American soldiers in Saudi Arabia are suffering normal morale problems, but their spirits will rise when the Pentagon announces plans in November for replacing them with fresh units, a senior Army official said Tuesday. Gen. Gordon R. Sullivan, the Army's vice chief of staff, said the service is taking numerous steps to improve morale, including the possibility of leasing large cruise liners in the Persian Gulf to give soldiers a break from desert training. ``It's tough. It's not an easy mission'' for the more than 100,000 soldiers in Saudi Arabia as part of Operation Desert Shield to defend the desert kingdom against a possible Iraqi attack, Sullivan said in an interview in his Pentagon office. The four-star general said the Bush administration will announce within a couple of weeks its decision on when replacement forces would be sent to begin the rotation process. He said the Army had not been instructed to increase its total force in Saudi Arabia, but that extra troops, if needed, likely would come from combat units at U.S. bases in Germany that are scheduled to be closed next year. The Army also could tap the remaining three armored divisions based in the United States. On Monday, Defense Secretary Dick Cheney said that as many as 100,000 more forces - beyond the roughly 240,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines already there - might be sent to the gulf area. He did not say when more forces would go. Sullivan said the full contingent of soldiers assigned to Desert Shield would be in place within a few days, and a shipment of several hundred top-of-the-line M1A1 main battle tanks also is en route to Saudi Arabia from Germany to replace older M1 tanks that are less capable of handling a chemical attack. The biggest psychological lift for the troops, some of whom have been in the Saudi desert for two months, will come when the Bush administration announces a timetable for a rotation of fresh forces, Sullivan said. The four-star general said the Army already has set in motion the arrangements for mobilizing the first fresh units from the United States and Europe, although no individual units have been alerted to begin moving to the gulf. Sullivan acknowledged that some soldiers are grousing about not knowing how long they'll be on duty in Saudi Arabia, where living conditions on the front lines are harsh, but he said he was satisfied that morale is not suffering unduly. ``The troops are in pretty good shape and they are not experiencing what I consider to be inordinate morale problems,'' he said. ``I don't see it.'' Recent news reports based on interviews with soldiers and other servicemen in the gulf area have portrayed the troops as losing patience with the nagging uncertainty of when they might go home and whether they'll be required to fight. Earlier this month, after complaining members of the Army's 24th Mechanized Infantry Division were quoted in the New York Times, the commanding general restricted access to reporters. Some private analysts say the tough conditions in the Saudi desert should not be a reason for poor morale. ``Morale is a leadership problem,'' said James A. Blackwell Jr., a former Army commander of combat units and now a defense analyst at the Center for Strategic and International Studies in Washington. ``Good leaders will have good morale under the most distasteful and challenging circumstances.'' Sullivan said that rotating troops in Saudi Arabia is complicated by the fact that the Army intends to replace whole units at a time, not make piecemeal substitutions of individual soldiers. He said this would be the first time in history the Army has rotated whole units, a strategy designed to avoid the loss of unit cohesion that Army leaders saw during the Vietnam War.
