But the oldest serving head of the US Defence Department would not commit himself to a complete four year term in Bush's new term. He would also not set a date for the return of the approximately 135,000 US troops in Iraq.

Rumsfeld, 72, heading for trips to Kuwait, Afghanistan - for the inauguration of President Hamid Karzai on Tuesday - and later India, said he had met Bush last week to discuss his future.

"The election is over and the president asked me if I would be willing to stay on and I told him I would be delighted to do that," he told reporters.

Asked if he had ever considered quitting during his first four years when the March 2003 invasion of Iraq and the Abu Ghraib prison scandal caused international controversy, Rumsfeld said "certainly there are days."

Rumsfeld also highlighted the failure to find the weapons of mass destruction in Iraq that were used to justify the invasion. "That is clearly a disappointment," he said looking back at his first term.

But the defence secretary shrugged off criticism of troop levels in Iraq saying numbers had always been decided by the top US commanders, General Tommy Franks at the time of the invasion, and now General John Abizaid.

Rumsfeld rejected suggestions that more soldiers should have been sent. He said they would have been more vulnerable to attacks "and it creates more of an occupation impression."

The US defence chief highlighted Bush's insistence that US troops would remain in Iraq until the task of ensuring security can be carried out by the Iraqi security forces.

"The image of handing over that country to people who go around chopping off heads is not a pretty one - that's a dark image."

Rumsfeld said that he and Bush had not set "a timetable" for his new tenure but he was carrying on "enthusiastically".

In about three years, Rumsfeld will have set the record for the longest serving US defence secretary. When he was in the post in the 1970s he set the record, at the age of 43, as the youngest defence secretary.

"I am fortunate, I have good health, I do not have young children, I am able to do this," he said.

Rumsfeld said his main reason for staying on was that he enjoyed working with Bush and "second, we have a lot of tough challenges facing our country."

Before he was forced into the war on terror after the September 11, 2001 attacks and preparations for the Iraq war, Rumsfeld went to the Defence Department to transform the US military.

He has sought to modernise the army and its administration while at the same time embarking on a huge operation to change the global deployment of US troops - seeking to reduce numbers in Europe and Asia.

"We have got a big job to do. It is enormous," he said.

"The task of moving something as large as the US Department of Defence is a sizeable task. It is the kind of thing that does not happen instantaneously. Great bureaucracies do not spin on a dime."

Major changes are to be made to US deployments in Europe, particularly Germany, and in Asia in countries such as South Korea.

The defence secretary said the United States will "focus more on precision, equipment, speed, agility as opposed to numbers" while acknowledging opposition in some countries saying "we have seen it has been hard for people to understand."

There have also been changes to the drawing up of the huge military budget and the Defence Department is midway through rewriting all contingency plans for possible conflicts around the world.

Rumsfeld said some old plans took three or four years to write and were already "irrelevant" by the time they were finished.

He highlighted the greater importance of US special forces to the modern military. Numbers have been boosted in the past four years and Rumsfeld said special forces are now "an enormous part of the spearpoint of US military capability."

All rights reserved. � 2004 Agence France-Presse. Sections of the information displayed on this page (dispatches, photographs, logos) are protected by intellectual property rights owned by Agence France-Presse. As a consequence, you may not copy, reproduce, modify, transmit, publish, display or in any way commercially exploit any of the content of this section without the prior written consent of Agence France-Presse.

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