WASHINGTON - The United States will soon have enough heavy tanks, warships, aircraft, bombs and troops in the Persian Gulf region to enable it to begin an attack against Iraq sometime next month, senior military officials say.
About 60,000 soldiers, sailors, Marines and airmen, as well as about 200 warplanes, are in or near the region. The Army has 9,000 soldiers, 24 Apache helicopter gunships and heavy equipment for two armored brigades in Kuwait. Equipment for a third brigade is steadily arriving on ships usually based in the Indian Ocean, and some materiel will be stored at a new $200 million logistics base, Camp Arifjan, south of Kuwait City.
By late this week, four aircraft carriers will be poised to strike Iraq on short notice, with a fifth in Southeast Asia ready to steam to the gulf in a crisis. Two of the carriers, George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, are heading home, but the Navy will keep their crews together about two weeks longer than the usual 30 days after arrival in case they are ordered back to the gulf.
Special Operations forces in the region are refining plans to hunt for Scud missiles and clandestine weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. About 1,000 military planners, led by Gen. Tommy R. Franks, have assembled in Qatar and other gulf states for a computer-simulated exercise that begins tomorrow and is intended as a model for an offensive against Iraq, officials said.
Taken together, these are unmistakable signs that before long, President Bush will be in a position to order an attack to disarm Iraq and topple Saddam Hussein, and have it carried out within days, senior military officials said.
The steady buildup - brought together with little fanfare by air and by ship - is intended to put increasing pressure on the Iraqi government to disarm, and perhaps to persuade Hussein's generals to defect or rebel against him.
Pentagon officials say the armed forces could attack now, if required, but several diplomatic and military steps would have to be completed before the United States could go to war on its own terms, officials said.
The administration wants to use Turkey as a major staging base for U.S. ground troops, who would swoop into northern Iraq to protect the vast oil fields of Kurdistan and combine with allied forces pushing up from Kuwait to put the government in Baghdad in a vise.
But Turkey has balked at permitting ground forces, prompting the White House to invite Recep Tayyip Erdogan, the leader of the largest party in Turkey's new governing coalition, to meet with Bush on Tuesday.
Britain, another vital ally, is expected to contribute several thousand armored forces but has not yet begun to send them.
U.S. active-duty troops could be flown in quickly aboard chartered airliners to join their equipment. But any major campaign would require activating tens of thousands of reservists, largely to help defend U.S. military bases, power plants and transportation hubs at home against possible terrorist reprisals. Mobilizing reserve units typically takes about 30 days, but a senior defense official said the Pentagon was looking at ways to speed up the process.
The Pentagon has plans to mobilize as many as 265,000 members of the National Guard and Reserves, roughly as many as for the Persian Gulf war in 1991, if Bush orders an attack. Senior military officials said large-scale mobilizations would not begin before next month.
The force in place by next month would be large enough to begin the "rolling start" of an offensive, but additional armored and air forces would have to be sent from Europe and the United States to sustain a larger attack that could mass 200,000 to 250,000 U.S. troops.