Pentagon orders combat aircraft to Persian Gulf

By Susanne M. Schafer

Associated Press

WASHINGTON – The Pentagon on Wednesday ordered fighter and bombers to begin moving to the Persian Gulf area, the first concrete sign of preparations to retaliate for last week’s terrorist attacks, a senior defense official said.

The combat aircraft will be preceded by teams of Air Force airlift control teams to coordinate the refueling of the fighters and bombers as they deploy from the United States to the Gulf, the official said.

The deployment has been dubbed “Operation Infinite Justice,” the official said.

Asked by a reporter whether Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld had signed a deployment order, his chief deputy, Paul Wolfowitz said, “There are movements and we will see more movements.” He would not elaborate.

Separate from the order to send Air Force planes to the Persian Gulf area, the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt and the ships in its battle group left their home port at Norfolk, Va., on Wednesday for a scheduled six-month deployment to the Mediterranean.

The Navy already has one carrier battle group in the Gulf and a second in the Arabian Sea to the south.

The defense official, who discussed Wednesday’s deployment order on condition he not be identified, said no aircraft had yet moved. First to move would be the airlift control teams, which must establish ground communications at various places along the air route in order to coordinate refueling operations.

The airlift control teams are designed to deploy in support of cargo and tanker planes, vital to the support network set up for any long-term air operation. The team are able to set up under very austere conditions, and include men and women who can run control tower operations, load and unload aircraft, and fuel planes.

Teams that conduct such operations are located at Travis Air Force Base in California and McGuire Air Force Base in New Jersey. It was not immediately clear which units would deploy.

Likely to be included in the force of combat aircraft are F-16s, F-15s and possibly B-1 bombers, the official said.

The United States already has a sizable and well-developed military presence in the Persian Gulf, with combat aircraft stationed in Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Bahrain and elsewhere. It appeared likely that many of the extra combat aircraft to be deployed in the next several days would go to Kuwait and Bahrain, the official said.

Earlier Wednesday, Rumsfeld said America’s war on terrorism must go beyond Osama bin Laden and hunt down associated networks of terrorists in dozens of countries.

“We have a lot of evidence about a number of countries harboring terrorists that are working across the globe,” Rumsfeld told CNN.

“This is not a problem of al-Qaida and Osama bin Laden. It is a problem of a number of networks of terrorists that have been active across the globe,” Rumsfeld said. Bin Laden, considered by the Bush administration to be the prime suspect in the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, and his associates have activities in 50 or 60 countries, including the United States, the secretary said.

While the USS Theodore Roosevelt was beginning its deployment, the USS Enterprise was to have returned home from the Persian Gulf this month after the USS Carl Vinson arrived to relieve it. But the orders were changed and the Enterprise remained in the region. This could put three carrier battle groups in the area within weeks.

The Defense Department is moving to a war footing in the wake of last weeks attacks in which hijackers commandeered four commercial jetliners and crashed them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, the Pentagon and a field in southern Pennsylvania. The attack killed thousands.

Copyright ©2001 Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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