DONALD RUMSFELD, the US Defence Secretary, is facing a new challenge to his authority after the US Army’s Chief of Staff refused to submit a budget plan for 2008 in protest at the demands the Pentagon is placing on America’s overstretched military.

General Peter Shoomaker’s behind-closed-doors challenge was disclosed yesterday as another wave of criticism was launched — this time at a forum conducted by Senate Democrats — from a group of ex-Generals who have already called for Mr Rumsfeld to quit after six years as Defence Secretary.

General Schoomaker took the highly unusual step last month of delaying submission of the Army’s budget plan, arguing that the service requires either a much bigger budget than the Administration has proposed or relief from some of its worldwide commitments.

The Los Angeles Times reported yesterday that General Schoomaker was seeking $138.8 billion (£72.5 billion) for 2008, or nearly $25 billion more than the limit originally set by Mr Rumsfeld. The Army’s budget this year is $98 billion.

The overstretch is hitting troops serving in Iraq the hardest. The 1st Brigade, 1st Armored Division, is being extended in Iraq because the unit that is scheduled to replace them — the 1st Brigade, 3rd Infantry Division, needs more time to prepare. If it had deployed as scheduled, it would not have had the minimum 12 months at home between combat tours.

The 3rd Infantry has already served two tours in Iraq, including the initial invasion of the country in March 2003.

The Army has an active-duty force of about half a million soldiers. About 400,000 have done at least one tour of combat duty in Iraq or Afghanistan and more than one third of those have been deployed twice.

Yesterday three retired military generals bluntly accused Mr Rumsfeld of bungling the war in Iraq, saying that US troops were sent to fight without the best equipment, and that critical facts were hidden from the public. “I believe that Secretary Rumsfeld and others in the Administration did not tell the American people the truth for fear of losing support for the war in Iraq,” retired Major General John Batiste said.

It is rare for retired military officers to criticise the Pentagon while military operations are under way, particularly at a public event likely to draw widespread media attention.

A second military leader, retired Major General Paul Eaton, assessed Mr Rumsfeld as “incompetent strategically, operationally and tactically”. “Mr Rumsfeld and his immediate team must be replaced or we will see two more years of extraordinarily bad decision-making,” he said.

The national security issue has been the key battlefield in the campaign for congressional elections in November, where the Republican’s control of the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate is being challenged.

Although President Bush’s personal popularity shows some signs of recovery, opinion polls still show widespread dissatisfaction with the way the war has been run.

Over the weekend leaks of a government-produced National Intelligence Estimate showed that it had concluded that the war has helped to create Islamic radicalism and that the terrorist threat has grown since the attacks of 9/11.

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