"We're not there yet. There's still some holes in the system," Lt. Gen. Martin Dempsey, commander of Multinational Security Transition Command Iraq, said. "We've got them, I think, pretty well identified and are moving toward it."

"It's not an army that is yet introspective," Dempsey said. "It doesn't look at itself and discover its own problems, so we're still in the process of doing some of that for them. But that all gets better every time you do it."

In a May 4 briefing, Dempsey, responsible for U.S. training in Iraq, said Iraq Army and police units were improving at the tactical level. But he said deficiencies in interoperability, coordination, communications and logistics were hampering development.

"We've got some things that are going pretty well at the tactical level," Dempsey said. "We've got some things that are going pretty well at the institutional level. And the challenge now is to kind of pull it together and plug it in. I would describe the growth of the logistics architecture as kind of evolutionary, certainly not revolutionary."

Another challenge has been the Iraqi chain of command. Dempsey cited a failure to groom Iraqi commanders, particularly on the senior level. Most of the senior commanders have been holdovers from the Saddam Hussein regime.

"The higher up you run in the echelons of command, the more the vulnerabilities of leadership tend to become evident," Dempsey said.

Officials said the Iraq Army loses annually 18,000 soldiers, and the police, 25,000 officers. They said most of the attrition rate stemmed from casualties rather than absent without leave.

At the same time, Dempsey reported a significant improvement in Iraqi combat skills and operational planning in 2007. He cited the Iraqi-U.S. security mission in Baghdad, which has brought 5,300 Iraqi soldiers in the capital. The Iraq Army mission in Baghdad has already entered its second rotation.

Officials said the U.S. military and the Iraqi government were developing the Iraqi security forces based on the assessment that the Sunni insurgency war would continue for years to come. They said the training effort sought to build a core of Iraqi officers and commanders who could instill discipline and pride as well as set professional standards.

"We know how many NCOs [non-commissioned officers] we need for this army," Dempsey said. "We've got the system in place. We've got the courses in place. They've got a good cadre in place. It's a good curriculum. But they can't unplug from the fight as they would like to do, and so we're coming up a bit short there."

Dempsey said the current U.S. troop surge would support the Iraqi security forces. But he expressed concern that Iraqi forces would remain dependent on the U.S. military when it withdraws from Iraq.

"I do think that post-surge there will probably be some places where, because we kept doing things for our counterparts, they may have become used to it," Dempsey said. "We may have to break that umbilical cord a little more forcefully than we did the first time."

Maj. Gen. Rich Lynch, commander of the U.S. Army 3rd Division and Multinational Division Center, told another briefing that the development of the Iraq Army would take "some time."

"Now," Lynch said, "people are always going to say, 'Well, how long's that going to take? Can you say three months? Can you say five months, can you say a year?' We can't say that, because there are so many variables over here that we're working with."

U.S. Central Command chief Adm. William Fallon said the military wants to establish a so-called Provisional Reconstruction Team for each Iraq Army brigade combat team. Fallon said the PRTs would be embedded into Iraqi military units.

"My first blush with these embedded PRTs is they are indeed going to be value-added," Lynch said. "I've meet all the team leaders. I've talked to the members of the team, and they came here with a mission, and that is to improve capacity of the government of Iraq at the local and provincial level. And I have great optimism that those things are going to continue to mature and improve."