She also called for quick deployment of African peacekeepers to Somalia, where an Islamic insurgency accused of links to Al Qaeda has killed thousands of civilians.
At a Senate hearing on Feb. 13, Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said that a missile threat from North Korea warranted the quick deployment and that the Pentagon often learns how to improve weapons systems by simply using them.
At the same time, the Marines also are designed to be an agile, "expeditionary" force on call for quick deployment, and thus can go to war with everything needed to carry out the mission — troops, armor, attack jets and supplies.
Federal officials had planned to have a temporary system running in Washington, New York and Salt Lake City by the end of January, but the concerns of the cellular companies are so great that they are backing away from a quick deployment.
To make its forces more mobile, the Army has cut by half the financing for its fledgling Crusader artillery system until officials are convinced that it can be built light enough for quick deployment.
A year later, in Sierra Leone, the quick deployment of about 1,000 British soldiers helped save what was then the UN's largest peacekeeping mission from collapsing under attack by rebels of the Revolutionary United Front.All this seemed to confirm that the UN could take on only soft peacekeeping and "observer" missions with co-operation from the warring sides.
The quick deployment of United Nations peacekeepers and Lebanese forces into the stretch of southern Lebanon that Israel abandoned in May after 22 years of occupation has been thrown into doubt with the controversy over a series of apparent Israeli incursions across a border line drawn in 1923.
All three men have urged the administration to deploy a missile shield only once it has been proved to work -- in contrast to Secretary of Defense Donald H. Rumsfeld, who has called for quick deployment, even if a system is only partly effective.
