Most U.S. Units Now Prepared to Begin Land War : Combat: Allied air assaults have given troops time to complete their training and begin moving into battle positions. But delay won’t hurt readiness.

While allied aircraft have been pounding strategic Iraqi targets over the last three weeks, almost all U.S. military units needed for a ground assault have completed their desert warfare training and are maneuvering into battle positions, officials said Tuesday.

“They’re as ready as they reasonably could be,” Lt. Gen. Thomas W. Kelly, director of operations for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said of the roughly 370,000 U.S. ground troops in Saudi Arabia who will take part in any land war against Iraqi forces in Kuwait.

Although Kelly insisted that the U.S. ground forces are “ready to go” now, he rejected suggestions that a delay in the onset of the ground war would erode their combat readiness.

“A little more time isn’t going to hurt them,” he said. “They’re not going to begin to suffer from just sitting there. They’re in good shape now; they’ll be in good shape a month from now.”

Six months after President Bush ordered the first U.S. soldiers to Saudi Arabia following Iraq’s Aug. 2 invasion of Kuwait, the last of the ground units have arrived, officials said. The 370,000 ground troops are part of a total U.S. military force of 510,000 in the region.

On Tuesday, recently arrived combat units from the Army’s VII Corps, based in Germany, were rushing toward “tactical assembly areas” in the Saudi desert, where the troops are issued their equipment and sent to their final positions.

Some of those units still await a number of “odds and ends,” including supplies and logistical needs that are not considered immediately essential, according to one knowledgeable military officer.

“I don’t think all of that will ever be there in totality,” the officer said. “There will be supplies and logistics flowing in there until the war’s over.”

But the official added that although some supplies would be lacking throughout a ground war, crucial “war reserve stocks”--tanks and trucks and weapons to replace those lost in combat--have been stocked in large quantities in the rear of U.S. troop positions.

Officials said tanks and other combat vehicles have rolled off ships from Europe fully fueled and carrying full stocks of ammunition. In recent days, massive convoys of flatbed trucks carrying those weapons have been rumbling northward toward the Kuwait border.

As they make their way to front-line positions in the desert, many of the newly arrived units will stop at ranges to fire their guns, one defense official said. The “live-fire” operations help gunners adjust their gun sights and firing mechanisms for greater accuracy.

“There’s still some positioning going on, and a couple days more will help,” said another senior defense official. “Any time they have to get trained up, they can use.”

At the same time, the official, echoing Kelly’s comments, said “the bulk of the force is ready to go now.”

The assessments came as U.S. commanders--now pondering when to recommend the start of a ground war--focus increasing attention on the condition of Iraqi troops. Military officials hope that the relentless bombardment of dug-in Iraqi forces will destroy or disable half of each unit’s tanks and combat vehicles before a land war is attempted.

The continuing air war has largely obscured the final preparations of U.S. ground troops for a campaign whose outcome is still uncertain. Officials acknowledged that the aerial bombardment has done more than reduce the Iraqis’ ability to resist advancing allied ground troops; it also has given the 370,000 U.S. ground troops and the 250,000 fielded by America’s allies more time to get into place, train and prepare.

Concern about the readiness of these final troops led many military officials in December to urge the Bush Administration to delay an offensive against Iraq until as late as mid-February. In widely reported comments to reporters Dec. 19, the deputy commander of all U.S. troops in the theater warned that some combat units would not arrive in Saudi Arabia until the end of January and would need at least two weeks to move into position.

“Until our full complement of forces are on the ground, they should not initiate hostile activities,” said Lt. Gen. Calvin A. H. Waller in an interview in Saudi Arabia.

Severe winter weather conditions slowed the departure from Europe of many of the troops, which were arriving at a rate of 5,000 per day on some days last week.

“Waller wasn’t lying,” one Pentagon official said Tuesday. “We’ve had a sufficient force there for two weeks now, but now we’re 100%. We’re optimum, not minimum, now.”