June 01, 2004

By Jim Krane
Associated Press

CAMP ARIFJAN, Kuwait — In a rapid-fire deployment, about 5,000 Marines will arrive this month and travel to Iraq in July, the military said Tuesday.
The deployment occurs in the fierce heat of summer and under an extraordinarily tight schedule, with troops expected to land in the war theater a few weeks after receiving orders.

“We’ll be pushing them through the theater and getting them up north” into Iraq, said Army Col. Gary McKown, who oversees U.S. troop movements into Iraq from this desert base south of Kuwait City.

The Marines, who had yet to receive official deployment orders Tuesday, will be among the units traveling into Iraq in July, relieving about 15,000 war-weary soldiers from the Army’s 1st Armored Division and 2nd Armored Cavalry Regiment.

In April, both Army units had their stays in Iraq extended by three months after a pair of insurgent uprisings spread deadly turmoil across the country, requiring U.S. troops to take over a swath of Iraq formerly occupied by its coalition partners.

Military officials have identified the incoming Marine units as the 11th Marine Expeditionary Unit from Camp Pendleton, Calif., and the 24th MEU from Camp Lejeune, N.C.

The Marines will be followed by 3,600 soldiers from the U.S. Army’s South Korea-based 2nd Infantry Division. Those soldiers will pass through Kuwait after the Marines, McKown said in an interview with The Associated Press.

“They’ll have a little longer to get here,” he said. “I don’t want anyone to think we’re pushing that unit that fast.”

Many of the incoming troops have already been to war in Iraq or Afghanistan, said Army Col. Greg Adams, who runs the giant Coalition Operations Intelligence Center here, overseeing military logistics in Iraq and Afghanistan.

McKown and Adams said the troops already know they are being sent to Iraq but would be given official orders within days. The Iraq-bound troops were packing, handling family matters and taking care of last-minute training, McKown said.

“We’ve already had contact with them, given them their preliminary information,” McKown said. “Notification is faster than normal, so we’re on a compressed timeline.”

At the same time, military transportation officials in Kuwait were organizing cargo aircraft and ships to ferry the troops and their gear to the port here. Because of the short time between notification and arrival in Kuwait, the complex rotation of forces must be tightly synchronized.

The emergency troop rotation has been dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom 2.5, because it occurs after the huge rotation of U.S. forces in Iraq this spring, when most U.S. invasion troops left and were replaced by the current contingent.

The Germany-based 1st Armored Division and Louisiana-based 2nd Armored Cavalry were supposed to depart in April, leaving U.S. troop levels in Iraq at around 110,000. But Lt. Gen. Ricardo Sanchez, the top U.S. commander in Iraq, ordered the units to stay in Iraq 90 days longer, keeping 130,000 troops in the country.

The Pentagon has decided to retain that level of combat power in Iraq beyond the summer, requiring military brass to find troops who could be deployed ahead of schedule. A second major rotation of forces, dubbed Operation Iraqi Freedom 3, is supposed to begin in October.

The Marines will spend about 20 days in Kuwait, unloading their gear, practice-firing their weapons and acclimating themselves to desert heat that already is soaring above 110 degrees.