Compare and contrast:

BUSINESSES STILL AREN'T HIRING. Businesses are still relying on productivity gains, not hiring, to generate any increases in output. So, while the economy has lost more than 1 million jobs over the last five quarters, real gross domestic product still grew at an annual rate of 2.8%.

--chart published in BusinessWeek earlier this year

Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday there is no need to increase U.S. armed forces for now even though the military is being stretched by commitments in Iraq and elsewhere....

He said there were steps that could be taken to improve the efficiency of current troop levels, including putting civilians in jobs now being done by as many as 380,000 people in uniform.

"That's a pile of people," he said. "They need to be doing military functions."

--AP

To understand, Rumsfeld, just try to think like a CEO. If you're a CEO, you just keep squeezing your existing workers, demanding more and more work from them, maybe even new tasks they aren't trained to do, and you dare them to quit. As long as your fellow CEOs aren't hiring either, your workers will just grumble, stay late at the office and do what you tell them to do.

The difference, of course, is that when you do this in the civilian world, you just get crummy morale and corner-cutting. When you do it in a war zone, people die.