3,000 Bombs to Fall on the First Day of War (NYTimes)

national | miscellaneous | news report Monday February 03, 2003 08:06 by Vince TheConstitutionrules at hotmail dot com

The face of evil!

War Plan Calls for Precision Bombing Wave to Break Iraqi Army
By ERIC SCHMITT and THOM SHANKER

WASHINGTON, Feb. 1 — The Pentagon's war plan for Iraq calls for unleashing 3,000 precision-guided bombs and missiles in the first 48 hours of the opening air campaign, an effort intended to stagger and isolate the Iraqi military and quickly pave the way for a ground attack to topple a government in shock.

The initial bombardment would use 10 times the number of precision-guided weapons fired in the first two days of the Persian Gulf war of 1991, and the targets would be air defenses, political and military headquarters, communications facilities and suspected chemical and biological delivery systems, military and other Pentagon officials say.

Military planners said the immediate goals would be to break the Iraqi Army's will to fight, driving large number of troops to surrender or defect — and offering them guarded sanctuary if they do — while cutting off the leadership in Baghdad in hopes of causing a rapid collapse of the government of President Saddam Hussein.

The air campaign would be carried out by about 500 Air Force attack, radar-jamming and support planes flying from bases scattered throughout the gulf region and nearby, as well as by Navy planes from either four or five aircraft carriers, each carrying about 80 attack and support aircraft. About 300 American warplanes are already based at airfields north and south of Iraq. Two of the aircraft carriers are now stationed in the region, with two more scheduled to arrive within striking distance later this month.

The air war would be significant for what the targets will not be as much as for what they will be. Because the United States wants to help rebuild Iraq quickly after any conflict, the air campaign is intended to limit damage to Iraqi infrastructure and to minimize civilian casualties.

"The challenges in this air campaign will be to achieve certain military and psychological effects at the outset, but have as much of the infrastructure existing when it's over," said Gen. Ronald R. Fogleman, a former Air Force chief of staff who is a member of the Defense Policy Board, a panel that advises Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld.

The ground war would be carried out by two Army divisions and an expanded Marine Expeditionary Force.

The Army's Third Infantry Division and a sizable contingent of marines would be assigned to punch north from Kuwait, while a force spearheaded by the Fourth Infantry Division, whose tanks and armored fighting vehicles are equipped with the service's most sophisticated digital communications and target-acquisition systems, would move south from Turkey.

A large number of other Army forces with an array of capabilities — including elements of the 82nd Airborne and 101st Airborne divisions — would be assigned to special missions.

Administration officials are highly sensitive to political considerations in Turkey, and they refused to discuss negotiations over the use of bases with the government in Ankara.

But an assessment of troop deployment orders indicates a plan to send sizable heavy forces through Turkey and into Iraq, while keeping the number of American troops within Turkey at any one time within a cap set by the Turkish government.

Saudi Arabia has likewise presented a diplomatic challenge. Currently, no offensive air strike missions are expected to fly out of Saudi Arabia, but access to bases elsewhere in the region allowed the United States Central Command to structure a war plan that does not rely on Saudi territory to carry out attacks.

Just as the air campaign would rely on precision-guided munitions to an unprecedented extent, so, too, would the ground offensive build on the concept called maneuver warfare. The tactics would expand on those used in the 1989 invasion of Panama, when troops flew in, dropped onto and attacked more than two dozen separate targets almost simultaneously in the opening assault. The strategy, called vertical envelopment, was not central to the gulf war, when Army and Marine troops drove Iraq from Kuwait by chewing through the desert, mile by mile.

Pentagon and military officials said they expected Special Operations forces, including a large number of Rangers, and airborne troops to seize airfields and other targets deep within Iraq, relying on planes flying high-risk missions to ferry American armored vehicles to runways seized behind the lines of Iraqi regular troops. Those strikes would be backed up by Apache attack helicopters.