GlobalSecurity.org In the News

Moline Dispatch November 30, 2002

Q-C holds key to victory over Iraq

WASHINGTON -- Before the 1991 war against Iraq, the United States and its allies spent six months gathering 250,000 troops and armor and ammunition in Saudi Arabia.

More than a decade later, the United States has changed its buildup strategy drastically, keeping ground forces to a minimum in favor of hitting the ground running with a fast-strike force.

For the Army to even consider the strategy says volumes about a quiet but deadly serious program that's been under way for years at Arsenal Island. The island is home to the Field Support Command, an unheralded but rapidly rising star in the Army because of its success building up stocks of U.S. tanks, artillery and ammunition around the world.

``It is kind of peculiar to imagine this place in western Illinois holds the keys to victory,'' said John Pike, formerly of the Federation of American Scientists and founder of GlobalSecurity.org, an independent military analysis organization.

Mr. Pike said the U.S. military is approaching possible conflict with Iraq based on the idea of prepositioned stockpiles, not prepositioned troops.

So far, U.S. forces throughout the region number just 57,000, with less than 10,000 in Kuwait, according to published reports.

``If you ask how's this war going to be different from the last one, what the great innovation is going to be, this is a lot of it,'' Mr. Pike said.

The underlying idea is not new. For decades, the Army kept stocks ready in Europe for a Cold War showdown. That same concept has been expanded globally via the Field Support Command (FSC).

About 3,300 military, civilian and contractor workers worldwide report to Gen. Vincent E. Boles, a one-star general, and his staff of 70 at the FSC on Arsenal Island. He reports to the Operations Support Command, also on the island, which procures and manages Army stocks domestically and worldwide.

FSC role is crucial

What makes the FSC unique is that its mission is to maintain five movable stockpiles, called Army prepositioned stocks and worth a combined $11 billion, for immediate use anywhere in the world troops may need them.

``To think -- you have a subordinate command of the OSC on Rock Island with tentacles, if you will, that go out like that,'' said Gary Motsek of the Army Material Command in Alexandria, Va.

Mr. Motsek, a retired Army colonel and former commander of the Army's Pine Bluff Arsenal in Arkansas, is one of the nation's top civilian prepositioning managers and the equivalent of a one-star general.

``I will tell you the (FSC) command is unusual, particularly for a one-star general, to be honest about it,'' he said. ``The span and control of that command, just from a geographical standpoint, is quite dramatic.''

Indeed, expectations are growing within and outside the Army that the Field Support Command soon will be elevated to a higher status, possibly to a three-star command, a move that would put it above the two-star Operations Support Command and give the Quad-Cities its first three-star Army command.

Officials within the Field Support Command declined to discuss specifics of the command's future, partly because no changes have been announced and partly because war is looming. But they indicated that the role of the organization is expanding, with no end in sight.

Brian Newman, director of the FSC's G3 Operations Directorate on Arsenal Island, said the Defense Department's mantra of transformation to lighter fighting units and faster response means more work is expected for the command.

``As the Army transforms, it's our understanding that our business will indeed grow,'' he said.

Gen. Boles, who was not available for comment, spent much of November traveling to FSC locations, including Kuwait and the nearby Persian Gulf country of Qatar, home not only to FSC stocks but to the U.S. Central Command's gulf headquarters.

His travel itinerary illustrates that the FSC truly is a worldwide organization, having grown from its roots in Chambersburg, Pa., as the manager of American warfighting stockpiles in Europe before a transfer to Rock Island in the mid-1990s.

Lessons of Gulf War

It was the nation's first war against Iraq, just after the Berlin Wall fell, that convinced the Pentagon that new post-Cold War era threats required a new approach based on speed.

The mission has turned Gen. Boles and his Quad-Cities employees into logistics globetrotters. He, and they, regularly travel to one of the 56 sites in 15 countries where FSC operates, or go to sea with FSC's ocean-based ``afloat'' stockpile, which can be steered anywhere the Pentagon orders.

``We're here basically due to the lessons of the Gulf War,'' Mr. Newman said. ``The time it took to deploy to the war in 1991 was such that our leadership felt we needed to do better than that. We needed to be prepared for smaller contingencies, more mobile. We wouldn't have six months to build up. Our afloat program, our land basing, are direct fallout from lessons learned from the Gulf War.''

FSC spokeswoman Linda Theis said about a dozen Quad-Cities staffers are deployed overseas at any given time, helping to manage the stockpiles or provide assistance to the command's mix of American troops, contract employees and foreign national employees.

In addition to the Middle East, personnel also are deployed to such places as Bosnia, Kosovo and East Timor, where they assist U.S. and United Nations peacekeeping missions.

They are not the only Quad-Cities Army civilians serving abroad. A handful of Operations Support Command employees also are working far from home.

The deployments, of up to 179 days at a time, generally are on a volunteer basis, said Tom Esparza, president of American Federation of Government Employees Local 15, which represents the FSC civilian employees.

Some jobs are designated to be available for deployment by the commander, but otherwise employees cannot be sent without their consent.

The deployments are not junkets, clearly, though some are worse than others. ``The folks we have forward deployed, that I talk to on a daily basis, many of them are working 12 and 14 hours days without running water and power,'' Mr. Newman said.

When they are not abroad, Gen. Boles' Quad-Cities-based contingent of six military, one contractor and 73 civilian employees must keep track of the condition and location of every item managed by the FSC.

5 stockpiles of supplies

The FSC model is based on having stockpiles in four geographic regions -- continental United States, Europe, the Middle East and the far East -- plus one at sea.

Each is organized around the stockpile determined to be strategically important for the region. By this year, according to Pike's GlobalSecurity organization, the FSC had built up three brigade sets of materials in Kuwait, or enough to equip 15,000 to 25,000 troops.

Another brigade's worth of material was set to move by ship to the region in September. A brigade set consists of 115 Abrams tanks, 60 Bradley fighting vehicles, 100 armored personnel carriers, 25 mortars and 20 155mm howitzer cannons.

At sea, the FSC controls eight medium roll-on, roll-off ships that offer a combined 300,000 square feet of warehouse storage, along with three additional container ships and a crane ship.

Mr. Newman said the staff on Arsenal Island keeps track of everything, ensuring that stocks are repaired or replenished as needed and made available for military exercises. The exercises offer an important way to test the suitability of equipment for the environment where it will be used.

``One often hears the story of D-Day and the amount of equipment in containers that showed up, and how they were hunting for ammunition and all they found was a container that had basketballs. We have visibility down to what's inside the container,'' Mr. Newman said.

``We can take you on a virtual reality walk of what's on our ship to show you what's in there, down to the secondary items, the ammunition that goes with those vehicles. We can tell you what's in the tool box, what's not in the tool box, or the tank.''

Keeping track of everything requires sophisticated databases and high technology, including radio frequency tags and bar codes. Mr. Newman said communication throughout the world remains a top priority.

``Gen. Boles does three worldwide teleconferences a week,'' Mr. Newman said, with the European commander speaking during the local midafternoon, the Middle East commander about 5 p.m. and the Far East commander at 10 p.m.

Test is yet to come

Yet, for all the FSC has accomplished, an invasion of Iraq will tell how well the Army's preposition strategy actually works when called on.

Michael G. Vickers, director of strategic studies at the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments and a former Army Special Forces officer, called the prepositioning strategy ``an unheralded success story,'' and said putting stocks afloat gives the Army particular flexibility.

However, he also said the concept of global war fighting based on prepositioned stocks has yet to be fully tested. ``It's something to have it in practice, but another to actually depend on it in wartime and have it be central to your strategy.''

Whether it will be used at all depends on the outcome of weapons inspections in Iraq and Iraqi President Saddam Hussein's cooperation.

Meanwhile, Gen. Boles' workers in the Quad-Cities and around the world worry mostly about keeping up with the orders from the top of the command chain.

``One of the keys for any logistician is the ability to anticipate,'' Mr. Newman said. ``With the change and the fast pace of our environment, it becomes a challenge to anticipate requirements, do the planning, get posture to provide the support that we need to. So the challenge is to keep up with the changes that are ongoing out there.''

Mr. Motsek, with the Army Material Command, said the command will deserve a lot of credit no matter which way the Iraq crisis is resolved.

``It's because you have prepositioned stock that the U.S. can establish a force and a presence where they need to, much quicker than they could any other way.

``We're trying to avoid war, obviously, so I would say they are a key component for the United States, for us, to establish a credible presence and a deterrence, if you will. They are active today, I don't think there's any secret about that.''

Copyright © 2002 Moline Dispatch Publishing Company, L.L.C., All Rights Reserved