BRIEF

M1 Abrams

Marine units participating in the 2003 invasion of Iraq relied on M1A1 tanks and armored amphibious vehicles that had been pre-positioned in Kuwait after Operation Desert Storm in the early 1990s.  Stored in the desert outside Kuwait City, these stockpiles of equipment allowed U.S. Marines to establish a combat-ready mechanized force along the Iraqi border in only a fraction of the time that it would have taken to transport the required heavy vehicles, ammunition, and fuel from the United States or other overseas stockpiles.  The reliability of these "old new" tanks and vehicles that had been sitting in the desert for the better part of a decade was viewed with some skepticism by the Marines who would eventually ride them across the border into Iraq in early 2003.  There were concerns that rubber road wheels and other components may have dried out and been degraded by years in the arid environment and pre-invasion use of the vehicles for drills and training was limited.  

Pre-positioning equipment to facilitate a rapid deployment to the Persian Gulf region, began, for the U.S., with President Carter's creation of a rapid reaction force intended to counter a potential Soviet assault into the region.   That initiative saw the storage of material and weapons on forward operating sites such as Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.  It was the massive military build up associated with operations Desert Shield and Desert Storm, however, that set the stage for the regional pre-positioning scheme that was in place when preparations for Operation Iraqi Freedom began.  Following the closure of Operation Desert Storm, the U.S. maintained both manned facilities in the form of air bases and command and control apparati and "unmanned" materiel caches in a number of Gulf States.  By 1995 there was at least a brigade's worth of materiel positioned in Kuwait, with another brigade's worth stored afloat.  Pre-positioned equipment had just begun to flow to sites in Qatar.  

In March of 2006, contracting documents indicated that the U.S. planned on increasing the materiel pre-positioned at sites in Kuwait, Bahrain, Qatar, and Oman, in addition to "Site 23" a classified location in the Middle East and a site in an unnamed Central Asian state.  It appears that, in terms of tonnage, the amount of materiel pre-positioned at sites outside Iraq is expected to double by 2016.  Some have speculated that this increased reliance on pre-positioning is designed to mitigate political concerns in the region, allowing the U.S. to maintain a variety of military options in the region while simultaneously allowing its allies to claim that there are no "U.S. bases" on their soil.