WASHINGTON: One might call it the disaster scenario.

The United States goes to war with Iraq to rid President Saddam Hussein of weapons of mass destruction, but unpredictable North Korean leader Kim Jong-il launches an attack on South Korea, forcing America simultaneously to wage two major regional wars. And all this takes place even as US armed forces continue the military operation in Afghanistan launched after the Sept 11, 2001, attacks on America.

Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld has expressed confidence that the US military would be more than up to the task of winning two such big regional wars at the same time, while continuing to pursue the ‘war on terrorism’.

But military analysts said there would be numerous difficulties in facing such a triple threat, including getting sufficient numbers of troops and weapons to where they need to be, intelligently dividing up resources, and taxing the “brain power” of top policy makers.

“On paper, it’s doable. Logistically, its probably complex,” said Charles Pena, a defence policy analyst for the Cato Institute think tank.

At a Dec 23 Pentagon briefing, Rumsfeld was asked whether the United States was capable of pursuing wars with Iraq and North Korea and the ‘war on terrorism’ all at the same time.

“Yes, we are perfectly capable of doing that which is necessary,” Rumsfeld said.

A TRANSITION PERIOD: Jack Spencer, a defence policy analyst at the Heritage Foundation think tank, said the US military is in “a transition period” between the Cold War and a new reality.

“During the Cold War, our strategy was containment, and we built our forces to be able to contain Soviet expansion,” Spencer said. “After the Cold War, we decided it was in our interests that the force-sizing mechanism (regarding the number of US troops) would be to fight two major regional conflicts, one in the Middle East and one on the Korean peninsula. And we would build our forces capable of doing that.”

A Department of Defence policy document called the Quadrennial Defence Review asserts that the US armed forces are structured and funded in order to combat and occupy one adversary nation while beating another enemy.

The document emphasized a shift to what it termed “a capabilities-based approach to defence ... one that focuses more on how an adversary might fight than who the adversary might be and where a war might occur.”—Reuters