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European Stars and Stripes
June 29, 2000
Pg. 6

By Chuck Vinch, Washington bureau

WASHINGTON - The recent announcement from Baghdad that Iraqi leader Saddam Hussein had suspended a decree he issued in late 1998 to split the country into four decentralized military zones will not significantly alter the threat to U.S. forces in the region, the incoming chief of the U.S. Central Command said Tuesday.

"We see that as a return to command- and-control normalcy within Iraq, but there is no change in the risk," Army Lt. Gen. Tommy Franks said Tuesday during his confirmation hearing before the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Franks has been nominated for a promotion and reassignment as chief of the Central Command. The Iraqi announcement was made Sunday, 18 months after U.S. and British warplanes pummeled Saddam's military forces for shutting out U.N. inspectors who were looking for signs that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction.

In the decree, read over state-run television, Saddam said the United States and Britain had failed to impose their will during air raids launched in December 1998 to punish Baghdad for not cooperating with U.N. weapons inspectors. U.N. sanctions imposed for Iraq's 1990 invasion of Kuwait aren't to be lifted until U.N. inspectors certify Iraq no longer has or can produce weapons of mass destruction. The zones were set up hours before the December 1998 air raids. Zone commanders, all senior members of the ruling Baath party, were given sweeping powers within their areas and had the army, security organs and Baath party militias under their command.

Saddam said Sunday that zone commanders should return to base in Baghdad and assume normal responsibilities. He did not elaborate.

Franks said that while the Iraqi command might have restored lines of communication with its forces, the threat those forces pose has diminished since Operation Desert Fox in December 1998, because of the constant patrols of U.S. and British aircraft over the no-fly zones in the northern and southern regions of Iraq. Saddam has challenged coalition air patrols more than 1,000 times in the past 18 months with anti-aircraft fire, radar illumination of allied warplanes or violations of the no-fly zones by his own aircraft, Franks said.

Almost every time, the United States and Britain have responded by attacking various pieces of Iraq's integrated air defense system, which Franks said has been degraded by an estimated about 30 percent since Operation Desert Fox.

"As we came out of the Desert Fox strikes in 1998, we saw a tremendous amount of Iraqi air defense activity in the no-fly zones," Franks said. "Those assets in the north and south have been reduced dramatically. We've built ourselves a cushion where we operate, not with impunity, but certainly with a lower level of risk than we faced in Operation Desert Storm" in 1991.

Even so, Franks vowed to protect against any relaxation of the vigilance U.S. forces have displayed in the region since the war nine years ago.

"We are targets," he said. "It's a high-risk area, and we all understand that. We have to be on our toes."

Franks was joined at the hearing by Army Lt. Gen. William Kernan, commander of the XVIII Airborne Corps, who also has been tapped for a fourth star and reassignment as chief of the U.S. Joint Forces Command and Supreme Allied Commander Atlantic. Kernan would be the first Army general to ever hold that position, which has been staffed by Navy or Marine Corps officers since it was originally created as the U.S. Atlantic Command in 1947.

He takes over the command at an interesting time. While it retains warfighting responsibility for the Atlantic region, it was revamped last year as the U.S. Joint Forces Command to become the U.S. military's premier test bed for experimentation with new joint operations and doctrine. The services collectively spend about $500 million on such experimentation, about $50 million of which comes directly out of the Joint Forces Command budget - a level Kernan said is inadequate.

The Pentagon's commitment to joint operations in such areas as attack operations against mobile targets, logistics and information operations, and "forcible entry" operations will clearly require more funding in coming years, he said.

"The Joint Forces Command Joint Experimentation program is addressing some of the most compelling issues facing the Defense Department, including many that were evident in recent operations" in the Balkans, he said.

In early September, the Joint Forces Command's first major field exercise, Millenium Challenge 00, will involve all the services and a number of regional commands in testing some of the most recent innovations in the joint warfighting arena, Kernan said.

No opposition to the nomination of Kernan and Franks was voiced at the hearing, and a Senate Armed Services Committee aide said their promotions and reassignment should be easily approved within the next few days.