U.S. May Equip Saudi Air Force With Top F-15s

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney flew to Saudi Arabia on Friday prepared to negotiate agreements under which the United States would for the first time supply Saudi Arabia with the most sophisticated version of the F-15 attack fighter plane and drastically expand the stockpiles of U.S. military equipment permanently positioned in the oil-rich desert kingdom.

Cheney is expected to work out the final details for selling 24 of the top-of-the-line F-15 Eagles to the Saudi kingdom and to discuss sales of a large number of tanks, weapons carriers and other arms to Riyadh, defense officials and Saudi sources said.

In the past, the United States has sold the Saudis F-15C and F-15D models, but never before has it sold that country the most advanced version.

“The F-15Es are vastly more sophisticated than the other models and have the kind of offensive capability that would have driven Congress and the Israeli lobby right up the wall before the Persian Gulf crisis,” said the Saudi source. “Nothing like it has ever been in the pipeline before.”

It was not immediately known what role Congress would play in the Administration’s newest proposed arms sale.

The Eagles would be equipped with Sidewinder and Sparrow air-to-air missiles.

What makes any sale of the E version of the Eagle to an Arab state so potentially controversial for Israel is the fact that the plane is modified for maximum range of operations--giving it an offensive capability that other F-15s lack. The F-15E could be particularly effective against tank formations, according to one military analyst.

The idea of selling F-15Es to Saudi Arabia arose about five years ago, during the presidency of Ronald Reagan, but that Administration ultimately decided not to try to make such a sale because of the bitter fight with Congress it would have touched off. Instead, Saudi Arabia bought advanced fighter jets from Britain.

The proposal for enlarging stockpiles of U.S. military equipment in Saudi Arabia for use in a future crisis includes provisions for storing massive amounts of supplies and materials at the huge underground storage area at the air base at Dhahran, which was built with the aid of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and to its specifications.

The storage terminal already includes medical supplies, parts for F-15s and some armaments, all supplied by the United States, but the new agreement would give the Saudis a much larger arsenal that would remain in place once U.S. troops leave the country, sources said.

Officials said the Pentagon will stop short of seeking permanent U.S. bases in Saudi Arabia. In meetings with Saudi leaders in Jidda scheduled for Monday, Cheney is expected to repeat promises that American military forces will stay as long as they are wanted, but the United States has no plans to secure a permanent troop presence on Saudi soil.

Speaking to reporters en route to Saudi Arabia, Cheney emphasized that U.S. forces could remain in the region for an extended period and would not rule out their presence in Saudi Arabia “in January, 1992.”

“It’s far too soon for us to talk about any change in our deployments,” Cheney said. “The commitment is long-term,” he added. “The question is how long the deployments are for.”

Cheney also disclosed that Secretary of State James A. Baker III and his Saudi counterpart signed a “status of forces” agreement Friday formalizing the massive U.S. deployment.

The agreement notes that the American forces inside Saudi Arabia are there “at the request of the Saudis and in defense of the kingdom.”

A senior defense official said that the accord is “consistent with U.S. constitutional principles and Saudi sovereignty.”

Cheney said Friday, “We have a lot of capability” now in the Mideast. But he added, “I’d like to have more there before I am going to be comfortable with the situation.”

The defense secretary said that if Saddam Hussein’s troops cross Kuwait’s borders into Saudi Arabia, “it would be a very expensive proposition.”

Cheney also announced Friday the Pentagon’s decision to partially mobilize the nation’s Civil Reserve Air Fleet, a fleet of commercial planes that could be commandeered by the Pentagon in time of crisis. He indicated that the military’s planned diversion of as many as 38 civil airliners would allow the projected deployment to proceed more quickly.

The fighter jet sale to Saudi Arabia, long opposed by Israel and its friends in Congress, would bring Saudi Arabia’s arsenal of F-15s to 94 planes. It would follow the emergency transfer to Saudi Arabia of 12 F-15s ordered by President Bush in the opening days of the Iraq crisis. The 24 aircraft would be taken directly from the U.S. arsenal, officials said.

The Saudi request for the 24 F-15s and for hundreds of TOW anti-tank weapons was just one of a number of appeals received by U.S. officials as “shopping lists (of arms) poured in from all over the region” after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, according to one Administration source.

American officials have said publicly that the requests were being considered case by case. Privately, they have predicted a series of major new weapons sales to the region.

The sale of the F-15s and the missiles they carry would be worth more than $1 billion to their manufacturers, according to knowledgeable sources. The F-15 is made by McDonnell Douglas Corp. of St. Louis. The Sidewinder is partly assembled in Newport Beach by Ford Aerospace Corp., and the Sparrow is built in part in Pomona by General Dynamics Corp.

Although the Saudis have long sought the F-15s, one of their most urgent requests is for hundreds of thousands of chemical weapons-protection suits and medicinal antidotes--numbers that one official said greatly exceed the size of the Saudi military.

The vast numbers of suits and antidotes suggested to U.S. officials that Saudi leaders, convinced that Iraq may use chemical weapons against them, are interested in protecting large civilian populations from the threat.

Two weeks ago, when Cheney went to the desert kingdom for the first time during his tenure as defense secretary, he was on a mission of persuasion. Laden with briefing charts, satellite photos and a message of commitment from the President, Cheney warned a reluctant King Fahd that unless he invited U.S. forces into his country--and soon--his meager defense forces could be overrun by a tank army more than 15 times its size, leaving Saudi oil riches in the hands of Iraq’s Saddam Hussein.

Today, as Cheney arrives at a remote air base in Saudi Arabia, American forces inside that country number at least 30,000, with tens of thousands more on ships operating nearby and on vessels steaming and planes flying toward the kingdom.

The scale of the deployment awed Saudi officials, one highly placed Bush Administration source said in a recent interview. But after years of refusing to allow the “pre-positioning” of U.S. arms caches, Saudi leaders were surprised at how long it takes for U.S. troops to arrive with their armaments, officials said.

“What they’ve learned is we have enormous time constraints on getting things there,” said the senior Bush aide. “They were impressed by how much we were capable of bringing. But they had never really gotten their minds around the scale of things, and it was easy to think it could all be done from over the horizon.”

“I’m sure they’d ask us to make arrangements so we could get back the next time,” the official added. “Not only will they let us stay, they will rather press us to stay until the danger (Saddam Hussein) presents is removed, until the sting has been pulled from the scorpion. And there are people out there who feel that as long as Saddam Hussein is out there, they’re not safe.”

“But,” he added, “there is a lot that could be done to bring our presence down to zero and still make our capability there substantial.”

Driven by a growing fear of long-range Iraqi missiles, Saudi officials in recent months have probed Washington’s willingness to sell them Patriot missile systems that have been specially designed to shoot down incoming ballistic missiles.

Pentagon officials describe the updated Patriots as a “mini-Star Wars” system that have become much in demand throughout the Middle East, including in Israel. The Bush Administration has not approved any such sale to Saudi Arabia, but officials said that the kingdom may soon renew its request.

It is still unclear how much military equipment might be stored on Saudi soil and what terms would govern its use, officials said.

The United States has positioned large stores of equipment and spare parts in Israel in cases that could be used by the Israel Defense Forces in a military crisis. The United States also maintains giant warehouses of equipment in West Germany for use by American Army divisions there.

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