But some senior officers argued Friday that the current effort might not be adequate.  “We do need to do more training with the Iraqis, we do need more opportunities to have embedded units with them,” Gen. Peter Pace, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said at a Pentagon news conference. The number of Iraqi battalions rated as capable of operating without American assistance fell to 6 this month, from 10 in March, soon after the start of the American security push, he said.  The current American strategy, presented by Mr. Bush in January, relies on more than 20,000 additional American troops who have been dispatched to Iraq to carry out intensive security operations. A less-prominent part of the strategy was a pledge to double, to 20, the number of provincial reconstruction teams, or P.R.T.’s.  But the progress report released Thursday conceded that “expansion of the P.R.T. program is not yet complete, with only about half of the approximately 300 additional P.R.T. personnel deployed to date.”  “The full complement of ‘civilian surge’ personnel will be completed by December 2007.”  State Department officials have said the lengthy schedule for deploying all of the civilian team members is due to the time required to hire civilian experts for some of the more technical agricultural and economic development positions, as well as delays in identifying and then training Foreign Service officers for Iraq’s hazardous environment.  Despite the lag in filling the teams, President Bush sought Friday to highlight the effort at increasing economic and political development at the local level, speaking with team members in Iraq during a video teleconference from the White House.  The effort, however, has drawn some skeptical responses, including from a prominent former development expert for the State Department, Carlos Pascual.  Mr. Pascual, who was the State Department’s coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization, said the impact of the provincial reconstruction effort has been “almost negligible.”  Because of the level of violence, the reconstruction teams “don’t have a secure environment to begin with, so they don’t have the latitude to move about, to make investments, to understand how projects are going and to generate employment,” said Mr. Pascual, now a vice president at the Brookings Institution, a nonpartisan policy research center.  General Pace said Friday that recommendations for attaching more American troops as advisers to Iraqi units would also be considered as part of a strategy review in September.  Despite the decline in the number of Iraqi battalions rated as capable of operating independently, General Pace called attention to what he called another measure of progress: that the number of Iraqi battalions rated as capable of operating “in the lead” with American assistance had increased to nearly 100, from 88 in March.  Pentagon officials explained that the discrepancy reflected the limitations of the categories. Iraqi units are gaining tactical experience and improving through their contribution to the new security effort, officials said, but they remain plagued by logistical problems, troop shortfalls, and sectarian interference from senior Iraqi politicians.  Those problems have in some cases gotten worse as Iraqi units have been called on to move around the country and take on more challenging combat roles.  In recent months, the training effort has focused on building up the Ministries of Defense and Interior and on improving training centers, logistics depots, budgeting and contracting, one senior American officer said. General Pace said 6,000 American soldiers were involved in the training effort.  Other Pentagon officials and senior officers who agreed to discuss their concerns about training insisted on anonymity so they would not be seen as upstaging the White House report.  To permit a large reduction in American forces, some officers argue, programs linking American advisers to Iraqi battalions will once again have to become the focus of the training, one senior officer said. That will require increasing the size of American adviser teams attached by adding American combat troops as well as specialists in administration, logistics and other support functions, the officer said.  That approach would make the teams better able to operate without American combat units nearby, permitting withdrawals and a shift in the American mission.  But several officers acknowledge that this approach has been tried before and has foundered because of concerns that Iraqi units remains incapable of supporting and handling security on their own.  A version of this article appears in print on , on Page A5 of the New York edition with the headline: Gaps in Training Iraqi Forces Worry Top U.S. Commanders. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
American commanders said that the effort to train Iraqi Army and police units had slowed recently and would need to be expanded to enable any large-scale reduction in American force levels.