Lead story in the WP is our invasion plans. The amount of detailed info here is incredible. "We land in Tikrit at 8AM the first day." Not quite that bad, but almost. I am getting the feeling that Rumsfeld would like to replace Franks.
washingtonpost.com
War Plans Target Hussein Power Base
Scenarios Feature A Smaller Force, Narrower Strikes
By Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, September 22, 2002; Page A01
As the Bush administration moves aggressively at the United Nations and in Congress to win support for a possible military strike against Iraq, a consensus has begun to emerge among Pentagon war planners that the United States should conduct a narrowly focused but extremely intense attack that will be radically different from the 1991 Persian Gulf War.
Although the planning is far from complete and remains fluid, military officials and advisers say the broad outlines of an attack against the government of Iraqi President Saddam Hussein are starting to take shape. They include the targets for U.S. warplanes and missiles, the size and character of the U.S. ground force, and the potential endgame of a U.S. invasion.
The planners' thinking is being shaped by a unique set of circumstances confronting the United States in the Persian Gulf region, most notably Hussein's often unpredictable behavior. There are no conclusive answers, for example, about whether Hussein would be able to use biological or chemical weapons, what Israel would do in response to an Iraqi Scud missile strike, how much of the Iraqi military would change loyalties, or whether fighting would bog down in Baghdad and other cities.
What is already clear, however, according to senior officers and others familiar with emerging "concept of operations," is that unlike the 1991 war, neither Iraq's infrastructure nor its military rank-and-file would be targeted. Instead, the U.S. military is thinking about how to execute a sharply focused attack on Hussein and the people and institutions that keep him in power. And rather than a five-week-long air campaign followed by a ground attack, as happened in 1991, the two could occur nearly simultaneously.
The ultimate decision on how to write and execute the war plan resides with Army Gen. Tommy R. Franks, who as chief of the U.S. Central Command would lead the attacking force. Even with this week's flurry of diplomatic activity in New York and Washington, planning for a possible war intensified. Franks met in Kuwait on Thursday with his command's service chiefs to discuss the state of the Iraq planning.
Franks also recently briefed President Bush on what one senior officer termed "a range of courses of options" for invading Iraq. That briefing, which was first reported in yesterday's editions of the New York Times, was confirmed by Taylor Gross, a White House spokesman, who said, "The president has options now, but he has not made any decision." Planning is continuing as Franks and his subordinates try to balance conflicting goals, such as being cautious and overwhelming against being audacious and swift.
Franks's planning is being heavily influenced by Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld and a tightly knit circle of advisers surrounding him who, according to sources, are urging Franks to consider an invasion force that is smaller, more fast-moving, and relies more on Special Operations troops than traditional Army thinking would dictate. Indeed, the units Franks has signaled that he is likely to want to move overseas point toward a compromise force that is heavily armored but also fast. Among those Franks has tapped for likely use are the 1st Cavalry Division, a tank-heavy unit based at Fort Hood, Tex.; the 3rd Infantry Division, a mechanized infantry outfit based at Fort Stewart, Ga.; and parts of the helicopter-rich 101st Airborne Division, from Fort Campbell, Ky., according to three officials.
After Bush's decision this summer to make Iraq his top foreign policy priority, military planners are operating under a tighter schedule than they had anticipated, though one senior officer predicted that the military could be in position to launch an attack 45 to 60 days after the president gives the order.
This article is based on more than two dozen interviews with uniformed and civilian Defense officials, with some advisers to Rumsfeld, and with independent military analysts and strategists who have knowledge of Pentagon thinking. It reflects their understanding of the issues confronting Rumsfeld, Franks and their colleagues and the emerging blueprint for battle.
Pentagon spokeswoman Victoria Clarke declined to discuss specifics of this report, but said the department opposes publication of articles that discuss the possible conduct of war. The Post has on its own initiative withheld operational details that could potentially endanger U.S. troops. The military plans discussed in this report are still options being debated.
Targeting the Leadership
The war being designed now is an attack on a government, not a country.
"Our interest is to get there very quickly, decapitate the regime, and open the place up, demonstrating that we're there to liberate, not to occupy," one military planner said.
The bull's-eye is Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, where about 50,000 people live on the Tigris River about 100 miles north of Baghdad. "Tikrit is the political center of gravity," said Rick Raftery, a retired Marine intelligence officer who served in northern Iraq in 1991. "It must be immediately eliminated."
Experts on Iraq say that Tikrit is the nexus between Hussein, the security police and his weapons of mass destruction, or WMD. "Iraq's WMD are under the control of the special security organization," Khidir Hamza, a former Iraqi nuclear engineer, recently testified on Capitol Hill. "This is the same group that are charged with Saddam's security. This feared and ruthless organization is mainly composed of conscripts from Saddam's hometown and very loyal tribes in the adjacent areas."
Targeting the leader and his cronies is reminiscent of the NATO air campaign against then-Yugoslav President Slobodan Milosevic and those around him during the Kosovo crisis in 1999. The campaign focused on the factories and warehouses where their wealth resided.
But the start of a new Iraq air campaign is likely to be far more intense than either the bombing of Yugoslavia or the opening salvo of the Gulf War, which introduced the world to cruise missiles and other precision munitions.
Air Force officials say an attack on Iraq likely would begin with hundreds of bombers, cruise missiles and fighter aircraft executing a series of airstrikes with a barrage of firepower only hinted at in other recent U.S. air campaigns. Their warheads would rain down on antiaircraft systems and missiles and aircraft that could deliver chemical or biological weapons. Then the campaign would concentrate on "regime targets" -- presidential palaces, Hussein's bodyguards, military communications systems, secret police facilities, and the bases of the elite Republican Guard and other diehard supporters.
There is talk inside the Air Force of using 16 B-2 bombers on the first night of the campaign to conduct precision strikes against deep bunkers housing communications facilities or weapons. That is almost the entire fleet of operational B-2s, which have been used only in Kosovo and Afghanistan -- and then in far smaller numbers.
Each B-2 can deliver 16 earth-burrowing high-explosive 2,000-pound bombs. Some of the bat-winged, radar-evading stealth aircraft would fly long round trips from their home base in Missouri, while others would be deployed to the British installation on the Indian Ocean island of Diego Garcia and conduct repeated strikes.
At the same time, Navy ships in the Persian Gulf and Red Sea and lumbering B-52s would launch volleys of cruise missiles against presidential palaces and intelligence facilities.
There have been hints from top Air Force generals that the United States would use for the first time some secret weapons, such as directed-energy weapons to scramble the electronics of Iraqi military computers and communications systems.
All this might would be focused on toppling the regime as quickly as possible while minimizing the suffering inflicted on the Iraqi population, said several people familiar with the thinking of Air Force planners. "You don't want to go after bridges and other infrastructure targets," said retired Air Force Lt. Gen. Thomas McInerney. "All you want is regime targets."
Even most Iraqi troops would be exempted from attack. "The Iraqi military will be told, 'if you come out of your staging areas, you'll be destroyed, but if you stay, you'll live,' " said one person familiar with Air Force thinking.
U.S. intelligence officers are debating which units are most likely to turn. One person involved in those discussions predicted that the major units around Basra, in the Shiite south, won't fight the Americans, and that some may join them. In the north, some Kurds are reporting contacts from Iraqi officers facing them eager to arrange private cease-fires. Indeed, as part of a series of changes in how U.S. warplanes enforce the "no-fly" zones, said one officer, the United States has avoided bombing certain units that possess antiaircraft weapons but are believed to be ready to change sides.
Some planners think that the initial air campaign could last just a day or two before the ground campaign kicked off. The more conservative viewpoint is that it will take 10 days to two weeks, said one Air Force general. But no one involved thinks it will be the five weeks seen in the Gulf War.
How Big a Force?
The single most vulnerable point of a ground campaign, according to people familiar with the thinking of military planners, would come at the outset, as U.S. forces moved into areas adjoining Iraq in the weeks before the first shot was fired.
One of the biggest concerns military planners have is that if Hussein sees a force coming with the clear mission of removing and likely killing him, he will have every incentive to use chemical and biological weapons to hit U.S. forces as they arrive in Kuwait and Qatar and prepare for their attack.
There are three ways to address this "assembly problem," as it is known inside the Pentagon, but none of them is particularly satisfactory, according to the people considering them.
One is to keep the invasion force as small as possible, which shortens the time needed to gather it -- but raises risks later if reinforcements are needed and are thousands of miles away.
A second is to assemble much of the force elsewhere, far from the reach of Iraq's short-range missiles. U.S. military intelligence experts have concluded that Iraq doesn't possess any working long-range Scud missiles but may have some hidden away in parts, and also could try to deliver chemical or biological agents with drone aircraft such as modified crop dusters. So, planners say, some troops might quietly assemble at distant U.S. bases in Europe or Turkey, and then move quickly into Iraq as the attack began.
A third way is to move the troops as stealthily as possible. That's one reason that media-shy Saudi Arabia, with its two dozen major airports, some built to handle the annual surge of Muslim pilgrims to Mecca, remains extremely attractive to the U.S. military.
Military officials said they expect that Franks ultimately will select a mix of those three options -- that is, a relatively small force that is widely dispersed and can be reinforced quickly.
As a result, Franks's attack likely would have at its core three divisions: two tank-heavy Army units of about 16,000 troops each and one lighter Marine unit that would be used mainly to tie down Iraqi forces and be an on-hand reserve force. A fourth Army division, perhaps the 4th Infantry Division, would also be poised to rush to the Middle East to provide reinforcement, if needed. In addition, parts of the 101st Airborne Division and some Special Forces units may attack northern Iraq from bases in Germany and Turkey.
All told, the U.S. invasion force would likely amount to more than 100,000 troops, planners and others say. That's a fraction of the nine divisions -- seven Army and two Marine -- and 500,000 troops the United States deployed for the Gulf War.
Weapons of Mass Destruction
The biggest unresolved question about the air campaign is how to deal with chemical and biological weapons.
The Air Force has studied this "agent defeat" issue for years. The major concern is that bombing shallow bunkers containing such weapons could spew spores or gas into the air, creating lethal plumes that drift across Iraq and into neighboring nations, possibly killing thousands along the way. "You could get a downwind tail that could reach well into Iran," warned one Pentagon consultant who has studied the issue.
Air Force officers are still vigorously debating how to isolate those weapons, say officers familiar with the deliberations. The decision that targeteers appear to be favoring is to strike the means of delivery -- missiles and drone aircraft -- but to leave most of the actual weapons to be dealt with later. Predator and Global Hawk drone reconnaissance planes would help monitor weapons sites so airstrikes could be called in on anyone seeking access to the arsenals.
The major exception to that hands-off conclusion, said the Pentagon consultant, will be deeply buried bunkers of weapons of mass destruction that can be reached by deep-penetrating incendiary bombs. Those new munitions, developed in a secret Pentagon project in recent years, can produce the sustained high temperatures needed to kill the spores in biological weapons and break down the ingredients of chemical weapons, the consultant said.
But chemical and biological weapons are far from a purely military issue. Hussein hit Israel with Scud missiles during the Gulf War, and is likely to try again, Pentagon planners think. And unlike last time, Israel is likely to retaliate, raising the prospect of a general war in the Middle East.
That is especially worrisome to Defense officials because the Scud hunt in western Iraq, in which U.S. warplanes unsuccessfully scoured Iraq's desert for Scud launchers, is remembered inside the U.S. military as one of the least successful aspects of the Gulf War. The Pentagon thinks it would do better this time. Pentagon officials have reassured the administration that by using reconnaissance drones and other new devices, they stand a better chance of detecting and destroying Iraqi missile launchers.
People familiar with the Pentagon's deliberations also think that Jordan, which sits between Israel and Iraq, would permit low-profile Special Operations missions against Iraqi missiles to be staged from its soil. Indeed, noted one former Central Command official, Jordan's King Abdullah is unusually familiar with U.S. Special Operations commanders, having run his own country's Special Operations Command before becoming king.
Urban Warfare
The single biggest unknown, should the United States invade Iraq, is how Iraqi troops would react. The war would be longer and bloodier if many chose to fight, especially if they retreated into Baghdad and other big cities, according to defense experts.
Some contend that the rank-and-file is waiting for an opportunity to safely turn on Hussein. "If I had to guess, I would predict that Saddam ultimately would be destroyed by his own forces, whose loyalty he has good reason to question," Richard Perle, a Pentagon adviser who is a leading hawk on Iraq, said recently on a foreign policy Web sitewww.inthenationalinterest.com.
But there were constant predictions during the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s that units would turn against the Iraqi leadership, military analyst Anthony H. Cordesman recently noted, and "they were wrong virtually every time."
The bottom line, said one Army general, is that no one really knows how the Iraqi military will react.
The U.S. war plan can be crafted to encourage mass defections by quickly shattering the security police, said Raftery, the former Marine intelligence officer. "The real key to collapsing the regime is the destruction of the internal security services and the Republican Guards," he said. "Once these threats are eliminated, the regular army units will probably defect or surrender and popular support for the regime will evaporate."
But the person whose views count most on this is Franks. One Army officer who knows him notes that Franks's experience in Afghanistan with local Afghan forces is likely to make him suspicious of relying too much on local support. Franks is said to feel betrayed by the Afghan militias who failed to carry through on promises at Tora Bora, the battle last winter in the mountains along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border at which many al Qaeda members, possibly including Osama bin Laden, slipped away.
Pentagon planners say if U.S. ground forces met resistance, they expect it would be in the cities, particularly Baghdad.
At least some members of elite Iraqi units are expected to fight, especially the Special Republican Guard, which reportedly is trained for urban fighting. That's worrisome because major U.S. military advantages, such as airpower and aerial reconnaissance, are far less effective in a crowded city.
The U.S. military's biggest worry about attacking Baghdad is how long it would take. Planners fear that if it looked as though the Army is besieging the city, which has a population of 4.8 million, global opinion would swing against the United States, and so constitute a strategic defeat. "Our largest concern is that we do not allow time to become our enemy," one officer said.
Local public opinion also would go a long way toward determining the intensity and duration of any battle for Baghdad. If much of the population were to come over to support the United States, then the fight could prove easier than expected, because locals could provide valuable intelligence, noted one U.S. military expert on urban warfare.
But if a significant part of the population opposed the U.S. presence, then fighting in Baghdad could quickly become a nightmare, officials said. If it went well, planners say, the major fighting in the war could be over in a week. If it went worse than expected, they say, the United States still would prevail, but its victory over the course of two or three months would be seen as a mixed success.
If fighting really bogged down that long, warned retired Army Col. Robert Killebrew, a veteran planner, it would be time to brace for the worst-case scenario: "protracted and costly fighting, the further mobilization of radical Islam in the region, and the ensuing collapse of one or more U.S.-allied governments in Egypt, Saudi Arabia or Pakistan."
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