Military Gets to the Gulf ‘Fastest With the Mostest’ : Logistics: The bitter lesson of Vietnam spurs largest movement of troops and equipment in U.S. history.

When the Army’s 1st Infantry Division at Ft. Riley, Kan., was ordered into action Nov. 8 as part of the second wave of U.S. troops bound for the Persian Gulf, the clock started to run on a deployment that is still under way nearly two months later.

The Army spent two weeks repainting 6,000 vehicles from the traditional three-pattern green to a new desert camouflage. Twenty-nine trains, each a mile long, were loaded for a two-day trip to the Port of Houston. The equipment was transferred to 14 ships in two days.

By last Friday, three cargo ships had arrived in Saudi Arabia and more than 3,200 of the division’s 11,500 troops had flown in by plane, picked up their equipment and moved to the front.

To strategists at the Pentagon, the American buildup in the Persian Gulf is an effort to take advantage of one of the most bitter lessons that the United States learned in Vietnam--that use of a massive force, rapidly deployed, is the key to victory.

“The thing that drives this buildup, differently from Vietnam, is the military’s commitment to using overwhelming force and getting this thing over as fast as possible,” said a ranking Army officer who served in Vietnam and is planning gulf strategy.

But overwhelming force cannot be assembled overnight, and the seemingly slow pace has created the impression that logistic snags may prevent President Bush from carrying out his threat to attack if Iraq doesn’t pull out of Kuwait by the United Nations’ Jan. 15 deadline.

Defense Secretary Dick Cheney and Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told Bush last week that the troops will not be ready to move until weeks after the deadline--largely because of the time needed to get equipment to the region.

Despite concerns about the Jan. 15 deadline--set for political reasons that are independent of the Pentagon’s military timetable--military leaders say that the largest movement of troops and equipment in American history actually has been an enormous success.

“Even with some marginal problems, we have moved a helluva force faster than anybody else has ever done in history,” said a senior Pentagon official who is analyzing the deployment. “This will be compared to Hannibal crossing the Alps.”

The sheer numbers are staggering:

Three million tons of equipment had been moved into Saudi Arabia by mid-December, with troops arriving at a rate of about 4,000 a day. Thousands of military and commercial trucks, rail cars, ships, barges and airplanes are ferrying troops and weapons to an isolated desert.

And, according to interviews with military officers, the few real hitches have been relatively minor: early delays in readying some of the reserve fleet for the sealift, a shortage of some specialized ships, a logjam at some Saudi ports and small weather problems.

In the first 60 days of the buildup, nearly five times as many troops were moved into Saudi Arabia as were sent to South Korea in the first two months of the Korean War. More than twice as much military equipment was delivered to the desert kingdom in that period as was deposited in Vietnam in the first two months of that war.

The mobilization of the 1st Infantry Division--known as the Big Red One because of the scarlet number on the unit’s shoulder patch--illustrates the challenge that the military transportation experts face.

Troops at Ft. Riley, which once served as home to Lt. Col. George Armstrong Custer, first learned that they were bound for the gulf when Bush and Cheney went on television Nov. 8.

As soon as the announcement came over the airwaves, three shifts of painters began transforming vehicles--painted green for disguise in the forests of Northern Europe--into equipment that would be easier to conceal in the deserts of the Middle East.

Among the vehicles they painted were the division’s 232 M-1 tanks--the mainstay of any ground attack against Iraq’s fortifications in Kuwait--108 Bradley fighting vehicles, lighter tanks capable of carrying up to six infantrymen, and 33 Apache and Blackhawk helicopters.

The equipment was loaded onto 29 leased railroad trains. Each piece, from howitzer to tank, received a tiny bar-code sticker like the ones on groceries in the supermarket, so it could be tracked by computer until it was turned over to U.S. troops in Saudi Arabia.

When the trains reached the Port of Houston, the equipment was loaded onto 14 commercial and military vessels provided by the Military Sealift Command. The tanks and Bradleys went aboard ships known as RO-ROs (for “roll on, roll off”).

There is a worldwide shortage of RO-ROs because they are not as profitable to operate as container ships. But the monster tanks are not suited for transport by container ships.

“RO-RO is always much easier,” said Lt. Col. William G. Byrne Jr., who was supervising the loading of military goods bound for the gulf on a Cypriot-flagged container ship in Bayonne, N.J.

Although an overnight snowstorm had delayed work, just as similar storms have caused minor delays in Northern Europe, Byrne was upbeat: “It’s been hectic,” he said Friday. “It’s been frantic, but it’s been paced.”

The logistics of this massive movement have been carried out by a triad of military units under Air Force Gen. H. T. Johnson, chief of the U.S. Transportation Command at Scott Air Force Base in Belleville, Ill.

The elements of the triad are the Military Airlift Command, the Military Sealift Command and the Military Traffic Management Command, which gets troops and equipment to ports and airports for the other two units.

The MSC is using 248 ships in Operation Desert Shield, including 112 vessels leased from foreign-flag operators. About 95% of the military cargo from the United States and Northern Europe is going by sea.

Voyage time varies depending on the vessel and weight of its cargo. Most ships make the 8,700-mile trip from the East Coast in 23 to 30 days.

The Navy has eight fast sealift ships that can make the voyage in two weeks, and Army officials said they would like eight to 12 more of these. An MSC official said that building more is financially impractical and said that the Army needs to develop lighter weapons.

Even fast ships are not immune to problems. One of the eight broke down on its first gulf voyage and had to be towed to Gibraltar, where it is undergoing repairs.

The others are moving Army goods to the gulf from Rotterdam, the Netherlands, and Antwerp, Belgium, so the Big Red One’s equipment in Houston was loaded aboard a slower armada of vessels, the last of which won’t leave Houston for another few days.

As the first of those ships approached Saudi ports earlier this month, the Military Airlift Command began flying the initial contingent of Big Red One troops to the gulf.

As of Wednesday, the MAC had flown 282,000 troops to Saudi Arabia. Nearly two-thirds of them were carried under contract by American commercial lines. The airlines have longstanding commitments to provide planes and crews in a crisis.

But airplanes have transported only a fraction of the military equipment to the area of operations because air cargo is not cost-efficient. Even the largest military cargo plane, the C-5, can accommodate only a small amount of the materiel that can be loaded on a ship.

“A C-5 can carry two M-1 tanks, but it would have to be refueled immediately after takeoff,” said Sgt. Chuck Jones of the MAC.

Linking troops with their equipment in Saudi Arabia depends on fairly precise timing in a process called “marrying up.” Commanders do not want troops on the ground before their equipment arrives because there would be little for them to do.

The equipment is offloaded into staging areas, where troops claim what is theirs and move to assembly points away from the port. Saudi highways have been augmented to enable U.S. troops and weapons to move to the battle lines in the desert.

“People lose sight of what a tremendous challenge it is to move a 60-ton tank 200 or 300 miles into the desert,” said Army Lt. Gen. Calvin A. H. Waller, deputy commander of all U.S. forces in the gulf. “It’s not something you do with the snap of a finger.”

U.S. commanders in Saudi Arabia have blamed logistic logjams on the fact that planners initially gave priority to putting combat forces in place. As a result, support operations lagged far behind.

For that reason, until recently, the United States relied almost entirely on a fleet of leased cargo trucks for the distribution of goods within Saudi Arabia.

About 250 U.S.-owned trucks have begun to operate to supplement an estimated 1,000 vehicles leased from Saudi contractors, Army Maj. Gen. Dane Starling, logistics chief of the U.S. Central Command, told reporters at a briefing in Riyadh last week.

While the process of moving troops and equipment to the gulf is still not completed, Pentagon officials said the military has demonstrated that it can build up a massive force in a short time.

And resupplying U.S. forces through the same process should be continuous and smooth.

“Once you have opened the pipeline this way, you can sustain activity and you have effectively solved your logistics problems in a large sense,” a senior Pentagon official said.

Times staff writers Douglas Jehl and Maura Reynolds contributed to this story.

SUPPLYING THE FRONT: THE FIRST 60 DAYS

Military Number of Tons of Action Troops Carried Cargo Shipped Operation 107,039 520,000 Desert Shield Vietnam War 85,562 240,000 Korean War 22,716 400,437

Source: Military Traffic Management Control.