>>Kuwait's Landscape of Tents and Tanks - U.S. and British Forces Flood Northern Desert As Buildup Continues
By Peter Baker
Washington Post Foreign Service
Friday, February 7, 2003; Page A19
CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait, Feb. 6 -- The main Kuwaiti port bustles with ships disgorging containers. The international airport and nearby air base roar with the engines of transport planes unloading column after column of soldiers. The highways are jammed with troop convoys heading to camps that did not exist weeks ago.
And parked here at the U.S. Army's main staging area are acres and acres of tanks, armored vehicles, Humvees, bulldozers, forklifts, trucks and tankers as far as the eye can see.
During the past few weeks, the U.S. military has transformed Kuwait into an armed camp, dramatizing predictions from officials and analysts that war with Iraq is likely within weeks. More than 50,000 U.S. military personnel have arrived, from the Army, Marines, Navy and Air Force. More are on the way. By next week, Kuwaiti officials predict, 80,000 foreign troops will be in place, roughly the equivalent of 10 percent of Kuwait's native-born population.
British troops have begun arriving as well, judging by the recent proliferation of accents and uniforms in the mess hall at Camp Arifjan, 40 miles south of Kuwait City, as well as the Union Jack flying over Camp Doha, the main U.S. base just west of the capital. Britain, which had already ordered 35,000 troops to leave for the Persian Gulf region, announced today that another 100 warplanes and 7,000 support personnel are on the way.
"The reception stage is winding up," said Brig. Gen. Vincent Boles, head of Army Materiel Command operations here, in charge of supplying soldiers with everything from food and water to tents and tanks. "We've gone from zero to 60, and we'll probably go to 90 soon. . . . Since the beginning of January, there have been ships with cargo being downloaded every day and there have been planes every day. There has been a constant flow of soldiers in here."
Boles said in an interview that he has enough equipment for four heavy brigades on the ground, meaning more than a full Army division, which typically includes at least 15,000 soldiers divided into three brigades. In addition to the Army combat units, Air Force and Marine personnel, and thousands of logistical and support staff, have been dispatched.
"There's enough here to do what we need to do," said Lt. Col. Ray Langlais, commander of the combat equipment battalion at Camp Arifjan.
The Marines have their own supply units. During a visit with troops in Kuwait this week, Gen. Michael Hagee, the Marine Corps commandant, told reporters that the past few weeks of buildup have been sufficient to prepare his troops to begin an attack against Iraq immediately if President Bush gave the order. "We are ready now," he said.
The arrival of tens of thousands of foreign troops has sharply altered the landscape here in this 6,880-square-mile emirate on the Persian Gulf. Driving down the road outside Kuwait City, it is almost impossible not to run across a long line of military vehicles moving troops or equipment.
Even those vehicles are not enough for such a huge operation; the military has snapped up nearly every available four-wheel- drive vehicle in the country. Every morning hundreds of identical Mitsubishi Pajeros snake toward the checkpoint at Camp Doha, the main base for U.S. land forces in Kuwait.
More tents go up with each passing hour, some of them equipped with air conditioning and electrical connections, others less comfortable out in the rugged desert north of Kuwait City. The military has set up whole tent cities in the sand, some of them named after the states associated with the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- Camp New York, Camp Virginia and Camp Pennsylvania.
"It may be that people are arriving tonight and somebody's putting up a tent today, but there will be a place for them to sleep," said Joyce Taylor, a civilian employee at the Army Materiel Command who oversees hundreds of civilian contractors scrambling to stay ahead of the curve. "You may go out in the morning and say, 'There's no way this will be ready,' and by evening it will be ready."
The Kuwaiti government has done everything it can to ease the way for the Americans and Britons, reserving a quarter of the country for them to operate without interference. Starting Feb. 15, the government will expand the "no-go zone" to cover the entire northern half of Kuwait, keeping out civilians without special permits.
While their compatriots arrive, the soldiers already here spend their days training, setting up bases and receiving their equipment. Even without hostilities, the military buildup has yielded a few casualties. One soldier was killed and four others were injured in a traffic accident outside Camp Arifjan this afternoon. Last week a soldier was shot in the abdomen during a live-fire training exercise in the Kuwaiti desert. And the day before that, a soldier and a civilian contractor were injured when a 25mm round exploded inside the turret of their Bradley Fighting Vehicle.
Next week, officials will hold perhaps the most important exercise, involving few troops but most of their top commanders. Lucky Warrior, a computer-generated, command-post exercise, will test the U.S. forces' command-and-control systems in a dry run for a drive north across the Iraqi border.
Beyond Britain, few other countries have sent troops. Australia has announced that it is dispatching forces. The Czech Republic has deployed a battalion of chemical, biological and nuclear weapons specialists, as has Germany, which today conducted a public display of its capabilities despite past reluctance to highlight its presence.
Much of the burden of outfitting the U.S. troops arriving each day has fallen on Boles and his team here at Camp Arifjan. A sprawling, isolated patch of desert far from the Iraqi border, the camp serves as the rear depot where thousands of troops and civilians labor to unload equipment, service the M-1 Abrams tanks and Bradley Fighting Vehicles and distribute gear from latrines to portable kitchens.
The military had planned to move its Kuwait headquarters here from Camp Doha in 2005 at the request of the local government. But the Iraq crisis forced the military to move into Arifjan in October, without abandoning Doha. When the initial units arrived in October, there was no water and no permanent electricity. "It was real austere," said Langlais, the commander of the combat equipment battalion. "It's come a long way."
Today a gravel terrace of sorts, with plastic picnic tables and chairs, is surrounded by a gymnasium in a tent, a PX and newly arrived eateries such as Burger King, Subway and Baskin-Robbins, set up in trailers or shipping containers. Basketball hoops and volleyball nets are set up outside the mess hall. Three-story dormitories have been erected and are expected to be used as sleeping quarters soon.
Long rows of vehicles and shipping containers cover the desert floor, waiting for their combat units to retrieve them. A typical container might hold 50,000 to 60,000 pounds of equipment. Each day companies from the northern desert make their way down to Arifjan to claim gear.
In Kuwait, as well as aboard cargo ships around the world, the buildup has been eased considerably by the prepositioning of equipment since the end of the Persian Gulf War in 1991. But officers are reluctant to give firm figures to describe the scope of their operation. "I don't think you can use the word, 'typical,' " said Langlais. "None of this is typical."
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