ABOARD THE USS MOUNT VERNON — A thousand combat Marines are going ashore in Kuwait today for a long-planned desert warfare exercise that has taken on added significance because of the standoff between the U.S. and Iraq.
The troops, from the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit at Camp Pendleton, will train with Kuwaiti soldiers in the flat, sandy wasteland near the border with Iraq. The outskirts of Baghdad are only about 300 miles away.
The decision to move forward with the exercise is the Pentagon's latest show of military muscle in the region. In recent weeks, the U.S. military has been building on already significant levels of troops and equipment it has positioned in the countries and seas around Iraq.
The permanent U.S. military presence in the region is in stark contrast to its relative absence 12 years ago in the months leading up to Operation Desert Storm. At that time--shortly after the end of the Cold War--far more of the Pentagon's resources were still deployed in Europe.
But for much of the last decade, the Pentagon has based more than 20,000 American military personnel within close striking distance of Iraq, along with heavy equipment for at least four armored brigades and Patriot antimissile batteries to protect them.
In addition, senior defense officials say elite special operations troops this month began training alongside CIA units that could be used in covert counter-terrorism operations within Iraq.
The Navy has accelerated training and maintenance schedules for many of its ships, including three aircraft carrier battle groups based on the West Coast, so they could be ordered to steam toward the Persian Gulf on short notice, a senior Navy official said.
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More Troops in Kuwait
Several thousand heavily armed Army soldiers also are moving into Kuwait as part of regularly scheduled exercises or troop replacements, while about 600 military planners from the U.S. Central Command, based in Tampa, Fla., are now training in Qatar.
The Pentagon says the planners have deployed to the Persian Gulf to test the command's ability to set up a headquarters in a crisis. But senior Pentagon officials say the planners could remain in Qatar to establish a new forward headquarters in the region at Al Udeid Air Base outside Doha, the capital.
