Senior military officers said they had reduced the nationwide total from 77,000 to 60,321 - most of them Sunni Arabs.

The officers also expressed impatience with the Shiite-dominated government's failure to fully embrace the U.S.-backed home guard program and warned that the armed men could "drift back toward violence" if they aren't put to work.

Officials said the 22 percent discrepancy in guard numbers came about because not all Iraqis recorded as enlisting to protect towns against extremists had been accepted into the "concerned local citizens" program, which has been credited with helping curb violence.

Col. Martin Stanton of the military's reconciliation and engagement office said he detected the discrepancy during an audit that found 17,000 people previously listed on the rolls "were not standing post as a volunteer."

He said the mistake occurred because the military divisions overseeing different parts of Iraq did not have a proper definition of who should be included on the list. The largest decline was in northern Iraq, where the total was reduced by more than 10,000.

The effort to recruit local Iraqis to fight extremists in their areas grew out of a Sunni rebellion against al-Qaida in Iraq in the former insurgent stronghold of Anbar province and has been hailed as one of the main success stories in more than four years of war.

The Iraqi government welcomed the development in the nearly all-Sunni province west of Baghdad, but it showed more resistance when the U.S. began expanding it to the Sunni minority in the capital and surrounding areas.

Gen. David Petraeus, the top U.S. commander, and other officials have been saying 77,000 Iraqis had joined the fight against al-Qaida in Iraq and other extremists, primarily in Baghdad and its volatile southern belts.

"Some of these figures were getting a little scary to the government of Iraq," Stanton said during a briefing for a small group of reporters this week. "It was like are there really 77,000 guys standing out there on the street corners with a rifle? And the answer to that was no."

Stanton said he informed Petraeus about the reduction to 60,321 on Wednesday. The new figure included 51,190 volunteers receiving a monthly stipend averaging $300 and 9,131 working with U.S.-led and Iraqi forces in an organized fashion.

Three-fourths of the total, about 46,000, are Sunni Arabs, and the rest are Shiite, the military said.

Military planners insisted the lower number didn't reflect a lack of enthusiasm, because the 17,000 being crossed off the list had shown a willingness to join American forces.

"On the one hand, that kind of cuts into the good news story, but these people have come forward and said they want to work for us," Stanton said.

He said they weren't taken on only because there was no need for them.

The mistake did, however, highlight concerns over the initiative - that the armed men could return to violence or form new militias as insurgent attacks decline and varied groups battle for power.

"We can't pay them to stand on street corners with rifles forever. We have to transition them into non-security type employment," Stanton said.

Officials said Wednesday that they were focusing on jobs programs to try to provide other employment opportunities.

"It's an economic choice for many of them to go back to the insurgency and we're trying to give them alternatives," said Col. Bill Rapp, a senior aide to Petraeus.

Rapp said Iraq's government needed to reach out to the volunteers. "If they don't sense that they can make any progress peacefully they may drift back toward violence."

Stanton said he didn't expect the Iraqi government to be able to take over the program for at least six months.

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