

Yet the Iraq army units didn’t stand up.

Instead, a Pentagon that seemed more interested in seeding its Iraq transition team with Republican operatives and anti-Baathist Iraqi émigrés stood them down.

The May 23, 2003, order disbanding Iraq’s army technically was made by U.S. occupation czar L. Paul Bremer – yet with Pentagon input, and without telling the White House, the CIA or the State Department. It was also in apparently direct contravention of a March 12 decision by President Bush and his war cabinet, as laid out by Rajiv Chandrasekaran in his new book, “Imperial Life in the Emerald City.” Only a few Pentagon officials, including Rumsfeld, seem to have known about it in advance.

Yet the momentous directive instantly married Saddam Hussein bitter-enders with thousands of average Iraqi soldiers and officers angered by their loss of pay and employment, ensuring an enduring insurgency.

“Donald Rumsfeld is not a competent wartime leader. He knows everything, except how to win,” said retired Army Gen. John Batiste at a highly unusual, partisan hearing last month in which recently retired generals lambasted the Pentagon’s handling of Iraq.

Batiste, a West Point graduate who served as a senior military assistant in Rumsfeld’s Pentagon, said he left the military out of principle last year after 31 years.

He said he was not arguing for withdrawal; only for leadership.

And he noted that the burden of Iraq falls on just 1 percent of the population – the military.

America continues to have the greatest military in the world. But the Iraq adventure has stretched it almost to the breaking point while the principal architect of this avoidable mess presides Cheshire Catlike over a diseased Pentagon in which too many uniformed officers are cowed into silence.

Rumsfeld must go. His replacement must be willing to revisit every single assumption about Iraq to restore credibility to the process. And Congress must be prepared to spend the money and exert the oversight required if the military is not to emerge from Iraq a broken force.