Cheney Would Reduce Reserve Combat Role : Military: The secretary says war shows that rapid deployment should be left to regulars. He predicts the U.S. will establish a Central Command headquarters in the Gulf.

The war in the Persian Gulf demonstrated that the Army should abandon its reliance on National Guardsmen and reservists as rapid-deployment combat troops and leave that job solely to active-duty soldiers, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said Wednesday.

Cheney also predicted that the United States will forge stronger military links to Middle East nations, including the formation of a long-sought headquarters for the U.S. Central Command in the region.

The U.S. defense secretary--now a key player in shaping the Bush Administration’s Mideast policy--added that at least one heavy division’s worth of U.S. equipment is likely to remain in storage in Saudi Arabia after American ground troops leave. Some countries in the region, he added, may build facilities “to accommodate U.S. forces even though there wouldn’t be any U.S. (ground) forces there.”

He further noted in an interview with The Times that the experience in the Gulf has not changed his mind about plans for cutting back defense expenditures.

Cheney’s comments touched on some of the major repercussions that could be felt soon from the short but momentous war.

Converting military reserve combat brigades to second-tier status would mark a significant step away from a post-Vietnam concept designed to ensure that citizen-soldiers would play an integral role in any major U.S. conflict. The combat role for these troops was designed as a way of maintaining a direct military bond with the civilian population.

In late November and December, the Bush Administration called about 14,000 combat guardsmen and reserve troops to active duty. But military officials encountered serious readiness problems among the forces and never deployed them to the Persian Gulf.

Cheney said Wednesday that the state of the “weekend warrior” forces convinced him and others that the concept of mixing a brigade of combat reserves with active-duty combat forces is “not a good one.”

The so-called “Total Force Concept” mixes a brigade of guard and reserve combat troops with two brigades of active combat troops to create a full division. Three divisions were to be created in this way.

Cheney called the concept a success in instances where guard and reserve units were deployed in support of combat operations by active forces. But integration did not appear to work when officials contemplated sending guardsmen and reservists to fight alongside active-duty combat troops.

“One of the lessons we’ll learn out of this,” Cheney said, is that in the future, the Army’s rapid-deployment divisions should be composed entirely of active-duty forces. The guard and reserve combat forces, he said, should be consolidated into whole divisions for use later in a conflict.

“We ought to use the guard combat units as a second or third echelon that you call up and deploy over a longer period of time,” said Cheney. “The planning would take into account not that they deploy the first day of the war but rather that they get 90 days, 120 days of work-up before you send them.”

The three combat brigades activated for Gulf duty comprised 14,000 troops, a small fraction of the 220,000 reservists called up. But they have a high profile, and changes could cause political aftershocks among lawmakers who called for their use in the Persian Gulf. Cheney called the proposed shift a “refinement” of the Total Force Concept, rather than a rejection of the policy.

Cheney’s comments came as the U.S. military began to gather and assess the lessons of the six-week war in the Middle East. Among the chief concerns, Cheney said, is the length of time it took to deploy the most heavily armed U.S. forces to Saudi Arabia to face down Iraqi armored forces.

That, in turn, has set into motion a flurry of U.S. diplomatic initiatives to win U.S. forces greater access to bases and facilities throughout the Middle East. In meetings that began earlier this week with leaders of Saudi Arabia and other Persian Gulf states, Secretary of State James A. Baker III and other Bush Administration officials are hammering out the details of the long-term U.S. presence.

Cheney said that he is likely to return to the region for a round of consultations as early as late April, after the Muslim holy month of Ramadan.

He also said that American leadership of the anti-Iraq coalition already has opened doors to the United States that were long closed because of doubt over U.S. resolve.

“Desert Storm has . . . clearly enhanced the value of the U.S. military commitment,” said Cheney. “When we say we’re committed to the security of a friend or ally, by golly, that means something.”

But Cheney said that even as he plans to shrink the size and budgets of U.S. forces, the Pentagon is trying to overcome logistic problems that delayed the movement of heavily armed troops to the Gulf.

While many lawmakers have called on him to increase the Navy’s purchase of fast sea-lift ships, Cheney said that “it might be that the money’s better spent buying equipment for a division and putting it in a key spot in the world, rather than buying ships.”

Cheney complained Wednesday that even some of the U.S. Army’s more readily deployable units, like the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division, “took weeks to get there. . . . I think we need to look for ways to reduce that.”

American planners may consider making greater use of massive weapons warehouses, either afloat in the Middle East or on Saudi soil, to “pre-position” equipment that could be used by U.S. forces dispatched to the region, Cheney said.

One senior defense official said that the Saudis, who traditionally have been reticent to acknowledge strong links to the U.S. military, “have dropped some awfully broad hints that they’d be willing to take care of and maintain equipment for us.”

Cheney said Wednesday that “we might want in the Middle East, perhaps in the Gulf region, a full-up division in terms of equipment so that you can simply fly in the personnel so that in a matter of days you have a heavy armored division ready to go.”

Cheney added that “some kind of (Central Command) forward presence--a headquarters based forward”--also is in the cards. The defense secretary refused to say where such a headquarters would be based. But several knowledgeable sources said that Kuwait and Bahrain, whose ports have long been home to U.S. Navy forces, currently top the list of the countries most likely to host a U.S. military headquarters.

While several senior Kuwaiti officials have spoken positively of such a U.S. presence, one knowledgeable source said Wednesday that the Kuwaiti emir, Sheik Jabbar al Ahmed al Sabah, remains reluctant to invite the Americans into the emirate in spite of the U.S. operation to free Kuwait of Iraqi occupation.

The Saudis, who agreed earlier this week to the long-term presence of a 100,000-man Arab force in the region, also want to limit the U.S. military presence to air units and occasional ground exercises.

But Cheney said Wednesday that “there’s a whole series of ways” in which the United States can shore up the security of the region without the permanent presence of ground troops. Defense sources said that U.S. planners are considering conducting exercises on Saudi soil that could involve more than 5,000 U.S. troops at a time, but President Bush has ruled out basing any ground forces in the Saudi kingdom.

Cheney said Wednesday that the United States envisions a “beefed-up naval presence, beefed-up air presence, pre-positioning, more robust exercises” in the Middle East after the departure of U.S. troops.

The fact that the allies have virtually destroyed Iraq’s offensive capability, Cheney said, “means that it probably does not take as big a U.S. presence to provide reassurance as might have been the case had we had not destroyed this military threat.”

In spite of heavy lobbying by the military services to rethink some of his budgetary decisions, Cheney said that nothing in the lessons of Operation Desert Storm has persuaded him to curtail a planned five-year cutback of U.S. military forces.

“I don’t come away from this experience with the view that we should change that basic force structure that we’ve laid out,” Cheney said. “We may want to make some additional changes or refinements, but the basic structure is pretty sound.”

The Cheney plan would reduce Army divisions from 28 to 18; the Air Force from 24 to 15 tactical fighters units, and the Navy from 545 ships to 451.