Opening with A Bang

By Mark Thompson/Washington

The first Gulf War was as relentless and predictable as the tides--waves of warplanes, followed by thousands of U.S. troops, destroyed much of the Iraqi military. The second Gulf War, if it comes, would be more like the Big Bang--hundreds of towering explosions all across Iraq all at the same time. The Pentagon buzz word for this is simultaneity. The plan would have unprecedented numbers of smart, satellite-guided bombs attack a multitude of targets over a great sweep of territory, swiftly followed by U.S. troops seizing key objectives.

Call it the doctrine of inevitability. The U.S. military wants to capture 75% of Iraq, a country the size of California, in the war's first week and convince the Iraqi military that resistance is futile. The Pentagon is betting that most of Iraq's 400,000 troops would not fight. The diehards--led by the 20,000 members of the Special Republican Guard and the Special Security Organization, which would be suspected of hiding banned weapons--would be expected to hole up in greater Baghdad, which includes Saddam Hussein's hometown of Tikrit, 100 miles north of the capital. The Pentagon believes that the Iraqi dictator's 24-year reign would come to an end, one way or another, somewhere in that vicinity.

"Our troops in the field are trained; they're ready; they are capable," Army General Tommy Franks said last week after briefing President Bush on the war plan. Pentagon planners suggest that more targets in Baghdad would be hit in the first 24 hours of Gulf War II than were hit in all 43 days of the first war. The U.S. military's goal would be to deliver "such a shock on the system that the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on that the end is inevitable," Air Force General Richard Myers, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, told TIME last week.

Unlike the first Gulf War, in which fewer than 10% of the bombs were smart, this time close to 80% would be. And unlike the laser-guided bombs of 12 years ago, these satellite-guided weapons, known as joint direct-attack munitions (JDAMS), should be able to find their targets automatically, unimpeded by smoke or bad weather. The top targets of those JDAMS would be the military sites--command posts and critical garrisons belonging to the Republican Guard--that keep Saddam in power and the symbolic sites, like his presidential palaces, that reflect that power. "It will be highly kinetic," an Air Force planner says with grim understatement.

NOVEL STRATEGY last fall General John Keane, the Army's No. 2 officer, previewed this new kind of war for other senior officers. The old way of war, he said, "was to seize terrain, overmatch adversaries and control populations." The dearth of intelligence on the enemy's whereabouts required such a measured approach. That's no longer the case. "We have unparalleled situational awareness to understand what an enemy is doing," Keane said. "In a sense, we have an unblinking eye over the enemy formation." That near omniscience plus smart weapons, U.S. officers say, would enable the U.S. to take out lots of enemy positions across vast distances. "We want to go to these objectives as near simultaneous as we can," he said. Keane's views are watched closely inside the Pentagon. He is a favorite of Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and is slated to become the Army's top officer in four months.

The war would begin with a regime-shattering thunderclap. "It's hard to imagine that Saddam could have any idea of what he's in store for," Senator Carl Levin of Michigan, senior Democrat on the Armed Services Committee, told TIME last week. "There's no way he can survive," says Levin, who recently visited U.S. forces in the region. "It's too massive."

The Iraqi military would stand largely defenseless before this onslaught. U.S. tanks could destroy Iraqi tanks before the Iraqi tanks could even detect the American armor. B-2 bombers fly beyond the reach of Iraqi guns, and invading U.S. troops should be able to drive around flaming, oil-filled ditches or other defensive measures; U.S. troops call them speed bumps. If the Iraqis elect to stand and fight, the Pentagon fears, they would unleash hidden stores of chemical and biological weapons on advancing U.S. troops.

The most recent wars in which the U.S. fought--the Gulf War, the Balkans, Vietnam--were stop-and-go affairs with lots of pauses. They were designed to compel action--get out of Kuwait, out of Kosovo, out of South Vietnam--not to decapitate a government. That would be the principal goal of a second Gulf War. Actually, Gulf War II would look less like the first Gulf War than 1989's U.S. invasion of Panama, a country the size of South Carolina (and one-fifth the size of Iraq). In that operation, some 24,000 U.S. troops pounced on 27 different objectives across the country within the first 24 hours. Panamanian leader Manuel Noriega eluded capture for 14 days, but the war was essentially over in a day. Enlarging the Panamanian operation to cover a nation the size of Iraq would not have been possible before recent advances in smart bombs, sensors, stealth technology and remotely operated drones.

U.S. troops would, in Pentagonspeak, vertically envelop Iraq--drop behind enemy lines via parachute and chopper--to seize key targets "as rapidly as possible," a senior Central Command officer says. That's why the war plan features overlapping ground and air campaigns, nothing like 1991's deliberate 39-day air-only battle followed by a 100-hour ground war.

HIT FIRST--AND HARDER The Pentagon expects the "shock and awe" of thousands of JDAMS being dropped from B-2 bombers (neither of which existed at the time of the first Gulf War), combined with the ground deployments, to lead to mass Iraqi surrenders. If Saddam's troops needed further persuasion, the U.S. Air Force might push satellite-guided massive ordnance air-burst bombs (MOABs) out of the rear of its C130 cargo planes. These huge, 21,000-lb. bombs pack the power of a small nuclear weapon, complete with mushroom cloud, and trump the 15,000-lb. "daisy cutters" used in Vietnam and Afghanistan. (Air Force types prefer to call MOABs the mother of all bombs.) "We want to create a feeling of absolute hopelessness in the Iraqi military," says Harlan Ullman, a proponent of the shock-and-awe strategy and a scholar at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Because of the dangers Saddam could unleash, U.S. troops would try to neutralize him before he could do any harm. That means American troops--and lots of them--would have to get to work on Iraqi soil straight away. Their goals would be to prevent Saddam from firing his Scud missiles at Israel (as he did in the first Gulf War), to stop him from sabotaging his nation's future by destroying its oil wells (as he did Kuwait's in the first Gulf War) and to keep him from using his biological and chemical weapons (the Pentagon's biggest fear).

While Iraq has grudgingly detailed for the U.N. where it worked on biological, chemical and nuclear weapons in the past, it maintains that it no longer possesses or produces them. Senior U.S. officers believe that once Saddam was on the run, most Iraqis would be glad to lead U.S. soldiers to any such contraband. U.S. special-operations forces would seize some suspected weapons sites. Others would be blown up, if it was safe to do so. Just to be sure, the Pentagon might employ "e-bombs," which generate a massive electrical pulse, to destroy the electronics needed to deploy such weapons.

ON THE GROUND The U.S. push from Kuwait--perhaps 100,000 troops strong, led by the 3rd Infantry Division--would probably begin before the smoke of the first JDAMS had cleared. Hundreds of M-1 tanks and Bradley fighting vehicles would lead the 300-mile thrust to Baghdad, accompanied by U.S. Marines and British units. The troops would be protected by AH-64D helicopter gunships--basically flying tanks--whose new radars and missiles make them far deadlier than the AH-64A's used in the first Gulf War. Smaller U.S. units would pour into Iraq from Saudi Arabia and Jordan.

Until Turkish parliamentarians nixed the plan for the U.S. to use their country as a launching pad, a 60,000-strong American force led by the 4th Infantry Division was to push south from bases inside Turkey. Now a smaller force, led by the 101st Airborne Division, might be tapped for the job. The plan is to airlift that force from Kuwait into Kurdish air strips in northern Iraq that are being prepared by U.S. forces. Once secured, C-17 cargo planes could carry tanks and other armor deep inside Iraq. The Pentagon believes that attacking Saddam from more than one direction--a third force could approach Baghdad from the west--is vital to keeping the war short, casualties down and bomb damage minimal.

But there could be potholes on the road to Baghdad. The Pentagon wants the attacks to be fast and widespread enough to shock the Iraqi military but powerful enough so that the Iraqis can't shrug them off and regroup to fight the following day. U.S. troops plunging into Iraq would have to be nimble enough to move swiftly but with sufficient ammo and fuel to keep fighting deep inside Iraq until reinforcements arrived. Another concern: some in the U.S. military are as worried about American soldiers as they are about the enemy. Friendly fire, which accounted for 35 of 148 U.S. deaths in the first Gulf War, could be a bigger problem this time because the air and ground campaigns would coincide.

COLLATERAL DAMAGE Civilian casualties are a political and military nightmare. Human-rights groups estimate that about 3,500 Iraqi civilians died in the 1991 war. U.S. officials refuse to estimate the numbers of civilian expected deaths in a second Gulf War. It could get extremely messy, with the carnage broadcast instantly around the world. "What appears on al-Jazeera TV in the region is going to determine success maybe even more so than the actions on the ground," says retired Marine General Anthony Zinni, who ran Central Command from 1997 to 2000. "All the explanations afterwards won't counter those first images."

U.S. war planners are using computer programs like Bugsplat, which predicts the blast pattern of a bomb, to show which aircraft approaches generate the least collateral damage. On most bombs, fuses can be set to detonate after the bomb has burrowed into its target, which can further reduce collateral damage. "War is inherently violent. People are going to die," Myers said last week. Americans should not look to the relatively antiseptic wars for Kuwait and Kosovo as a guide. If it were to come down to fighting block by block in Baghdad, the images could be brutal. "We have to be mentally prepared for that," Myers said.

Human shields pose another public-relations predicament. The Pentagon has made it clear that it would treat voluntary human shields differently from hostages forced to stay at military targets. Volunteers, a senior Pentagon official says, are "working in the service of the Iraqi government and may, in fact, have crossed the line between combatant and noncombatant." That's another way of saying they could be legitimate targets, he adds. The U.S. military would not assure the safety of any of the several dozen human shields in Baghdad. A group of them headed home to Britain last week after the Iraqis told the volunteers they could not protect certain sites, like hospitals.

SADDAM'S LAST STAND The Iraqi leader has pulled his Adnan Republican Guard division from the northern city of Mosul toward Baghdad, suggesting that he is more interested in a showdown in his capital than in defending Iraq's borders. The same ethnic tensions that make Iraq tough to govern should make it easier to push Saddam and his defenders into Baghdad. The Kurds have virtual autonomy in northern Iraq. In the south, U.S. troops face an uncertain reception. While Shi'ite Muslims disdain Saddam's Sunni-led government, they are also wary of a coalition that allowed Saddam to crush a 1991 Shi'ite uprising at the end of the Gulf War. The western reaches of Iraq are mostly empty desert.

The Americans say they would like to keep Iraqi infrastructure unharmed. If things went as planned, key civilian sites like bridges and water and power systems would largely be spared, bringing home the message that the U.S. target is Saddam, not the Iraqi people. Such a strategy would make reconstruction easier when the war ended.

HEARTS AND MINDS The U.S. is hoping that the bulk of the Iraqi military would sit out the war so it could help keep the peace in a post-Saddam Iraq. U.S. planes dropped a blizzard of leaflets across southern Iraq last week. "Do not risk your life and the lives of your comrades!" read one entreaty, written over what appeared to be a picture of a dead Iraqi soldier. The other side featured a young Iraqi student in school; "Leave now and go home," it advised. "Watch your children learn, grow and prosper."

The endgame would probably begin with American forces encircling Baghdad. But U.S. troops would not rush into the city of 5 million and give Saddam the opportunity to kill them in bloody urban warfare. Instead, the plan is to cordon it off and launch targeted strikes into the capital. With Saddam and his inner circle trapped--and humanitarian aid flowing into the rest of Iraq--the war would be all but over. "If the leadership is isolated and not effective in governing the country, that would be victory," Myers said. "The ultimate objective is not Saddam Hussein."

Baghdad's civilians could be lured out of their city with promises of food and shelter, as commandos and smart bombs took down key targets inside the city. The U.S. is hoping its military juggernaut would persuade Iraqis to take matters into their own hands. "Hopefully, they'll hang Saddam in the streets of Baghdad," a British military officer in Kuwait says.

The Pentagon's war plan, while always evolving, is basically complete. As with all wars, some of what generals leak may be information designed to intimidate, deceive or divert the enemy. Franks said last week that the answer to the most important questions about the war--how long it might last and how many might die--are "unknowable." That's because, despite all the millions of variables that Pentagon planners have cranked into their computers, one remains truly unknown: whether the Iraqi military would fight to the death to defend its homeland or hail the invading Americans as liberators. Unfortunately, Franks and his commanders concede, that wouldn't become clear until the first JDAMS and G.I. boots began hitting Iraqi soil. --With reporting by Alex Perry and Simon Robinson/Kuwait

With reporting by Alex Perry and Simon Robinson/Kuwait