"Our military is low on parts, pay and morale," the Texas governor said in his acceptance speech at the Republican National Convention in Philadelphia earlier this month, adding that two divisions of the Army were currently not ready for duty.

Cheney acknowledged that the information cited by Bush might have been out-of-date as it was taken from an army report of last November.

The report had said the two divisions did not meet readiness criteria, Cheney said on CBS's "Face the Nation" program.

"They may have fixed them since then and addressed those problems ...," he added.

Democratic Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts drove home the advantage on NBC's "Meet the Press" show, saying the two divisions "for about a three-week period had a minor issue about redeployment from Bosnia and Kosovo" last November.

Bush's claim had been "misleading ... and insulting in a sense (as) those divisions were on duty at the time," Kerry said.

The moral high ground which the Bush campaign laid claim to when it raised the issue of defense has looked less firm this week, after Democratic presidential candidate, Vice President Al Gore, appeared on Tuesday at a veterans' convention, wearing a veteran's cap.

Gore accused Bush of sending a defeatist message to "our allies and adversaries across the world" and of "trying to run down America's military for political advantage in an election year."

On the Sunday talk shows, two Republican lawmakers did not dispute that under the administration of President Bill Clinton the number of soldiers receiving food assistance had fallen to 5,000, from 19,000 under the Republicans.

But Cheney stood by his guns on claims of low pay and morale and lack of preparedness.

"Either Al Gore doesn't know what's going on, or he's not telling the truth about it," he said on ABC's "This Week."

Cheney was confronted with his record as defense secretary in the Bush administration. With a US public eager for a peace dividend from the end of the Cold War, he had himself ordered defense spending cutbacks, interviewers pointed out.

"We started with a reduction of 25 percent in the force structure," in line with the changed defense needs, he acknowledged on ABC. But the Democrats had introduced cutbacks of 40-50 percent in some areas of defense, he said.

"The problem is they are not investing in the future," in a field which has a long lead-in time for recruitment and research, he said.

There was no mention in Sunday's talk shows of the planned US nuclear missile defense shield. A senior Pentagon official told Danish television last Monday that that a decision on the controversial project could be taken within a week.

Meanwhile, on NBC's Meet the Press, Republican Congressman John Kasich of Ohio said the Clinton administration had overstretched the military, deploying US forces around the world 116 times, most recently in Nigeria.

"I think what you're going to see under a Bush-Cheney administration is the narrowing of our commitments, the withdrawing of forces in places where our policy is not working, and we'll make a better targeted use of the military," Kasich said.

The Al Mamoun factory, located about 40 kilometres (25 miles) southwest of the Iraqi capital, employs 250 technicians, said the mass-circulation German newspaper. The paper provided satellite coordinates for the site.

A BND spokesman said Iraq was working to develop missiles with a 150-kilometre range and had "installations", but refused to comment on where such an arms factory was located.

Bild mentioned a BND report released at the beginning of the year that revealed that even before the 1991 Gulf War, Iraq was planning to develop several types of missiles, with a range of up to 3,000 kilometres.

If Iraq succeeded in developing such missiles it would bring large parts of Europe within attack range, the BND report said.

Iraq still had both the desire and the necessary staff to complete the programme, the secret service report added, according to Bild.