Actually its a bit small for the current tasks.
Disagreed. The generals say they have enough (sometimes more than enough) troops for their respective missions in Afghanistan and Iraq. The loudest complaints of troop levels being stretched thin were from liberals who were trying to shroud their anti-war rhetoric in the guise of military responsibility.
Anyone with recent military experience would agree with you. Some guys are on a fourth or fifth one-year tour of the middle east. It's very tough on both men and equipment. It's also extremely tough on the family members - many of whom have young children that don't even remember what their dad or mom looks like.
I remember when Carter was President. I was assigned to a mobile radar unit and we were gone more than we were in garrison. One year we went to Denmark and spent three months during the winter - came back to garrison for two weeks and then went to Saudi for six months during the summer.
Our equipment was completely worn out - but we couldn't take it out of service for maintenance because we couldn't function without it. We were behind on all our admin work - like writing personnel appraisals and rewriting procedures, regulations, and checklists so when we were in garrison we spent 18 hour days trying to fix equipment, resupply parts, and catch up on admin chores.
In the 90s the military downsized. I was in a 14-person unit that developed training for the F-15. We were merged with a larger unit and lost our admin support and some of our instructor slots. Two years later we merged with another unit and lost even more slots. After the dust settled we had six people with more taskings than we had as a 14 person unit. We worked nights and weekends just to try to keep up.
The pilots we had assigned were happy to be there. Most had come from Eglin or Langley operational units and would spend three months deployed to Saudi and come back for a few weeks and then go to the Balkans for another three months. They continued this type of rotation until the people and the airplanes were worn out.
Anyone who thinks the military is over staffed is ignorant.