The Defense Department has provided the first report on
the U.S. military buildup in Kuwait.
A Defense Department release said about 8,000 U.S. military personnel now
serve in the sheikdom Ñ twice as many as reported late last year. About 2,000 of them serve in Camp Doha near the Iraqi
border.
Last year, Gulf defense sources reported no more than
4,000 U.S. troops in Kuwait, Middle East Newsline reported.
Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, on tour of the Persian Gulf and South
Asia, refused to disclose how many U.S. troops are deployed throughout the
region.
But he stressed that the U.S. military presence has grown over the last six
months.
"We don't discuss the size of military presence around the world for
good reasons," Rumsfeld said in a news conference in Doha on Tuesday. "It
changes every day; we have ships coming, ships going, people coming, people
going, and needless to say the presence is larger than it was before the
Afghan activity began, but we don't give numbers."
During his current tour of the Persian Gulf and South Asia, Rumsfeld
visited Camp Doha, the forward military base against Kuwait. The base,
operated by U.S. Army Central Command, contains M1A1 main battle tanks,
PAC-2 anti-missile batteries, self-propelled artillery and AH-64D Apache
Longbow helicopters.
Rumsfeld told 1,000 soldiers at Camp Doha that they should be prepared
for combat. "The global war on terrorism began in Afghanistan, to be sure,
but it will not end there," he said. "I'm certainly not in a position to
tell you when,
why or where."
At a nearby Kuwait air base, the United States has deployed F-15E and
F-16 fighter-jets to patrol southern Iraq. Rumsfeld did not rule out the
deployment of additional air and ground assets in Kuwait.
U.S. officials said the military presence in Kuwait is being bolstered
by additional troops. These include soldiers based in Fort Bragg, N.C., who
will perform support duties.
