Last Updated: November 04, 2002 03:07 PM ET

LONDON (Reuters) - Three enormous U.S.-military owned cargo ships capable of carrying tanks have left U.S. shores in recent days, a U.S. navy official said on Monday, amid mounting evidence Washington is building up firepower to attack Iraq.

The latest deployment comes as the aircraft carrier battle group the USS Constellation set sail for the Gulf from San Diego, California this past weekend.

The cargo vessels, the USNS Bellatrix, the USNS Bob Hope and the USNS Fisher, just short of the length of aircraft carriers themselves, are some of the largest transport ships in the U.S. military's inventory.

Marge Holtz, director of the Military Sealift Command (MSC), a branch of the U.S. Navy charged with running the ships on behalf of the U.S. armed forces, declined comment on the exact destination of the vessels.

"It is part of the repositioning of forces and equipment in support of the war on terror. They are on route," she told Reuters from Washington.

Two, the USNS Fisher and USNS Bob Hope, have seven decks capable of carrying tanks, helicopters and other heavy armor MSC says.

Over 900 feet long and 100 feet wide each has a hold capacity of 380,000 square feet -- equivalent to eight soccer fields.

According to MSC the vessels are capable of carrying 58 Abrams battle tanks, 48 track vehicles, such as armored vehicles, and 900 other trucks.

Holtz said the ships would also carry "tanker trucks and bridge sections."

Eight of their sister ships, known as the Watson-class, and similarly packed with armor and supplies for the U.S. Army, are anchored around the British base of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean, within a few days sail of the Gulf.

The fast sealift ship the USNS Bellatrix, of a similar size but quicker -- it is one of the fastest cargo ships in the world -- loaded equipment for the U.S. Marine Corps on the west coast of the United States and set sail last week.

The two others, Large Medium Speed Roll-on Roll-off (LMSR) ships, had loaded equipment for mechanized U.S. army units on the east coast and set sail in the last 14 days. "One last week and one the week before," Holtz said.

There are another six fast sealift ships and seven LMSRs berthed at U.S. ports awaiting orders according to the MSC.

In addition to these government-owned ships the Department of Defense has regularly chartered merchant vessels to carry tanks, ammunition, helicopters and other supplies to the Gulf.

Since August the Pentagon has chartered at least eight large vessels.

On Friday MSC confirmed to Reuters it had chartered two ships to move a massive quantity of ammunition and a smaller quantity of armor to the Gulf and the Red Sea.

-- Anonymous, November 04, 2002

Answers

Los Angeles Times November 3, 2002 U.S. Readying Its Bridges for River in Iraq

By Esther Schrader

The Pentagon is outfitting Army engineering units with state-of-the-art river-crossing equipment capable of moving large numbers of troops and heavy materiel across the Euphrates quickly if the decision is made to attack Iraq, current and former defense officials say.

The portable bridges -- carried on truck beds in retractable sections that snap out into flat spans when they hit the water -- are being delivered to some of the dozen or so units at U.S. and European bases that might deploy to the Persian Gulf in the event of war.

Any U.S. military drive to oust Iraqi President Saddam Hussein from power probably would require not just airstrikes but also a full-scale ground attack.

Military officials say it would be impossible to control Iraq without crossing the broad Euphrates, which flows the length of the country and passes near Baghdad. The rapidly deployed bridges could play a crucial role, minimizing U.S. casualties by speeding large numbers of soldiers and heavy equipment across the river. No matter how U.S. troops were to advance across Iraq, they would face the task of bridging and controlling the strategic waterway.

"At the end of the day, there will have to be equipment moved across the Euphrates, because if you want to control Iraq, you have to have forces on both sides of that river," said retired Lt. Gen. James Terry Scott, former commander of the Army's Special Operations Command. "And it will have to be over something that we can construct, because Iraq just doesn't have big enough existing bridges to move that kind of heavy equipment. And if it does, Saddam Hussein is going to make sure they get blown up."

Units that specialize in the muddy, difficult work of a major river crossing recently have stepped up training. In September, the Army's armor-heavy 1st Cavalry Division, based at Ft. Hood, Texas, conducted a huge exercise to practice the procedure. Military officials say the unit most likely would be the first deployed in any invasion of Iraq.

Other units are following suit, honing their skills at a task that was considered an important capability in Cold War days, when the military needed to be ready to cross the many rivers of Europe with ease.

Since the end of the Cold War, the focus of U.S. military operations has shifted from Europe to areas of the globe with fewer broad rivers, and the technique of fighting has shifted from the deployment of massive ground forces to heavy reliance on air power, making river crossing less important.

In the 1991 Persian Gulf War, U.S. forces had no need to cross the Euphrates because their goal was simply to expel Iraq from occupied Kuwait. This time, however, the stated aim is ousting Hussein from power and changing the Iraqi regime -- a task likely to require entry into Baghdad.

Military history is replete with tales of crucial and treacherous river operations, from Washington crossing the Delaware to the U.S. 3rd Army's rush over the Rhine in 1945, but American forces have not faced enemy fire while crossing a major river with a large force in five decades.

"At that point, Iraq has a half-mile-wide moat that the American Army is going to have to get across," said John Pike, director of GlobalSecurity.org, a military research firm. "If there's one place that the Republican Guard might counterattack, that would be it."

Even if the U.S. military were to face no enemy at the banks of the Euphrates, it would have a complex logistical challenge on its hands.

The last time U.S. ground forces crossed a major river under conditions that might have led to combat was in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1995.

That crossing of the Sava River was unopposed. But it was severely complicated by the worst flooding on the river in 70 years, at the height of the harsh Balkan winter. Few commanders involved had executed a major river operation, even in training, said retired Army Maj. Gen. William Nash, who commanded U.S. ground forces in Bosnia at the time.

Even so, U.S. forces were so confident about the operation that they ferried troops and equipment across in helicopters and rafts long before the bridge was completed. After almost a week of attempts, Army engineering brigades built a 373-foot one-lane span in 72 hours. During the next few weeks, it was expanded to allow two-way traffic; 20,000 vehicles, many of them heavy fuel tankers and artillery pieces, crossed over it safely.

The last time U.S. forces faced an enemy while crossing a river of any size was during the 1950-53 Korean War, at the Han River. In World War II, the 3rd Army under Gen. George S. Patton Jr. used some of the techniques still employed today to cross the Rhine.

"Unlike the situation that faced Washington crossing the Delaware, Robert E. Lee and Patton, for that matter, we've got a capacity today, with our air and mobile capacities, that allows us to jump that river with a lot less vulnerability to the forces doing the crossing," Nash said. "But you've still got to move a lot of things across that river that can't fly."

Military planners at the Pentagon are analyzing a broad range of options for an invasion of Iraq, but all call for advancing significant ground forces deep into the country and for crossing the wide, slow-moving expanse of the Euphrates to take control of nearby Baghdad, defense officials said. Several plans also call for crossing the Tigris, the other major river that slices across Iraq.

"This is one of the contingencies that has to be addressed, and that planners are addressing," said a defense official, speaking on condition of anonymity. "It's pretty simple. If what we need to do is on the other side, we have to cross that river."

Getting an armored force, even a relatively light force, across a river is anything but simple. Although every ground unit is trained and outfitted to get troops and equipment across small rivers, creeks and gaps, crossing a major river is a different challenge altogether.

Although many aspects of waging war have gotten easier with the advent of modern technology, crossing a river has in some respects become harder, because a modern army has so much equipment to move.

And although technology has made it possible for the modern army to protect crossers with air power as it unfurls bridges off the backs of trucks, the fundamentals of attacking an enemy across a river have not changed since ancient times, when the Persian army built bridges in the 5th century BC during its invasion of Greece, and ancient Macedonia, a century later, first used professional engineers to speed a river crossing.

Any U.S. ground force driving to Baghdad would number 2,000 vehicles at a bare minimum, according to former military officials with experience in such crossings.

Before a bridge could be constructed, ground forces would have to get the structure and the necessary heavy equipment -- including rafts and small boats -- to the river. Once there, warplanes and combat helicopters would protect the bridge-building operation. Troops and light equipment would be ferried across the river on helicopters and rafts to secure the other side.

Although military planners think it unlikely that Hussein's army would be capable of mounting any significant opposition at the banks of the Euphrates or the Tigris, the Iraqis could do some mischief, the planners say.

If the Army slowed while crossing the river, that could give the enemy a chance to lob artillery shells at the Americans. Iraqi combat engineers, considered among their nation's most competent soldiers, also could dynamite standing bridges over the Euphrates, making crossing with even light ground forces significantly more difficult.

If Hussein chose to launch a chemical or biological attack against invading U.S. forces, the banks of the Euphrates could give him the chance to do so while the American military had a large number of troops and equipment in one place. There are also major dams along both the Tigris and the Euphrates that the Iraqis could open to swell the rivers.

During the past decade, the U.S. Army has reduced the number of units trained to cross major rivers.

Currently, there are six such units at the division level, according to Russell Glenn, a senior defense analyst at Rand, a Santa Monica-based think tank, who as an Army officer commanded an infantry division's bridge company in the 1970s.

The bridge units are attached to mechanized and armored divisions. Two are based at Ft. Hood and one at Ft. Stewart in Georgia. Two more are based in Germany and another in South Korea.

The Army also has reserve units trained to get personnel and equipment across rivers and already has positioned in the Gulf region some of the bridges, trucks and other heavy equipment that would be needed for crossing the Euphrates.

Three of the divisions will finish regularly scheduled training by the end of this year that would ready them for an assault on Iraq in January or February.

The new bridge being deployed to the units, the Improved Float Bridge (Ribbon Bridge), is carried on a modified Army truck chassis. The Pentagon began deploying the equipment in June 2001.

The bridge, produced by a German company, is a significant improvement over earlier ribbon bridges, according to Glenn. Copied in Cold War days from satellite photos of Soviet ribbon bridges, plus one captured by the Israelis from the Egyptians, it is made up of several sections. Some of the sections have ramps and supports to secure the structure against steep riverbanks; others are designed to attach to the end sections and float on pontoons in the middle of a river.

At the touch of a series of controls, the bridge sections slide off the back of the truck and flatten out as they hit the water. When they are deployed, tug-like boats -- also brought to the banks of a river on trucks -- push the sections together. Soldiers then secure them to each other.

The new bridge supports more weight than earlier versions and can be secured to steeper riverbanks. The bridge also stays more stable in faster currents than earlier models. With modern military mobile artillery pieces weighing in at as much as 140,000 pounds, such improvements become critical, according to military analysts.

"River crossings are technically difficult feats of amazing technology and skill," Glenn said. "To get vast amounts of heavy equipment across a major river, you can't bring it in by air; you have to worry about currents, muddy banks, steepness of the banks, depth of the water. It's never been easy."

-- Anonymous, November 04, 2002

Posted on: Monday, November 4, 2002

Pearl Harbor ships to join armada in Persian Gulf

By William Cole Advertiser Military Writer

At least seven of Pearl Harbor's 30 home-based ships and subs are — or soon will be — part of an armada the U.S. Navy is massing in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea.

The aircraft carrier USS Constellation battle group left San Diego on Saturday to join the build-up of forces.

Patrick Garrett, a military analyst for Virginia-based Global Security.Org, said he expects that four, and possibly five, carriers will be stationed in the Gulf region in December or January for a possible start of war with Iraq.

Garrett said the carrier group may fall just short of the six-carrier presence put in place for the first Gulf War.

"I think the indicators for a long time have been that it's not, 'Should we go to war with Iraq?' but 'When are we going to war with Iraq?' " Garrett said. "With the increased tonnage — just the sheer number of ships that are out at one time and converging on one area — I think it's a serious indicator that war is going to occur sooner rather than later."

On Oct. 24, Secretary of the Navy Gordon R. England visited the San Diego-based amphibious assault ship USS Tarawa and repeated the oft-heard Operation Enduring Freedom advice of "be prepared" to the 2,000 sailors and Marines during an all-hands call.

The Tarawa is expected to leave in coming months for the Gulf region, where 2,100 Camp Pendleton Marines already are deployed with the USS Belleau Wood Amphibious Readiness Group.

Carrier training and deployment schedules are determined years in advance, and Ensign David Luckett, a spokesman for the Navy's Office of Information in Washington, said the aircraft carriers deployed and the ones preparing to leave port in the near future are on "routine deployments."

But those schedules can be altered to meet the Navy's needs, as in the case of the Constellation, which last week left port earlier than planned after returning in September 2001 from a previous Persian Gulf deployment.

There are no aircraft carriers with home port in Hawai'i.

Normally, a carrier deploys for six months and then is in training and undergoing maintenance or upgrades for the next 18 months. The Constellation had more than four months remaining in that cycle.

More than 8,000 Pacific Fleet sailors are deploying with the Constellation and its escorts, which include the Hawai'i-based attack submarine Columbia, as well as two cruisers, two destroyers, a frigate and support ship from elsewhere in the fleet.

The Constellation, with approximately 75 combat and support aircraft, is heading to the North Arabian sea in support of Operation Enduring Freedom, the Navy said.

The carrier Abraham Lincoln, meanwhile, which left Everett, Wash., in July and arrived in the Arabian Sea in September, has as part of its battle group four Pearl Harbor-based surface ships: destroyers Fletcher and Paul Hamilton; frigate Reuben James; and attack submarine Honolulu.

The carriers Constellation and Harry S. Truman were expected to take over in December for the Lincoln and the George Washington, which is in the Mediterranean Sea.

But both the Lincoln and George Washington could be kept on deployment in the event of war with Iraq.

"There is the possibility the Lincoln could come home because she's due back in port sometime in January," Garrett said. "But I haven't heard anybody talking about her going home on schedule."

Garrett said a likely scenario calls for the use of the Lincoln, Truman and Constellation for strike operations. The Japan-based carrier Kitty Hawk, which got under way Oct. 25 for an "at sea" period and training with Carrier Air Wing 5 embarked, could be deployed quickly to the Gulf region, Garrett said.

The carrier USS Nimitz out of San Diego and its battle group, meanwhile, are scheduled to deploy early next year, but that could be moved up. The Pearl Harbor-based guided missile cruiser Chosin and attack submarine Pasadena are part of the battle group.

Submarines normally lead the way for a battle group, but Pacific Fleet submarines also operate independently of the warships in the Bahrain-based 5th Fleet and Western Pacific 7th Fleet areas of responsibility, said Cmdr. Kelly Merrell, spokeswoman for the Pacific Fleet submarine force.

-- Anonymous, November 04, 2002

sure seems to be a lot of information here that I would think shouldn't be aired.

Interesting to know, though.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 2002

Just the guv turning up the heat on Saddam is all.

-- Anonymous, November 05, 2002