Scripps Howard News Service January 16, 2003
Bridge-building unit's call-up shows need to cross Euphrates
By THOMAS HARGROVE
Worried that allied troops will suffer from a bridge not far enough if America invades Iraq, the Pentagon this week called to active duty a small National Guard engineering unit from rural Alabama.
Normally, activation of the 145 men in the Guard's 167th Engineer Company based in the south Alabama towns of Demopolis and Centreville would draw scant attention among the tens of thousands of reservists and guardsmen being called. But the unit knows how to construct float bridges, and may well be asked to help span Iraq's fabled Euphrates River.
"The unit's mission is to provide float bridge assets at one or more river crossings," Maj. Gen. Mike Sumrall, adjutant general of the Alabama Guard, said when announcing the activation. "The unit can span up to 660 feet of water." Pentagon observers closely followed the announcement.
"These bridge units are on our watch list," said Francois Boo, a military analyst at GlobalSecurity.org, a Washington-based nonprofit research group. "When we see call-ups of engineering units that know how to build ribbon bridges, we know that they are getting serious about operations in Iraq."
The Pentagon recently ordered Army and reserve units to practice bridge construction using new equipment that was redesigned following embarrassing mistakes that delayed the U.S. military's entry into Bosnia seven years ago.
The problem facing military strategists is the 1,700-mile-long Euphrates, part of the Fertile Crescent's network of rivers and lakes that helped make Iraq the cradle of civilization 8,000 years ago. During the rainy season of March through May, the Euphrates can be 750 feet wide, although it averages about 475 feet or so throughout much of central and southern Iraq.
"We've got to get heavy tanks across that river," Boo said. "The odds are that the United States will blow up every bridge across the Euphrates to impair Iraqi military operations or that the Iraqis will destroy the bridges themselves to try to stop the advance of alliance forces."
During the 1991 Persian Gulf War, warplanes from the United States, Britain and France destroyed all bridges across the Euphrates to hinder troop movements ordered by Baghdad. But because alliance forces are expected to occupy Iraq this time if war breaks out, bridges across the Euphrates will be critical.
The Army's mechanized 1st Cavalry Division, based at Fort Hood, Texas, conducted large-scale operations to practice bridge building in September. A bridge unit from the Army's Fifth Corps stationed in Europe already has received call-up orders to prepare for Middle Eastern operations, Boo said.
The Army is still smarting from its attempt to cross the Sava River in late 1995 and early 1996 so that U.S. forces could become peacekeepers in Bosnia.
"We allocated about four or five or six days to building a pontoon bridge across the Sava River to get into Tuzla, Bosnia," recalled former Defense Secretary William Perry. "Our engineers were confident and told me this was 'no sweat.' This river was about the width of the Rhine River (in Germany) and the engineers had built this pontoon bridge across the Rhine River several times."
But the rains started to fall on the second day of construction - swelling the Sava to twice its normal size. Bridge engineers, under the gaze of international TV crews, finally pieced together a 373-foot span using all available equipment.
"So, it ended up two weeks, not one week," Perry said, adding that they used the materials intended for a two-lane bridge to build instead a one-lane crossing twice as long as originally planned.
What concerned Army strategists was that the Sava crossing was unopposed. Could alliance troops afford to wait two weeks to bridge the Euphrates, especially if Iraq were to deploy long-range artillery against them?
The Pentagon ordered the design of a so-called "Improved Ribbon Bridge," or IRB, which began testing in late 2001. The IRB received a rollout ceremony at the Anniston Army Depot in central Alabama on June 4, 2001, as military authorities celebrated the new design.
The new bridge, which was engineered by Eisenweke Kaiserslautern in Germany, increases the weight of vehicles that can traverse its pontoon support system.
"The ribbon bridge units will play a major role in any Iraqi operations," Boo said. "And the bulk of those units are in the National Guards."
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