U.S. won't be ready until March

Despite a wave of deployment orders issued by Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld over the past five weeks, the Pentagon has only begun sending major combat elements to the Gulf and cannot assemble the force required for an invasion of Iraq until late February or early March, defence officials and analysts said Friday.

The commanders of five Army divisions - the 1st Armoured Division, the 1st Cavalry, the 3rd Infantry, the 4th Infantry and the 101st Airborne - are scheduled to take part next week in Germany in a computer simulation of an Iraqi invasion.

But only two of those divisions, the 3rd and 4th infantries, have received orders to move. The 4th Infantry is just now packing its Abrams tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and helicopters at Fort Hood in Texas and sending them by truck and rail to ports, where they'll be loaded onto ships for a two- to three-week voyage to the Gulf.

The military timetable provides a cushion to Bush administration efforts to enlist the support of reluctant allies on the UN Security Council, notably Germany and France, for confronting Iraqi President Saddam Hussain with military force.

U.S. and diplomatic sources said the administration is prepared to meet allied demands for continued UN inspections in Iraq for several more weeks - a concession diplomatically but one that's in sync with Pentagon planning.

The stretched-out time frame for building up U.S. forces also enables the administration to keep up pressure on the Iraqi government as it seeks to convince Baghdad that the United States is serious about invading to seek Saddam's removal.

"We rolled forces in and out many times under the Clinton administration," one senior defence official said. "But Saddam's got to be reading this crowd differently - even Saddam's advisers have got to be telling him these guys are not likely to be bluffing."

While the Pentagon's war plan is classified, military analysts believe the 101st Airborne Division, because of its fast-paced helicopter mobility on the battlefield, could be the key component of an invasion force.

If that turns out to be the case, it would be difficult to begin any invasion plan before late February or early March, since the 101st hasn't yet received a deployment order.

The 101st is equipped with 70 Apache helicopter gunships and more than 100 Blackhawk and 40 Chinook transport helicopters. It would take about a month to move the division from its U.S. base at Fort Campbell to the Gulf.

The Pentagon is in a similar stage in the deployment process of air forces, with hundreds of aircraft and thousands of support personnel yet to be sent from U.S. bases to the Gulf.