Associated Press

Capt. Corey Gilliland, left, a flight surgeon with the Army Special Operations Command, at Fort Bragg, N.C., and his new bride Amelia Maness, kiss on the plaza outside the Cumberland County Courthouse, in Fayetteville, N.C. They were married yesterday by a magistrate. The couple planned a March 2002 wedding but pushed it up because Gilliland may be deployed.

Wednesday September 26, 2001

WASHINGTON - The Pentagon called nearly 2,000 more reservists to active duty yesterday as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld said the new war on terrorism will be long and not start with a massive offensive.

"There is not going to be a D-Day, as such, and I'm sure there will not be a signing ceremony on the Missouri, as such," he told a Pentagon news conference. He referred to the final allied push in Europe in June 1944 and the signing of surrender papers aboard the USS Missouri in Tokyo Bay in 1945.

"This is not something that begins with a significant event or ends with a significant event," he said. "It is something that will involve a sustained effort over a good period of time."

Rumsfeld predicted the campaign would last "not five minutes or five months," but years.

Rumsfeld's remarks continued a Bush administration effort to prepare the public for a difficult, costly and sustained anti-terrorism campaign that is likely to suffer deadly setbacks as well as secret successes.

"It will not be an antiseptic war, I regret to say," he said. "It will be difficult. It will be dangerous. And ... the likelihood is that more people may be lost."

The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks against the United States left nearly 7,000 people dead or missing in New York City, at the Pentagon and in Pennsylvania.

The Pentagon announced that another 1,940 reservists from 16 states, Puerto Rico and the District of Columbia were called to active duty. They bring to 12,243 the number of Reserve and National Guard members called so far, under a partial mobilization order President Bush signed after the Sept. 11 attacks. Bush authorized the Pentagon to call as many as 50,000 to active duty.

Also, officials at Fort Campbell, Ky., said a small number of soldiers from the 101st Airborne Division have been sent elsewhere in the United States to provide extra security. They provided no other details.

The military campaign - separate from the financial, diplomatic and law enforcement tools being mobilized against terrorism - has been code-named "Enduring Freedom," Rumsfeld said.

The name first chosen, "Infinite Justice," was scrapped after the administration recognized that in the Islamic faith such finality is considered something provided only by Allah, the Arabic word for God.

Rumsfeld said the anti-terror effort will not require a large-scale ground attack.

"It is by its very nature something that cannot be dealt with by some sort of massive attack or invasion," he said. "It is a much more subtle, nuanced, difficult, shadowy set of problems."

The U.S. forces being assembled in the Persian Gulf and Arabian Sea certainly are not subtle. They include at least two aircraft carriers, with two more reportedly headed in that direction, from the Atlantic and Pacific. Each ship carries about 5,000 sailors and 75 aircraft and is accompanied by about a dozen warships, generally including attack submarines capable of firing cruise missiles.

A key element of the military campaign is expected to be U.S. special operations forces, the clandestine warriors who operate behind enemy lines, sometimes in helicopter-born raids to kill, kidnap or sabotage.

Rumsfeld was asked about remarks by Russian President Vladimir Putin that Central Asian nations such as Uzbekistan and Tajikistan have not ruled out allowing the use of their air bases for anti-terror strikes into neighboring Afghanistan, which is accused of harboring alleged terrorist mastermind Osama bin Laden.

Rumsfeld said the administration has been in contact with Moscow on "a number of aspects" of the anti-terrorism effort. But he left it to spokesmen for other governments to say what basing arrangements have been worked out for

American forces.

He also suggested the administration has yet to see clearly how its various anti-terrorism tools will squash bin Laden's al-Qaida organization and punish those who support it, including the Taliban religious militia that rules most of Afghanistan.

"It's a little like a billiard table," he said. "The balls careen around for a while and you don't know what'll do it, but the end result, we would hope, would be a situation where the al-Qaida is heaved out and the people in Taliban who think that it's good for them and good for the world to harbor terrorists ... lose, and lose seriously."