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Thread 5319

Thread ID: 5319 | Posts: 2 | Started: 2003-03-03

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Sertorius [OP]

2003-03-03 01:52 | User Profile

War plan for Iraq largely in placeU.S. forces wait for president's order to strike Baghdad

By Thomas E. Ricks THE WASHINGTON POST     March 2 —  After more than a year of intense work, the Bush administration's plan for an assault on Iraq is essentially in place and is based on an unusual approach that envisions simultaneous air and ground operations combining the U.S. advantages in firepower, speed and precision, according to several people familiar with the strategy.                     ARMY GEN. Tommy R. Franks, the chief of U.S. military operations in the Middle East, sat down in the Persian Gulf state of Qatar last week and reviewed the plan with his top Army, Navy, Marine, Air Force and Special Operations commanders. The conclusion of the top secret session, said a U.S. official based in the region, was that everything is ready once President Bush gives the order.

       As military action draws nearer, Franks and the Pentagon are keeping the actual war plan closely held, publicly revealing only the vaguest of details about their intentions. But the broad outlines are now apparent, pieced together from congressional testimony and briefings by defense officials, the assessment of dozens of military analysts and relief experts privy to particular aspects of the operation, and from the military's deployments and high-profile exercises in the region.

       The framework that has emerged calls for a war that would be remarkably different from anything the U.S. military has done. It aims to combine the armored fist of the tank-heavy 1991 Persian Gulf War with the speed of the overnight 1989 U.S. takeover of Panama and the precision bombing of the 2001 U.S. campaign in Afghanistan.

       One sign of the innovative nature of the plan is that, without much public notice, its first phase is already underway. Special Operations troops are executing missions inside Iraq to prepare the way for later attacks. U.S. and British warplanes ostensibly enforcing the "no-fly" zones in northern and southern Iraq have increased the number and intensity of airstrikes, and recently expanded their list of targets to include Iraqi surface-to-surface missiles. They were attacked, defense officials said, not because they were in the "no-fly" zones and threatened U.S. aircraft but because they were in range of U.S. troops mustering just over the border in Kuwait.

       "We've already got a lot of stuff underway — the air campaign, psychological operations, Special Ops," said Robert Andrews, a former Pentagon official who oversaw Special Operations activities.         SIMULTANEOUS MOVES           The formal onset of the war, if Bush gives the go-ahead, is expected to begin with three nearly simultaneous moves. That is a sharp contrast to the sequential nature of the Gulf War, in which the ground war only began after five weeks of bombing.

       On the ground, tanks, Bradley Fighting Vehicles and Apache attack helicopters will charge north into Iraq from Kuwait. Most Army units will be on the west, heading northward toward the Euphrates River, while the Marine Corps and British forces will jump off farther to the east and move up alongside Iraq's southern marshes around the southern city of Basra.

       In the north, the U.S. military also plans to launch some kind of offensive, though the continued foot-dragging by the Turkish government could impede the execution of the attack envisioned by the plan. Planners think the minimum U.S. force needed in the north to create a second front is about one division, plus some specialized reinforcements, for a total of about 20,000 troops. While some troops and gear can be flown into airstrips in Kurdish areas in the north, getting a force that size into Iraq by air would be a logistical nightmare.

       "General Franks . . . is looking at lots of options," Air Force Gen. Richard B. Myers, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said Friday. "My guess: In the end, we will have U.S. forces in northern Iraq, one way or the other."

       The pace of Special Operations forces will also be stepped up. Their main focus will be denying Iraqi forces access to certain chemical and biological weapons sites that cannot be bombed for fear of setting up toxic plumes, according to people familiar with their missions and training. Preventing Iraq from launching drones or missiles against Israel will be another major focus of Special Operations troops and other units. Some Special Operations personnel may be ordered to protect key points in Iraq's oil fields to prevent any Iraqi attempt to set them afire.         VIOLENT AIR CAMPAIGN        At the same time, the air campaign will begin with a thunderous volley of strikes by aircraft and missiles. These will be aimed first at eliminating Iraq's antiaircraft emplacements, which have been concentrated around Baghdad, and also at hitting military communications systems and presidential palaces. Pentagon sources said they expect that more targets will be struck in Baghdad on the first night of the campaign than were hit in the Iraqi capital during the entire Gulf War, when about 330 bombs and missiles hit the city. In contrast to the 1991 war, when nine out of 10 bombs were unguided "dumb" bombs, nine out of 10 to be used in the new campaign would be precision-guided munitions.

       Paradoxically, the air campaign promises to be as narrowly aimed as it is ferocious. Most of the airstrikes will focus on "regime change targets — weapons of mass destruction, command and control, and palaces," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney. Infrastructure such as electrical plants will not be hit, said people familiar with the planning.

       A major reason is that the Bush administration is already making plans to oversee Iraq's reconstruction if President Saddam Hussein and his government are removed. Unlike in the Gulf War, said former Navy secretary Richard Danzig, "[w]e know we have to repair whatever we bomb."

       The war plan even calls for sparing the Iraqi military, if it doesn't fight. Some leaflets being dropped by U.S. planes on Iraqi military installations urge troops, "Leave now and go home — Watch your children learn, grow and prosper." Others dropped yesterday warned against using chemical or biological weapons, asserting, under an image of a satellite, "We can see everything. . . . Unit commanders will be held accountable for non-compliance." Bush has vowed to prosecute Iraqi leaders for possible war crimes if they use weapons of mass destruction.

       Other military leaflets and radio broadcasts are telling civilians that they will not be targeted.

       Some military experts doubt whether the narrow approach of the bombing will be effective. One problem, said retired Marine Col. Gary Anderson, an expert in urban warfare, is that the high-tech, airpower-oriented war-fighting strategy now embraced by the U.S. military has become familiar to adversaries over the past decade — in Bosnia, Kosovo, Afghanistan and in Iraq itself. Because Iraqi leaders know the United States will not bomb indiscriminately, he said, they may be able to ride out the bombing from private homes in the suburbs as they watch government buildings explode on the horizon.

       "I think they're going to watch the fireworks and say, 'Oh, that's nice,' " Anderson said.         DISABLING THE REGIME        A person who has been briefed on the entire war plan dismissed those concerns. If Hussein and his lieutenants can be forced to hide in private houses away from military communications centers, this source said, their control of the regime will begin to break down. Also, it will make it harder for them to issue orders to use chemical and biological weapons — an overriding concern of Franks and other U.S. commanders — and to confirm that their orders have been carried out.

       "The first goal is to conduct the air campaign in such a way that undecided Iraqis leave the regime, narrow it down," the source said. "The second goal is to disrupt the regime's ability to command and control WMD [weapons of mass destruction]."

       With the bombing of Baghdad in full force, thousands of U.S. tanks and trucks will race toward the capital from Kuwait and Turkey. Military experts said they do not expect much fighting along the way. "I'm fairly confident they [U.S. forces] won't encounter much resistance" until they reach the outskirts of the capital, said Michael Vickers, a former Army officer who now frequently consults with the Pentagon.

       One reason for that optimism is that Iraqi forces learned during the Gulf War that if they mass in the desert, they make a fat target for U.S. bombers. Yet if they spread out, they can be easily overwhelmed by U.S. ground and air attacks in which they would be heavily outgunned and outnumbered. .

       The major war event in the south, said several people briefed on the plan, is likely to be a no-holds-barred assault on the Republican Guard division based in southern Iraq. That unit will be given a chance to surrender, but if it tries to fight, it will be hit with a barrage of bombs and missiles, followed by an artillery shelling and a tank attack.

       "They want to make an object lesson" of a major Iraqi unit, said one of the people familiar with this aspect of the plan. "There's an attitude that if there is a division that wants to fight, they will wipe it from the face of the Earth, and just make it a crushing lesson." The thinking behind this, he said, is "hit them hard, let that be an example and encourage the rest to stay in their barracks."

       While such a pounding at the outset of the war may evoke memories of the "Highway of Death," the carnage of bombed Iraqi units as they fled north from Kuwait at the end of the Gulf War, those familiar with this aspect of the plan said Franks and his commanders are determined to get the fighting over with as quickly as possible. "There will be a very high premium on a very quick resolution, even if it gets a bit bloody," said one person involved in high-level Pentagon reviews of some aspects of the war plan. "That works a lot better than a long period of even small violence to noncombatants."

       As U.S. forces move toward Baghdad, noted retired Marine Lt. Gen. Paul Van Riper, the major issue confronting them may be logistical. U.S. armored units require tens of thousands of gallons of fuel and water daily, and their supply lines will be stretched to three or four times the length of the lines in the Gulf War.         LOW MORALE IN IRAQI ARMY        U.S. intelligence estimates are that most regular Iraqi army units won't fight. Even top officials are talking openly now about the sorry state of most Iraqi troops. "Generally, we think in the Iraqi military, particularly the regular army, morale is relatively low," Myers said on NBC's "Today Show" last week.

       While the Army and some Marines will move north, the British will split off to occupy Basra and the oil fields near it, said people familiar with the plan.

       For that purpose, said a U.S. official in Kuwait, the 15th Marine Expeditionary Unit will likely be assigned to a British command. Putting a large U.S. unit under foreign command in combat apparently has not occurred since World War II, when British Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery commanded large numbers of U.S. Army troops. As such, it is likely to carry much symbolic meaning, rewarding British Prime Minister Tony Blair for his close support of Bush's Iraq policy by evoking the close ties forged between President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Prime Minister Winston Churchill.

       Although there remains considerable concern about the prospect of U.S. forces getting bogged down in urban warfare in Baghdad, even here there is surprising optimism among military officials and analysts. Some think the Iraqi government will fall well before U.S. forces reach the capital.

       Even if there is some organized resistance in the capital, said Anderson, it isn't likely to be effective. If Iraqi forces seek to survive by dispersing in the city, they will be able to inflict casualties by sniping but won't be able to stop U.S. military progress, he said. And if they mass in buildings, the buildings will be destroyed.

       Said McInerney: "There isn't going to be a large urban battle."

       The wild card, which hasn't been discussed much in public, may be northern Iraq, which some of those interviewed for this article said could prove to be the most troublesome part of Iraq in the long run — after the war. Their concern isn't Iraqi forces but the complex politics of the region, revolving around armed Kurdish factions, a skittish Turkey confronting its own restless Kurdish population over the border to the north, an Iranian government that also has interests in the area, and some of the world's richest oil fields.

       Turkish balking at U.S. troop movements promises to complicate the matter: U.S. planners worry that the slower the U.S. entry in the north, the greater the chance that Hussein will destroy the infrastructure of the northern oil fields, which would greatly increase the expense of postwar rebuilding.

       Indeed, the end of the fighting may be the beginning of the real difficulties for the U.S. military, some experts said, noting that the Bush administration is planning for a lengthy military occupation. "The major concerns," said Andrews, "are still pretty much what happens after the shooting stops."                © 2003 The Washington Post Company

[url=http://www.msnbc.com/news/879623.asp?pne=msntv]http://www.msnbc.com/news/879623.asp?pne=msntv[/url]

[Links with the article--• An issue guide • U.S. deployments • The order of battle • The U.N. role • Iraq's exiles • Slide show: Saddam's Iraq • Tools of warfare • Complete coverage: Conflict with Iraq]

DRSLICEIT

2003-03-03 02:27 | User Profile

For sure our gang of thugs and extortionist will convince the Turks that democracy is only good if it turns out in Americas favor which means another "democratic" vote to allow our troops in the next few day's.