US adds thousands more troops to Gulf force
The United States is sending thousands more soldiers to Kuwait in the largest single ground deployment to the Persian Gulf since the war there in 1991, it was reported today.
The Pentagon has been steadily building up forces in the area for months, but this deployment is the first time a full division has been sent to the region, The New York Times said.
One of the Third Infantry Division’s three combat brigades, about 4,000 soldiers, has been training in the Kuwaiti desert since September, but the unit has been told to send the rest of the more than 15,000 combat troops to join the soldiers in Kuwait, officials said.
The deployment is the latest visible signal that the Bush administration is moving towards military action to force Iraq to disarm.
The troops being sent out specialise in desert warfare, and they have been rotating through desert training exercises in Kuwait and Southern California for months.
The US navy also directed the Abraham Lincoln aircraft carrier battle group to remain at sea for perhaps three more months and to be prepared to steam to the Persian Gulf on short notice, officials said.
The military’s classified war plan for Iraq calls for as many as 250,000 American troops, about half of the forces that massed for the 1991 Gulf War. But any American-led invasion force would be much smaller than that, with a large number of troops held in reserve, defence officials said.
