It was supposed to be the cornerstone of NATO's conversion from a Cold War necessity to a rapid-reaction, anti-terror force. The alliance even declared the NATO Response Force (NRF) -- 25,000 fully equipped troops ready for deployment at a moment's notice -- to be fully ready to go in November of last year.

But now, the NRF may be facing a premature end. It turns out that, despite General Secretary Jaap de Hoop Scheffer's  repeated expressions of confidence (as early as April 2005 he said, "the primary challenge at this point is no longer in setting up the NRF. The challenge is to figure out when and where to use it."), it proved difficult to get NATO member countries to contribute the troop numbers and materiel they had pledged.

"The NRF requires a very heavy commitment of troops," NATO chief spokesman James Appathurai acknowledged on Wednesday. "There is heavy pressure on NATO and other countries to provide forces for real world operations, which of course have to be the priority." He also admitted that it was "very difficult to maintain the 25,000."

NATO defense heads discussed the NRF when they met in the Canadian city of Victoria last week to come up with a plan that makes it easier for member-countries to honor their troop pledges. The result, NATO insiders have said, may very well be a much less ambitious force that bears the NRF name merely to avoid an embarrassing fiasco.

The main problem faced by the force is its sheer ambition. The 26 NATO members have had trouble finding the troops, transport planes and helicopters needed to keep such a large force at full readiness. In addition, many countries are already fully stretched in other NATO missions in Afghanistan, the Balkans, Middle East and Africa. Germany, for example, has thousands of troops in Afghanistan and NATO has upped its commitment there from 7,000 to 40,000 soldiers since the NRF was declared ready last November. America, for its part, has 169,000 troops stationed in Iraq and has been unable to honor its NRF pledge.

The idea for the NRF came from then US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. He pictured a well-equipped force able to respond quickly to global hotspots and to help out with the war on terror. But his successor Robert Gates recently questioned whether such a force was realistic in this age of heavy NATO engagement in Afghanistan.

Just what the future of de Hoop Scheffer's "transformation process" might look like without the rapid response force remains unclear. NATO defense ministers will no doubt be looking for a face-saving way out at the upcoming conference at the end of October. But the NRF will likely be quietly buried. As one NATO source told Süddeutsche Zeitung: "There is no cause for hope."