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In United Nations operations alone, the number of military and police peacekeepers has trebled in 10 years to almost 75,000 at the end of August, with only 2,200 then in place of a Lebanon force that could grow to 15,000. The UN has also mandated a 17,000-strong force for Sudan, not yet deployed because the government has refused to allow them in.

Military analysts are talking of overstretch in the world's largest military: the US has more than 140,000 troops in Iraq at least into next year, and 20,000 in Afghanistan. But the word is now being widely used elsewhere.

Jeremy Black, a professor of history at the University of Exeter, says Britain's forces are overstretched. "There has been a mismatch between [government] aspirations and the ability to execute," he says.

Senior military officers describe the UK military as stretched by commitments that include 8,500 troops in Iraq and the Gulf, 5,600 in Afghanistan and 8,500 in Northern Ireland. The new chief of the army last month described it as "running hot" and a quarter of the 102,000-strong army was deployed on operations and other military tasks, according to a July parliamentary report.

Britain's defence ministry has admitted that it is breaching its own guidelines that call for a two-year gap between six-month overseas deployments. Illustrating the pressure that some personnel such as helicopter pilots and communications experts are under, a squadron of light dragoons that left Iraq in November will head to Afghanistan next month, a gap of only 11 months.

A similar debate is under way in France. Bruno Cuche, chief of staff of the army, said last week that his force - which has committed 1,750 troops to Lebanon - was being "pulled about", adding: "In some places, we are stretched. And we are looking to see if it is possible to reduce numbers."

France has 36,000 troops outside mainland France out of a standing army of 122,000. Some 16,500 are in French overseas territories, 5,300 on long-standing deployments, mostly in Africa, 6,600 in shorter-term bilateral deployments, including the Ivory Coast, and about 8,000 in multi-lateral engagements under banners that include Nato, the European Union and the UN.

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Nato officials say European members of the alliance have made demonstrable progress since Lord Robertson, then Nato secretary-general, said in 2003: "One-point-four million in uniform, 55,000 in operations. That equals overstretched?" But most analysts agree that the ratio of tooth-to-tail - combat-capable troops to the rest - is still far too low. From a Nato perspective, too many uniforms are stuck at headquarters or defending territory unlikely to be attacked.

But Bruce Jones, co-director of the Center on International Co-operation at New York University, says the issue is not just a shortage of capable troops. More important is a lack of strategic assets, such as transport aircraft and helicopters, to get troops into theatre and to get them into the right places. "This is the single greatest problem we face," he says.

However, some recent developments, he says, may signal changes ahead. Many UN deployments have historically been financed by industrialised countries and staffed by south Asian armies: Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, which have found the funding a useful contributor to hard-pressed budgets. There has also been an unwritten rule that the permanent members of the UN Security Council do not make large troop contributions to UN missions - though they often support them.

Yet, in a remarkable shift, China has offered 1,000 troops to the Lebanon force and France 1,700. Mr Jones says the contributions from France and Italy signal the return of European forces to UN peacekeeping.

The success or otherwise of European participation could, in the medium term, have significant influence, for better or worse, on future European peacekeeping commitments, he says.

In his view, governments in the medium term will be pushed to reshape their militaries as they come to see stabilisation missions as central to their security. "What we have seen over the last four to five years is a growing recognition in the industrialised countries that peacekeeping is not the voluntary extra stuff that we do. Peacekeeping is part of a broader security response."

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