All new US Iraq troops will be ready -commanders

WASHINGTON, Feb 28 (Reuters) All US military units sent to Iraq as part of a troop increase ordered by President George W Bush will be fully trained and equipped, commanders promised after Democratic contentions that the Pentagon could not afford to do so.

Rep. John Murtha, a leading Democratic opponent of the war, has proposed forcing the Pentagon to certify that all the extra troops meet conditions including being fully trained and having at least a year at home between combat deployments.

Murtha has suggested the measure would effectively block the planned increase of some 20,000 troops as the military, stretched by the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, would be unable to meet the conditions.

But commanders said troops being deployed as part of Bush's plan announced last month to send more troops to crack down on sectarian and insurgent violence gripping Baghdad and other parts of Iraq would be trained and equipped to the same standard as those already there.

''Our deploying units will be manned, trained and equipped and they will be ready for their specified missions,'' Maj Gen Richard Formica, the US Army's director of force management, told a news briefing at the Pentagon yesterday.

Brig. Gen. Charles Anderson, the Army's director of force modernisation, said the extra units had already received most of the equipment they needed and were on track to get the remainder by the time of their deployment.

''We do not compromise our standards in force protection for deploying units,'' he said.

Formica said he was not aware of specific conditions being proposed in Congress but no soldier would go to Iraq unless they were fully ready in terms of training and equipment.

He also said all five of the Army combat brigades being sent to Iraq in the next few months under Bush's plan would not have been deployed in the last year, except for one brigade which had already moved into Iraq from Kuwait.

REUTERS SBA RN0412