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Financial Times Monday, March 17, 2003
Waiting for the big guns By Peter Spiegel
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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.
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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.
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The 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.
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Michael