Rommel’s Ghost Haunts Army Engineers’ Work : Strategy: Lessons learned from field marshal’s North African campaign are being put to use in Saudi desert.

On the shelves of an Army engineers’ school at Ft. Leonard Wood, Mo., is an obscure volume containing the lessons of German Field Marshal Erwin Rommel. Its central conclusion, drawn from World War II battles in the sands of North Africa: First, you must defeat the desert.

Now, more than 45 years later, American combat engineers are taking Rommel’s advice very seriously in preparation for another possible war on the sands. They are hurrying to conquer the desert so that they can wage war more efficiently when the fighting begins.

* In Saudi Arabia, where the main highways run north to south, engineers are cutting east-west road networks that will cover 1,000 miles in hopes of transforming the impassable wasteland into byways upon which armies can move.

* They are building about 1,000 helicopter pads, metal-floored oases scattered across the vast expanse so that U.S. commanders will have a wide choice of attack options if combat ever comes to pass.

* And, in what were barren outposts a month ago, the soldiers have begun to erect a myriad of structures, shelters to protect their tools of war against an array of potentially hostile elements: sun, sand and wind.

“Where Rommel went wrong was that he could never really get off the main roads,” said Col. Bob Flowers, the theater commander for Army engineers here. “We’re making sure that doesn’t happen to us.”

In taming the desert, commanders hope to provide American generals with the flexibility they need to ensure surprise, forcing Iraq to prepare for an attack at any point along the long desert front.

The basic task facing the engineers is to transform the vastness of the desert from an obstacle to U.S. combat operations, as it was when Army and Marine units first landed in August, into a tool that can help U.S. forces mount their attack.

But they clearly are involved in a race: At the same time that the American bulldozers are pushing ahead, Iraqi engineers are building their own vast network of roads in occupied Kuwait.

Thus, ominously, the scope of the potential battlefield is widening every day.

“When all this gets over, that trackless desert down there is going to look nothing like it does on the maps,” said one U.S. pilot who has been observing the two-sided buildup from the air.

Even before President Bush’s recent decision to increase the U.S. deployment here substantially, the job was a tall order--marking the biggest engineering challenge that the military has faced since the Korean War.

To be sure, in a country whose secondary roads often disappear into shifting dunes, U.S. tanks, armored vehicles and jeeps have found few obstacles to their maneuvers. Presumably, they could move at will if the current stalemate turns to war.

But the lesson learned by Rommel, and scrutinized in that dusty German volume by Missouri-based combat engineers, is that mobile armor will pack little punch unless supply trucks can be brought quickly on its heels.

“Rommel and his engineers never really succeeded in getting off the hard-surface roads,” said Flowers, who has studied the World War II desert campaign carefully. “What we’re trying to ensure is that you can take your forces . . . and move them wherever you need to go.”

In modern warfare in Saudi Arabia, the obstacles remain considerable.

The debilitating dust is an unrelenting obstacle for helicopter operations, limiting routes and bases to the few pre-paved landing strips.

Even the massed force of more than 150,000 GIs--out of a total U.S. deployment of 238,000--now on the ground near the front lines is too often restricted to paved roads running north to south. And the links between the ground forces remain tortuous at best.

“Very few people have a complete comprehension of the magnitude of separation between units,” said a weary Maj. Gen. Gus Pagonis, whose task as logistics commander in the theater requires him to plot supply lines to equip the forces on the ground.

“There’s no restriction here: You have the whole desert,” Pagonis said. “And, tactically, you spread out your troops.”

In recognition of the challenge, both American and British forces have bolstered their forces with extra-heavy units.

While waiting for their own equipment to arrive, U.S. engineers leased Saudi bulldozers. The British, who initially planned to deploy only 200 engineers, wound up eventually bringing six times that many.

U.S. Army commanders currently hope to build about 700 miles of new or reclaimed roads, and Marine Corps strategists have similar plans.

The routes cut through terrain that traditionally has been shunned by Saudi road builders, and American road builders say they understand why.

“The reason the roads are where they are is that that was the easiest place to build them,” grumbled one Army bulldozer driver.

The progress can be halting. As much time as the engineers spend building roads, they must spend at least as much time clearing sand from those they have completed, Flowers said.

So far, the Army has built about 250 newly cleared miles of desert roads, with marl surfaces that it soon will spray with a sealant to upgrade them to the quality of an American country road.

Of more than 1,000 helicopter pads that are planned, about 150 are in place, assembled in the sand from sheets of metal matting.

Even so, the United States still is trailing the Iraqis, whose earthmovers and surveyors have already crisscrossed southern Iraq and Kuwait with more than 500 miles of new military routes, according to U.S. officials.

More troubling to the Americans, Iraqi engineers have built up vast networks of sophisticated obstacles to help block attacking forces. Meanwhile, the United States, constrained by what military officials say is Saudi opposition, has yet to plant a single mine.

“Clearly,” one American official said, “we would prefer to have our own obstacles in place.”

But the U.S. officials say they recognize that such limitations will continue to constrain the American buildup here and require considerable innovation in the push to transform the desert into an amenable battlefield.

The push to build the necessary infrastructure to serve U.S. forces isn’t only a front-line affair.

Even in the primitive encampments that still house the majority of American ground troops, once-bare tent clusters are now ringed with impressive sand berms and barriers that, when viewed from the air, give the compounds the look of a medieval fortress.

And later this year, American commanders hope to sign leases on more than 100 Saudi compounds designed to house more than 20,000 soldiers in relative comfort.

The real-estate acquisitions reflect a growing recognition that equipment cannot be adequately maintained in the dust and dirt of temporary facilities--and that, even if the deployment here ends soon, American troops will still be here for months to come.

“It’s not going to happen overnight. . . . It’s going to take us six months to get over here,” Pagonis said.

U.S. forces are hoping to bring at least some of the new infrastructure back to the States when their stay here is over. Maintenance hangars have been designed to be quickly “boxed up and taken home” in case of a U.S. withdrawal.

And the precise location of each of the helicopter pads will be marked with a satellite-aided device so that none is left behind when the operation has ended.

But the new roads are certain to leave an enduring presence that may, Army engineers hope, be of use to some of the Bedouins who inhabited this bleak terrain before the current crisis began.

If not, Flowers pointed out, in the desert, nothing is permanent.

“Over time,” he shrugged, “if they don’t want the roads, they may just allow the desert to reclaim them.”