St. Louis Post-Dispatch (Missouri) March 18, 2003
Bush: Exile or War;
Invation of Iraq Is Expected to Be Fast and Furious;
Assaults from Sky Would Open Campaign
By Philip Dine
"SHOCK AND AWE"
If U.S.-led forces strike Iraq, Americans and others around the world will see an assault marked by speed, fury and the confluence of various modes of attack.
Assuming Saddam Hussein does not comply with the president's ultimatum, an onslaught of precision bombing from the sky will be joined simultaneously by special operations forces on the ground, followed quickly by the large-scale movement of coalition troops from bases in Kuwait.
"It will be unprecedented in scale and diversity and simultaneity of events," retired Adm. Stephen Baker said. Baker was operations officer for an aircraft carrier battle group in the Persian Gulf War in 1991 and served as chief of staff for naval Central Command in Bahrain.
"This is the theory of shock and awe, meaning there's going to be an overwhelming number of targets hit around the clock, day and night, for the first couple of days," said Baker, an analyst with the Center for Defense Information. "Along with the massive onslaught from the air, there'll be Special Forces, and then Marines and the Army will be very rapidly moving as well."
That assessment is "on target," said a senior Pentagon official, who declined to say much more. "The concern from our end is not giving away too much so the guys on the other end of the line know what's coming," the official said.
The early goal, military sources say, will be to overwhelm Iraqi forces and officials so they can't react to the offensive, as U.S. ground forces head to Baghdad to dismantle command-and-control structures and guard against worst-case situations.
"The premium is on moving as rapidly as possible toward Baghdad to remove the regime and to prevent the various nightmare scenarios," said Tom Donnelly, a military expert at the American Enterprise Institute. Among those, he said, would be Iraq's use of weapons of mass destruction on its own civilians, destruction of its oil wells and the launching of Scud missiles at Israel.
Retired Brig. Gen. John Reppert predicts the "first 72 hours will be extremely violent and will involve large numbers of precision-guided missiles, or smart bombs."
Reppert is executive director of Harvard University's research center on international security, technology and natural resources.
"We will try to take out the Republican Guard and the Special Republican Guard and their equipment, as well as any presidential palaces Saddam may be sleeping in," Reppert said. "We'll also target any suspected weapons of mass destruction sites and missile storage facilities."
Biological weapons are "fairly fragile" and will be destroyed if hit, experts say, but hitting chemical facilities is riskier and will require that monitoring stations be set up to see whether dangerous elements are released.
The mood at the Pentagon on Monday was one of "quiet determination," said spokesman Lt. Col. Dave Lapan. "Everybody realizes we're getting to the real serious point here." He said that Pentagon officials were going through checklists asking, just like troops in the field: "Are we prepare d? Have we done everything we need to do?"
As of late Monday there were 225,000 allied troops, most American, in the region, said Maj. Brad Lowell, a Central Command spokesman. While each passing day helps the troops better acclimate to the terrain, Lowell said, "At this point our troops in the field are trained, they're ready and they're capable."
A key hope of U.S. military planners is that Iraqi regular forces, after months of intense American psychological pressure urging them not to resist and thereby save their lives, won't impede the march toward Baghdad and Tikrit. Those are key urban strongholds of Saddam's regime.
"It is the belief of our leadership that the first-line units know the outcome of the war and do not want to fight," said Reppert, who commanded a psychological operations unit at Fort Bragg, N.C.
As soon as "your first plane flies," special operations forces will be on the ground to prevent any kind of response, Reppert said. "You have to insert special operations forces in two places - in the western desert, which is the only place that could reach Israel, and in the eastern oil fields, to try to neutralize any efforts by Saddam to set fire to them or blow them up."
Within 72 hours, experts say, ground forces will be added - 80,000 to 100,000, in Reppert's view.
The air onslaught will emanate from the five Navy aircraft carriers within range of Iraq, as well as from air bases in Kuwait, Qatar and Saudi Arabia. Military planners believe that such an assault is compatible with the low level of civilian casualties Pentagon officials predict, because of technical improvements in recent years. About three-quarters of the munitions fired will be precision-guided bombs, compared with one-fifth in the Gulf War.
Turkey's refusal, so far, to offer its airspace for an attack on Iraq complicates matters but doesn't disrupt the plans, analysts say. Rather than an infantry division opening up a second front from the north by way of Turkey, forces will likely be brought in by helicopter from Kuwait to the south, placed in northern Iraq and then make their way south.
The key in the first few days, Baker said, will be "how rapidly the house of cards of Saddam Hussein crumbles."
"A lot of the unknowns will become known in the first two or three or four days of this struggle," Baker said. "If things don't seem to be moving very rapidly, something's wrong, because of the velocity of our attacks."
NOTES:
CONFLICT WITH IRAQ; Reporter Philip Dine:; E-mail: pdine@post-dispatch.com; Phone: 202-298-6880
GRAPHIC: MAP GRAPHIC Color Map by JACOB PIERCY, POST-DISPATCH - U.S. FACILITY MAPKEY
(Map shows the area of the Middle East.)
Source: Globalsecurity.org
Copyright © 2003, St. Louis Post-Dispatch, Inc.
