Financial Times (London) March 17, 2003
The US military's continued inability to move heavy equipment may force war planners to go with a smaller, lighter ground force than the Pentagon had planned
By Peter Spiegel
At a planning meeting in Saudi Arabia shortly after Iraq invaded Kuwait in 1990, General Charles Horner, commander of all US air force squadrons in the region, turned to General John Yeosock, his army counterpart, and asked what kind of protection the army could provide for air force bases in the region.
Gen Yeosock, a straight-shooter with large, wire-rimmed glasses, reached into his uniform pocket and pulled out a small penknife.
Such was the situation in the summer of 1990. With few forces based in the region and the bulk of the US Army's tanks and armoured personnel carriers thousands of miles away, American ground forces had little to offer the air force or their Saudi allies by way of protection.
The 82nd airborne division, the army's elite air assault troops, with no armoured Bradley fighting vehicles or Abrams battle tanks - some in the unit began to call themselves "speed bumps" - were all that stood between Saddam Hussein and the Saudi oil fields for more than a month. It was not until five months after the August invasion of Kuwait that the US Army had deployed all the heavy divisions needed to push Iraq back.
It proved one of the most important lessons from operation Desert Storm: the US Army, for decades preparing itself for a land war in Europe, was big and slow and could not move itself to the world's new hot spots without an enormous effort.
The recent attempt to mobilise a force about half the size of that used during the Gulf war shows that the US military has learnt some lessons; but even senior Pentagon officials acknowledge that it still takes too long to move the army from its bases in the US.
Indeed, nearly three months after Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary, signed the first deployment orders - and as the original deadline for Mr Hussein to disarm passes - only one full heavy army division, the 3rd infantry, based at Fort Stewart, Georgia, has completed its transfer to Kuwait.
While the Pentagon says approximately 225,000 US personnel are now in the region, that number is misleading. About half of those troops are naval and air force personnel, putting the number of army and Marine ground forces at about 120,000.
If a ground invasion were to begin in the next few days, it would include the 3rd infantry division, the 101st airborne, 50,000 US Marines and 26,000 British troops from the 1st armoured division. In other words, the force would be far short of the four to five heavy divisions that Gen Tommy Franks, the head of US central command, initially requested and the size most analysts expected. As a result, the US-led attack may be forced to send far fewer and far lighter ground forces into Iraq in the opening days of the war, making the invasion more of a "rolling start" than the Pentagon may have originally wanted.
"The combat force present is not that overwhelming yet," says Michael O'Hanlon, a military analyst with the Brookings Institution. "You could start without all the forces being in place but why would you want to?"
Experts say the reasons for the inability to get troops into the theatre are partly political. The most obvious problem has been Turkey, which has prevented the US from inserting its second heavy army division - the 4th infantry, spearheading a taskforce of 62,000 troops - into northern Iraq from Turkish soil.
Similarly, anti-war sentiment in Austria led Vienna to block train shipments of some German-based US military equipment headed for Italian ports, forcing the Pentagon to reroute the hardware to Rotterdam or by rail through three or four other countries. That rerouting may have prevented a third heavy army division from deploying in time.
Politics, however, does not account for all the delays. Analysts note that units expected to be among the initial fighting force - the 1st armoured division, based in Germany, and the 1st cavalry division, based at Fort Hood, Texas - were sent their deployment orders on March 4, giving them only two weeks to get to the region before today's original deadline.
Instead, several analysts argue, it is the continued inability of the US military to move its heavy equipment halfway around the world that may force war planners to go with a much smaller and lighter ground force than Gen Franks envisaged when the war plan was first presented last year.
"They took their own sweet time getting everything there," says Patrick Garrett, an analyst with Global-Security.org, a military think-tank. "The whole deployment is completely messed up."
While the US and the UK do not run any real risk of suffering a military setback because of an inadequate ground force, the nature of the war is likely to be closer to what Mr Rumsfeld and his top civilian aides had originally proposed: an invasion more like the Afghan campaign than the 1991 Gulf war.
The smaller and lighter ground force, if it is indeed the complement used in the opening days of an attack, could mean a quick race to the outskirts of Baghdad, suggests Mr O'Hanlon, followed by reinforcements as they arrive. It would also force Gen Franks to rely more heavily on tactical fighter aircraft and Apache attack helicopters to serve as the heavy guns that support advancing infantry. Indeed, people briefed on the air campaign say the number of fighters currently in the theatre is far greater than needed to conduct bombing raids in the first days of the war.
Senior US navy admirals, for example, have said that each air wing attached to one of the five carriers in the region can target 700 "aim points" a day, meaning 3,500 targets are capable of being hit by navy fighters alone. "Tommy Franks has loaded up this plan with so much air power that the US Army wouldn't even have to show up and we could still win," says Loren Thompson, an analyst with the Lexington Institute, a Washington-based think-tank.
For its part, the Pentagon has been tight-lipped about departure and arrival times for specific units and has declined to comment on the pace of arriving troops. "In order for me to talk about the units which have been alerted would be about the same thing as me answering a question that says, 'What's your plan?', and none of us actually expect that we're going to talk about that," Gen Franks said this month.
Moreover, regional experts warn that there could be an element of deception in the troop deployments. Those who have been following equipment movements say there are suspicions that military material has been moved to Jordan and Saudi Arabia, where offensive operations could take place when troops arrive at the very last minute.
Mr Garrett notes that a joint US-British-Jordanian exercise called Early Victor took place last October inside Jordan, where 1,400 US special forces participated and equipment may have been left behind. He says there are similar suspicions about Saudi Arabia, where some equipment may have been pre-positioned at an airfield near the northern desert border town of Arar.
Military transport officials acknowledge they have pre-positioned large amounts of equipment in the region. And General William Welser, head of operations and logistics at US Transportation Command (Transcom), says that having more equipment positioned close to potential conflict areas was one of the important innovations the Pentagon implemented following the Gulf war, to help speed deployment.
"I have several ships at different places in the world that have equipment on them, so all I have to do is fly the forces in to offload them and fall right in on top of that equipment," says Gen Welser. "You're talking about everything from Humvees to Bradleys to you name it."
The pre-positioned equipment is just one of a series of measures taken by US Transcom in the past decade in an effort to make itself more mobile in case another war had to be mounted far from mainland US bases. Besides the pre-positioned ships, the most important addition has been a programme to build 19 enormous transport ships with six decks, which can carry dozens of tanks, helicopters and other heavy armour at relatively high speeds.
During operation Desert Storm, the military sea lift command ran short of ships that could move the army's heavy armour because it had been relying on smaller, faster transports to move over shorter distances. he new ships - the large, medium-speed, roll-on, roll-off ships that enable military logisticians to drive tanks and armoured personnel carriers directly on to them - can be loaded and unloaded in about three days. The ships carry the equivalent of 250 C-5 air cargo aircraft, the largest in the air force. "They save us a tremendous amount of airlift and they can be very efficiently onloaded (and) offloaded; and they can steam virtually anywhere in the world very quickly," says General John Handy, the Transcom commander.
But the benefit of the new ships has been severely curtailed by choke points created in the deployment process, particularly outside Kuwait City, where the main ports - Shuwaikh and Shuaiba - are much smaller than the Saudi harbours available to the US military during the 1991 Gulf war. Although Shuwaikh, one of the busiest ports in the Middle East, has 21 deep-water berths, it is only half the size of Saudi Arabia's primary seaport at Dammam, which has 39 berths including five equipped with ramps specifically designed for roll-on, roll-off ships.
Transcom officials have spent much of the past decade trying to avoid such bottlenecks by systematically evaluating airports and seaports around the world, assessing their capacity and occasionally conducting on-site surveys and recommending changes.
Because of past Saudi support for US troop deployments, the inability to use Dammam may not have been foreseen. Transcom officials are reluctant to comment on the Kuwaiti ports, except to praise local personnel who have assisted with the massive undertaking.
"They've got great facilities there and we've got good co-operation; and improvements have been made over the years in the eventuality that you would need to have operations in that location," says Gen Welser. "Certainly the ports of Saudi Arabia, because of the commercial business they have, are larger and they have more kinds of equipment and people."
Apart from the physical difficulty of moving the heavy equipment needed by the army, the Pentagon's bureaucracy makes it hard to get approval for equipment movements. This is particularly true for Central Command, the regional authority responsible for all US military activity in the Middle East and southern Asia. Centcom is in some ways a "paper command", with only about 700 headquarters personnel at its direct disposal. For troops and military hardware it must rely on forces assigned to other regional commanders. As a result, getting individual units assigned to the Centcom area is logistically difficult.
A decision to move troops starts with Gen Franks, who makes a request for forces to the joint staff at the Pentagon. Following their approval, the deployment order must be signed by Mr Rumsfeld, after which it is sent to bases around the world. Those "force providers" then inform Gen Franks of the equipment he can have and Gen Franks picks the divisions he wants. Only then is the order sent to Transcom.
"If you look at that process that goes from a request for forces, through deployment order signing, to sourcing, to validation, to transportation, you can see there is time consumed," acknowledges Gen Handy. "It's not that the army is hard to move. It is the process. That's the thing that needs to be improved."
After more than a decade of resistance, the army has owned up to the fact that the process has become something of a relic of the cold war, and it has only accelerated under Mr Rumsfeld.
Last year the army began equipping one of its brigades with a new, lighter ground attack vehicle called the Stryker, three of which can be loaded on to a C-17, the Pentagon's most advanced large cargo aircraft. By comparison, a C-17 can carry only one Abrams tank at a time.
The Bush administration's proposed 2004 defence budget calls for a total of four Stryker brigades, with the option to equip two more at a later date. In addition, the army is spending billions to field its future combat system - which will be led by a tank-like vehicle less than a third of the weight of an Abrams - by the end of the decade.
Still, those innovations will not help Gen Franks when he sends ground troops over the Kuwaiti border to invade Iraq, an order that could come this week. He will have an invading force with only about 250 Abrams tanks attached to the 3rd infantry division, plus 120 Challenger II tanks now arrayed with the UK's 7th armoured brigade.
It is almost certainly not the force he would have chosen if he had been allowed more time to get equipment into the region. Some analysts believe that the Bush administration's willingness to stretch diplomatic efforts into late March has as much to do with Gen Franks's need for more ground forces as it does with efforts to assuage reluctant allies.
"We're not sitting on our thumbs here because we really care what the French think," says Mr Thompson, the Lexington Institute analyst. "We're still sitting here because all this equipment hasn't gotten there yet."
Copyright © 2003, The Financial Times Limited
