Boston Globe December 8, 2002
Quietly, military builds gulf forces
By Robert SchlesingerWASHINGTON - Christmas came early for the families of the USS Harry S. Truman this year, but the celebrations were made bittersweet by imminent partings.
Ken Martin, a leading petty officer aboard the aircraft carrier, celebrated the holiday with his wife, Debbie, and their two children, exchanging gifts before the Truman sailed from Norfolk, Va., last week. Debbie secretly slipped a few more gifts into Martin's bag so that he would have something to open on Christmas Day.
No one knows precisely where the Truman will be on Dec. 25, but its battle group is one of five that could be in the Persian Gulf by year's end, prepared to launch a massive assault if President Bush orders an attack against Iraq.
Debbie Martin said she was not worried. While parting at the holidays is always stressful, she said, she learned while waiting for her husband to return from Operation Desert Storm that he and his colleagues are well prepared.
''They train the military hard, they train them for anything that could possibly happen,'' she said by telephone last week. ''They don't send them out there unaware of what could happen and how to handle any situation.''
The Truman is sailing to replace the USS George Washington, which is stationed in the Mediterranean. The USS Abraham Lincoln is in the Gulf, and the USS Constellation deployed in early November for the region. The USS Kitty Hawk is supposed to be operating in the Pacific, and was in Hong Kong at the end of November.
The carrier groups are a visible part of a military ramp-up the United States has undertaken in the Gulf in recent months. The lead-up to the 1991 Gulf War took six months because the United States had to move troops and their equipment into the region. But US planners ensured that any future conflict would have a far smaller run-up by pre-positioning several brigades' worth of equipment in the Gulf region and stationing troops in countries around the area.
The United States built major air bases in Saudi Arabia, Qatar, and other nearby countries. Over the last several months, the United States has quietly been adding to that force, loading enormous cargo ships with tanks and other equipment and moving them to the Gulf.
The moves are meant ''essentially to decrease the amount of time it would take from the moment we're convinced that we have to go to war to the time that strikes can begin,'' said Patrick Garrett of GlobalSecurity.org, a defense think tank that tracks troop movements.
The military has moved several more pieces into place during the past few months, according to military officials, GlobalSecurity.org, and media reports.
Central Command staff were dispatched last month to Qatar, where they are scheduled to take part in a computerized command-and-control exercise. Dubbed ''Internal Look,'' the exercise will be the first field test of a new, modular, portable command-and-control center that can be deployed anywhere in the world. All told, roughly 1,000 command personnel from Central Command and the Army, Navy, Marines, Air Force, and Special Operations will participate in the exercise.
If war does occur with Iraq, the modular headquarters could serve as a forward-deployed command center. No decision has been made about whether it will remain in the area once Internal Look is concluded, a Central Command spokesman said.
''We've got a somewhat higher level of presence in the Central Command area today than we did last week or the week before or the week before that,'' Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said Tuesday.
In Djibouti, 3,200 special forces, Marines, and Air Force personnel have established a base that will shortly be augmented by the arrival of the USS Mount Whitney, a command-and-control ship that will provide high-tech communications to coordinate the movement of personnel and other operations until the base facilities are completed. The troops there are ostensibly tracking down Al Qaeda in Yemen and Somalia, but assets in Djibouti could easily be diverted for an Iraq conflict. GlobalSecurity.org's Garrett said that the Fifth Fleet, which operates in the Gulf, lacks an amphibious command ship, but that the Mount Whitney could easily steam into the Gulf to join the fleet.
Closer to Iraq, two helicopter squadrons, consisting mostly of Apache and Blackhawk gunships, were deployed to Kuwait in October from Sixth Cavalry Regiment, part of V Corps which is based in Germany. Also deployed, according to Stars and Stripes, was V Corps' Echo 51st surveillance regiment. And the British announced last month that they would be deploying 15,000 to 20,000 troops from their Seventh and Fourth Armored Brigades to Kuwait.
In mid-October, command personnel from the Army's V Corps and the Marines' I Expeditionary Force were dispatched to the tiny desert country to prepare for a possible war with Iraq. And thousands of US troops are conducting combat exercises in the Kuwaiti desert, miles from the Iraqi border.
Some military specialists view the various exercises and other troop movements as the prelude to an attack on Iraq.
''If you want to do a quick dash across the border, then there's nothing like having a military exercise at that border,'' said Ian Cuthbertson, director of the World Policy Institute's Counterterrorism Project in New York. ''Everybody's locked, loaded, there's a plan, and when you decide to go, you just forget to stop at the border.''
Equally as significant as the deployments, according to specialists, are some non-deployments. For example, in October, an air squadron stationed in Germany reportedly had its deployment orders to Kosovo abruptly revoked. And elements of the 16th Special Operations Wing out of Hurlburt Field in Florida had their holiday leaves abruptly cut short.
Other key units that would probably participate in an attack on Iraq - the 101st and 82d Airborne, for example - have not deployed, according to Garrett. But specialists said that the equipment that has already been stockpiled or is en route to the region is more important in terms of timing. Estimates for the time it would take to airlift a sufficient number of troops into the area for an attack range from 10 days to three weeks.
But for the families of the deployed soldiers and sailors, the most important timing issue is their return.
Cindy, whose husband is a chief in maintenance aboard the Truman, said that while being apart during the holidays is ''lonely, hard to deal with sometimes,'' the specter of war with Iraq does not add to her anxiety.
Cindy, who declined to give her last name, and her husband followed their usual family holiday traditions - dinner with friends, taking in a local light show, exchanging presents - just a few weeks early. It hit her that he was gone, she said, only when she heard a love song on the radio.
Debbie Martin and her two children are already focusing on the homecoming, six months away. Every day is another that they get to mark off their calendar. ''Let the countdown begin,'' she told her 10-year-old daughter after the Truman had sailed.
Robert Schlesinger can be reached at schlesinger@globe.com.
This story ran on page A1 of the Boston Globe on 12/8/2002.
© Copyright 2002 Globe Newspaper Company.
