The U.S. Central Command will conduct a seven-day, computer-based war game at a new command-and-control operations center recently established in Qatar, a senior Central Command official says.

"Exercise Internal Look is designed to exercise the command, control and communications ability of Central Command Headquarters, and all of our different component commands who are spread throughout all of our areas of responsibility" (AOR), the senior official said.

The Central Command (CENTCOM), led by Army General Tommy Franks, is one of the five geographically defined military commands within the Defense Department. CENTCOM, which is located at MacDill Air Force Base in Tampa, Florida, is responsible for conducting U.S. military activity in a region consisting of 25 countries in Northeast Africa, Southwest- and Central Asia, and the island nation of Seychelles.

During a background briefing December 4, a senior CENTCOM official said the exercise is designed to test the capabilities of the newly deployed, portable command compound that will involve 1,000 CENTCOM personnel and several thousand other U.S. and foreign military personnel, but will not involve combat troops. Britain will be among the foreign countries participating, the briefer said.

"This exercise is going to ... test and exercise our ability to communicate on the modern battlefield," he said. While the war games are based on fictitious military scenarios, they are designed to "hone our battle staff's ability to command from a forward-deployed location, while maintaining seamless activity with our folks back here in Tampa."

The senior CENTCOM official said that while CENTCOM's 25-country area of responsibility includes Iraq, and this exercise could be construed as a rehearsal to military operations there, the war games will test "a number of contingencies in our AOR" and Iraq could be considered among them.

Phase One of the exercise started in November when Central Command moved the portable operations center to As Sayliyah military base near Qatar's capital, Doha. Phase Two begins December 9th and lasts through December 16-17th, the senior official said.

This is not the first such command exercise for CENTCOM, an official said. Similar exercises have been conducted in 1990, 1996 and 2000 in the United States, but this exercise is the first one held abroad.