By the time Congress finishes hearings and passes a war spending bill -- which is separate from the annual budget -- there are only a few months left to use the money, and bills have already been paid by taking money out of procurement accounts for new weapons and vehicles. That in turn delays the replacement and upgrade of equipment destroyed in the war, which degrades training for troops deploying to Iraq.

"He has less than 50 percent of (the equipment) he's supposed to have training. That is not an army that is training properly," said Maj. Gen. Stephen M. Speakes, the Army's director of force development. "Can you do it? Yes. Is it the kind of burden you want to put on a soldier 12 months before he deploys?"

There is no accounting reason why the Army could not submit the 2008 supplemental request in February 2007 when the 2008 annual budget request goes up to Capitol Hill, said Lt. Gen. David Melcher, the deputy chief of staff for Army programming, materiel integration and management.

"If there was a desire to submit that in February that could easily be done," Melcher told reporters at the Association of the U.S. Army conference in Washington.

"From the Army's perspective, I think it would make good sense to submit the president's budget and the entire '08 supplemental at the same time ... I think it would be good to have openness about that, and articulate the need up front."

As of now, the 2007 supplemental request -- estimated by the Office of Management and Budget this summer to be about $110 billion -- will go to Capitol Hill with the 2008 budget

That practice began shortly after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The Pentagon's annual budget does not have placeholders in it to cover contingency operations like wars, disaster response or emergency humanitarian operations. They generally can't be anticipated and defended in an advance budget request.

Indeed, Congress in 2002 turned down a request from Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld for a $10 billion contingency fund.Congress considered it a blank check. Rumsfeld has pointed to that rejection annually as the reason why supplementals are not submitted earlier -- because the Defense Department wants to wait to make its request when it knows with more specificity how much it needs for the wars.

"I think we have a very good handle for what does it cost to have an army at war in 2008," Melcher said.

Melcher and Maj. Gen. Ross Thompson, the Army's director of program analysis and evaluation, said they already know what it will cost in both 2007 and 2008.

Ostensibly a way to provide a fast infusion of cash to the military -- now spending about $10 billion a month in Iraq and Afghanistan -- supplementals are slippery bits of legislation. Because they are not part of the regular budget process, they do not get counted against the annual U.S. deficit. They are nevertheless paid for by running up larger deficits. They also go straight to the congressional appropriations committees, bypassing hearings before the more expert defense authorization committees.

And they obscure the total level of planned defense spending. Members of Congress move against supplementals at their political peril, as voting against them is easily cast as undermining U.S. troops.

Congress has tried to help by providing "bridge supplementals" at the beginning of the fiscal year to tide the Army and Marine Corps over until the real supplemental is submitted to Congress and approved.

Service officials are growing increasingly uncomfortable with the use of supplementals to cover war costs. Accounts that would otherwise be in the base budget are migrating to the supplemental -- but that means they no longer have a foothold in the budget. When the supplementals end, so too will funding for those activities that used to be in the base budget.

"The common wisdom is that supplementals will rapidly dry up as soon as we see force levels decline," Melcher said.

Force levels in Iraq, in fact, are climbing, Melcher said, making the budget crunch even worse. In 2004, when service officials were planning ahead for the war, far rosier scenarios were anticipated. Supplementals were considered a reasonable short-term fix. Their long-term consequences began to be felt in 2005, Melcher said. But force levels in Iraq are not expected to drop in 2007.

"We are trying to come to some reasonable level of sustainment in the base (budget) ... particularly when supplementals are drying up," Melcher said. "We're going to need the support of Congress over an extended period of time."

The Army's day-to-day spending and modernization costs in 2006 amounted to about $130 billion, not including war accounts, according to Melcher.

Congress approved a $70 billion "bridge supplemental" for 2007 war spending last month. The Army's share is about $43 billion. The service is on track to exceed $84 billion in supplemental war spending for 2007, the officials said.

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