Top US uniformed leaders are recommending that the United States change its main military mission in Iraq from combating insurgents to supporting Iraqi troops and hunting terrorists, The Washington Post reported on Thursday.

President George W. Bush and Vice President Dick Cheney met with the members of the Joint Chiefs of Staff at the Pentagon on Wednesday, and the chiefs offered a pragmatic assessment of what could and could not be done by the military, the newspaper quoted sources familiar with the White House's ongoing Iraq policy review as saying.

The chiefs did not favor adding significant numbers of troops in Iraq, but saw strengthening the Iraqi army as pivotal to achieving some degree of stability. They were also pressing for a much greater US effort on economic reconstruction and political reconciliation, the report said.

George Casey, the top US commander in Iraq, was reviewing a plan to redefine the American military mission there -- US troops would be pulled out of Iraqi cities and consolidated at a handful of US bases while day-to-day combat duty would be turned over to the Iraqi army, the sources said.

He was still considering whether to request more troops, possibly as part of an expanded training mission to help strengthen the Iraqi army, it said.

Under the plan formulated by Peter Chiarelli, the outgoing US ground commander in Iraq, the military would shift about half of its 15 combat brigades away from battling insurgents and sectarian violence and into training Iraqi security forces as soon as the spring of 2007, military and defense officials said.

Though officials said that the White House had made no final decisions on how to proceed in Iraq, the new disclosures suggested that military planning was well underway for a major change from an approach that had assigned the bulk of the responsibility for security in Iraq to more than 140,000 US troops, according to the report.

Pentagon chiefs thought that there was no purely military solution for Iraq, and they wanted to see a new push on political and economic issues, especially employment programs, reconstruction and political reconciliation, to help quell the problems that had fueled both the Sunni insurgency and Shiite-Sunni sectarian strife, defense officials and US military officers in Iraq said.

(Xinhua News Agency December 15, 2006)