U.S. may help NATO troops in Macedonia

By David Ensor and Chris Plante
CNN

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- The British-led NATO force scheduled to move into Macedonia to disarm ethnic Albanian rebels is likely to receive useful intelligence help from U.S. units already on the ground in the region, U.S. officials say.

Decisions on what kind of assistance will be provided to "Operation Essential Harvest" are still being made, Pentagon officials say, but the United States has a number of useful military and intelligence assets in place, and no additional deployments are expected to be needed.

Unmanned surveillance planes based at Camp Able Sentry outside the Macedonian capital, Skopje, regularly track rebel groups and the flow of weapons to them from neighboring Kosovo with cameras that can provide "real time" intelligence to the NATO forces on what weapons may remain to be turned over.

U.S. Army STICS units (Scalable Transportable Intelligence Communications Systems) are in the region, officials say, and could be assigned to provide the new NATO force ground commanders with the intelligence on the rebels and their weapons caches.

That information would come from Hunter UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles), from satellites and from other intelligence sources.

An advance unit of 400 troops from a British air assault brigade is expected to arrive in Macedonia within about 36 hours, with the mission of receiving arms from ethnic Albanian rebel groups, as called for in the peace plan signed Monday by Macedonia's major political leaders.

The peace plan is designed to end a sputtering civil war in Macedonia that has claimed more than 100 lives.

NATO has said the deployment will last one month, and the full force of 3,500 troops will be sent only if the alliance decides that a durable ceasefire has taken hold.

The force -- which would include troops from 12 nations -- would set up collection points for weapons.

About 300 U.S. troops already in Macedonia and the region would supply military transportation, communications and medical help as well as intelligence for the operation, officials say.