Pentagon Minimizes Report of U.S. Contingency Plan in the Mideast

The Department of Defense sought to minimize a news report last Friday attributed to “qualified Pentagon sources” that the U.S. is forming contingency plans to establish a force of 100,000 troops, including 40,000 combat soldiers for defense of U.S. interests abroad, including the Middle East.

A Pentagon spokesman told the Jewish Telegraphic Agency that such reports “pop up every now and then.” He emphasized that the U.S. military forces are “always prepared to protect American interests in a non-NATO scenario.” The spokesman denied any single development or combination of events at present contributed to the publication of the latest report on Pentagon planning.

According to the report, the contingency planning covers all of the Middle East and the northwestern Pacific, while the Persian Gulf area from Iraq to Oman on the Arabian Sea are regarded by the Defense Department as the most potentially explosive region.

The Pentagon spokesman observed that the Department would never publicly denote specifics on its assessments of danger areas but acknowledged under questioning that the Persian Gulf, the Middle East and Korea are areas on which a planner would focus attention.

As for contingency planning, the spokesman referred to President Carter’s address March 17 of last year at Wake Forrest College in which he said “the Secretary of Defense at my direction is improving and will maintain quickly deployable forces — air, land and sea — to defend our interests throughout the world.”

The spokesman also read from a prepared statement that said “this Administration has repeatedly emphasized that our military must have the capability to project power abroad in a non-NATO scenario. ” The statement added: “We must be able to respond effectively and simultaneously to a relatively minor as well as a major contingency. This has been commonly referred to as the war-and-a-half scenario.”