CAMP DOHA, Kuwait, March 15 - The American-led coalition that is preparing to topple Saddam Hussein's government is planning for a complex invasion of Iraq to begin even as allied troops are still arriving in the region, senior commanders say.
With three dozen ships carrying heavy tanks and equipment for the Army's Fourth Infantry Division waiting off the coast of Turkey because of a political standoff, the military is scrambling to put together a backup plan for the northern front of a war with Iraq.
In Kuwait, only a portion of the 101st Airborne Division's forces - equipped with Apache gunships and Black Hawk troop carriers - is ready to be sent into combat. If the invasion begins next week, the 101st would take part, but the division's major combat punch would come soon after.
Three powerful armored units - the First Cavalry Division, the First Armored Division and the Third Armored Cavalry Regiment - are still in the United States or Europe and will not be in the Persian Gulf region until mid to late April, intended as a postwar stabilization force.
"We recognized from the very beginning that we're going to be fighting and building up combat power at about the same time," said Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, the V Corps commander who would lead the Army's attack.
But there are military experts - including experienced commanders - who are worried by this plan, which has come to be called a "rolling start" to the impending war.
Assuming that no peaceful resolution is found to the confrontation with Iraq, the concept of the rolling start gives the coalition's commanders the option of starting at any time. Meanwhile, as diplomacy delays military action, the coalition can continue to assemble an ever more threatening force.
Nevertheless, its adoption marks a sharp departure from the doctrine articulated by Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
During the Persian Gulf war of 1991, under his leadership, the military took six months to assemble an overwhelming force, which only stormed into Kuwait after a massive troop and logistical buildup was completed and allied warplanes carried out a 39-day bombardment of Iraq and its army of occupation.
The staggered arrival stems partly from the limited capacity of Kuwait's ports, but it also appears to reflect Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld's view that large, heavy ground forces are not always needed. This time, the United States military is trying to get more firepower from fewer troops, supported with a heavy air campaign. The Iraqi Army is also much smaller and less capable than it was 12 years ago....
Some former American commanders from the 1991 conflict, however, say the United States would be in a better position and could keep risks to its troops to a minimum if it had more forces on hand.
"The key to success is rapid victory on the ground, and bringing stability as quickly as you can," a former senior officer who commanded land forces during the gulf war said. "Based on what I know about the forces in the region, or flowing in, I am concerned they don't have enough to give high assurance they can do this quickly. It's strange for most of us. If we did it so well last time, using the Powell doctrine, why would you do anything less than that now? Why take that risk?" ...
The commanders know their mission is daunting. American forces plan to advance all the way to Baghdad to overthrow Mr. Hussein and install a new government, a more challenging job than ejecting Iraqi invaders from Kuwait 12 years ago. They plan to hunt down suspected caches of chemical and biological weapons. They need to be able to handle tens of thousands of Iraqi prisoners. They need to guard long supply routes from Kuwait. They need to provide food and relief assistance to millions of Iraqis, who will become the responsibility of United States and British forces during the advance. Even with more effective weapons and more synchronized operations, the military's many tasks put demands on the troops.
"You need enough forces to fight the war itself, and sustain it," said Gen. Richard I. Neal, a retired Marine officer who served as Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf's deputy operations director in the gulf war. "But then you have to deal with displaced persons and enemy prisoners of war."
Demands like that, he said, are "force eaters" that reduce an army's combat power.
Gen. Ronald H. Griffith, who commanded the First Armored Division in the gulf war, voiced similar concerns. "War planners need to take into account the impact of large numbers of surrendering Iraqi soldiers," he said. "We faced this problem in 1991 and it impacted our rate of movement. Disarming the Iraqi soldiers, providing them with essentials such as food and water, and establishing minimal custody will require a level of force commitment."...
Allied commanders talk about their missions in only general terms. But it is clear that the Marine Corps is planning to advance to Baghdad, a thrust of more than 300 miles. In December 2001, thousands of marines were flown to Afghanistan by helicopter, 400 miles from their ships off the coast of Pakistan. The advance on Baghdad would be the longest Marine land attack since 1805, when Lt. Presley O'Bannon marched 600 miles across the desert in seven weeks from Alexandria, Egypt, to Derna, Tripoli, during the war with the Barbary pirates....
But the Marines do not have the logistics for deep thrusts into enemy territory. Nor do they have the Army's armored punch. The Marine force has about 120 M1-A1 tanks, about 130 fewer than the Army's Third Infantry Division.
So the Marines are working with other forces. To shore up logistics for a push toward Baghdad, the Marines have turned to the Army, which is supplying transportation units with 5,000-gallon fuel trucks....
The difficulties in deploying Army forces in Kuwait might have been eased if the United States had had access to ports in northern Saudi Arabia. American supply ships could have unloaded equipment there and had it driven north. As it turned out, however, all of the military equipment had to flow through Kuwait's port and airfield.
"We got only a single seaport of embarkation and a single airport of embarkation," General Wallace said. "We have had to make adjustments in the way we fight the fight."...
<http://www.nytimes.com/2003/03/16/international/middleeast/16MILI.html> *****