Citing unnamed senior defense officials, the newspaper said that Pentagon insiders had dubbed the options "Go Big", "Go Long" and "Go Home."

The experts conducting the policy review are likely to recommend a combination of a small, short-term increase in US troops and a long-term commitment to stepped-up training and advising of Iraqi forces, the report said.

The "Go Big" option developed by the group working for the Joint Chiefs of Staff calls for a classic counterinsurgency campaign that would require several hundred thousand additional US and Iraqi soldiers as well as heavily armed Iraqi police, according to the paper.

That option has been all but rejected by the study group, which concluded that there are not enough troops in the US military and not enough effective Iraqi forces, The Post said.

The "Go Home" option was rejected by the Pentagon group as likely to push Iraq directly into a full-blown civil war, according to the report.

The group, therefore, has devised a hybrid plan that combines part of the first option with the second one and calls for cutting the US combat presence in favor of a long-term expansion of the training and advisory efforts, the paper said.

Under this mixture of options, the US presence in Iraq, currently about 140,000 troops, would be boosted by 20,000 to 30,000 for a short period, The Post noted.

The purpose of this temporary increase, would be to do as much as possible to curtail sectarian violence.

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