U.S. Had Prepared for a Different Kind of Middle East War : Strategy: Years of defense planning assumed Soviets or terrorists would be aggressors--not Iraqi invaders.

As Washington pondered its options for military action in the Persian Gulf on Friday, U.S. officials acknowledged that a decade of planning for a very different kind of war in the Mideast had left them with few effective responses to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait.

Since 1979, when then-President Jimmy Carter declared that the United States would act militarily in defense of its Middle East interests, planning has focused on one big scenario--a Soviet invasion of Iran--and several small ones involving possible terrorist threats.

“Basically, U.S. planning for the Mideast has been almost totally oriented against threats external to the region--specifically, the Soviet threat,” said Barry Blechman, who was a senior official in the Carter Administration. “It was geared to going into Iran and keeping the Soviet hordes from coming in.”

Saddam Hussein’s lightning invasion of Kuwait and the threat that he poses to Saudi Arabia represent the first test of the Pentagon’s planning for a new “Peninsula strategy.” And it may have caught the U.S. military establishment unprepared, officials said.

“We’ve only recently begun to plan how to fight in the southern Persian Gulf,” said Dov Zakheim, a senior defense official in the Ronald Reagan Administration and now a Pentagon consultant. “And Saddam Hussein won’t wait for U.S. military planners to finish their job.”

In a secret “policy guidance” document issued to Pentagon planners earlier this year, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney ordered a shift in Mideast planning to emphasize the defense of oil facilities in friendly Arab states.

Cheney’s guidance has spurred “intensive work” to devise military responses to lesser threats inside the Persian Gulf, said one Pentagon official.

“That’s not to say the forces have changed,” the official said, adding that “it will take years” to readjust military options to address threats, such as Iraq, that arise inside the region.

By some Pentagon estimates, countering an Iraqi thrust into Saudi Arabia could require as many as 350,000 U.S. troops, backed by hundreds of tanks and warplanes.

While that is almost as large a force as would be needed to cope with a Soviet invasion of Iran, the defense of Saudi Arabia still represents the kind of mid-range scenario that previously had received little attention at the Pentagon.

More important, U.S. troops would have far less warning time in the case of an impending Iraqi attack on Saudi Arabia. Pentagon planners expected to have several months’ warning of a Soviet invasion of Iran, leaving 30 to 60 days for heavily armed U.S. troops to arrive by ship and blunt an attack.

But officials said that Hussein’s roll through Kuwait has provided a graphic reminder to U.S. war planners that American troops will not have the luxury of long warning times when Arab neighbors war with each other. When adversaries are squeezed together in one geographic region, time gets compressed, too.

By Friday, Pentagon officials said their best hope of stopping Hussein’s entry into Saudi Arabia with forces readily at hand was to scare him out of a Saudi invasion altogether. And the best way to do that, they said, would be to station several dozen U.S. warplanes at Saudi Arabian airfields, from which they could threaten Hussein’s advancing troops and their protective air cover.

Militarily, that would be easy enough to accomplish, since those airfields were built by American companies to U.S. military standards. They were designed for a scenario in which Saudi Arabia, its will stiffened by an imminent Soviet invasion of the region, would allow U.S. aircraft to mount operations in the region from Saudi soil.

In this case, however, officials said Saudi Arabia has not invited U.S. forces in, despite the Pentagon’s eagerness to secure early access to those bases.

Diplomatically, the war of wills over U.S. access to Saudi bases dramatizes just how difficult the new contingency planning will be.

If the U.S. military is to respond to large, quickly emerging threats from inside the region, Zakheim and other experts say, Washington must win greater cooperation from its allies, including ensured base rights and possibly even a permanent presence on Mideast soil.

With the exception of Oman, none of Washington’s Mideast friends will permit the stationing or exercising of U.S. troops within their borders.

The United States has reached implicit understandings with some Mideast allies that those bases could be used in a crisis, knowledgeable officials said. But defense planners are wary of counting on implicit understandings--especially those negotiated when the Soviet Union, not a brother Arab state, was the presumed enemy.

“I see an opportunity” in the Kuwait crisis, said Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.), a member of both the House Armed Services Committee and the House Intelligence Committee. “At the end of this crisis, I hope that these U.S. allies in the Mideast would be forced to adopt a more pro-Western stance.”