Initial Plan predicted 47
days to Bagdad--lie
By Rick Atkinson and Thomas E. Ricks
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, March 30, 2003; Page A01
KIFL, Iraq, March 29 -- Ten days into the invasion of Iraq, the political
imperative of waging a short and decisive campaign is increasingly at odds with
the military necessity of preparing for a protracted, more violent and costly
war, according to senior military officials.
Top Army officers in Iraq say they now believe that they effectively need to
restart the war. Before launching a major ground attack on Iraq's Republican
Guard, they want to secure their supply lines and build up their own combat
power. Some timelines for the likely duration of the war now extend well into
the summer, they say.
This revised view of the war plan, a major departure from the blitzkrieg
approach developed over the past year, threatens to undercut early Bush
administration hopes for a quick triumph over the government of President
Saddam Hussein.
Wars often divide political and military leaders. But in the U.S. campaign
in Iraq, that point of tension came surprisingly soon, after just a week of
fighting, perhaps because an unusually lean launch helped the U.S. force
advance so quickly.
Carrying out the original aim of a quick war with minimal civilian
casualties would require taking chances that officers here now deem imprudent.
In the past week, they found the Iraqi resistance tougher and more widespread
than expected, and the planned charge to Baghdad stopped short of the city,
with Hussein still in place.
The Army, which has little more than two divisions here, soon will have
three brigades -- the rough equivalent of one division -- devoted just to the
protection of the vulnerable supply lines from Kuwait to Najaf.
And Iraq's best troops -- the Republican Guard and the elite Special
Republican Guard -- haven't yet been engaged in large numbers on the
ground.
To some commanders in the field, that adds up to a need for longer timelines
for the war. They are discussing a more conventional approach that would
resemble the 1991 Persian Gulf War. It would mean several weeks of airstrikes
aimed at Republican Guard units ringing Baghdad, and resuming major ground
attacks after that.
At the same time, commanders say the first 10 days of fighting reaped many
successes. An initial plan last year predicted that it would take 47 days for
U.S. troops to get within 50 miles of the outskirts of Baghdad, noted a senior
Army commander. Instead, the 3rd Infantry Division got that far in less than a
week. By invading from the south and putting in smaller troop contingents in
the west and north, U.S. forces reduced a military problem the size of
California to one closer to the size of Connecticut.
In the process, Iraq's oil fields were not destroyed, and no missiles laden
with chemical or biological weapons were fired. U.S. casualties, while painful,
were light by the standards of modern military conquest.
"Look at the big picture," said Paul Van Riper, a retired Marine lieutenant
general who helped review the war plan. "Three hundred miles, relatively few
casualties, and almost no armored vehicles lost."
There also remains hope for a "silver bullet" outcome that could bring an
abrupt change in fortunes. The possibilities are a coup, a bomb that kills
Hussein or any one of several other scenarios that "tip the regime," as Defense
Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has put it in White House meetings. "This could
all turn around in a couple of weeks," said one retired U.S. general who served
in the northern Iraq relief operation in 1991.
But when the U.S. ground attack resumes, it will probably look very
different from the first week of fighting. "You adjust the plan," said an Army
general in Iraq. "The initial strategy was to get to Baghdad as rapidly as you
can, change the regime, bring in humanitarian aid and declare victory. Now it's
going to take longer."
The next phase of the war is likely to have scaled-back ambitions, not in
the eventual goal of removing Hussein, but in how that is achieved. Retired
Army Col. Benjamin W. Covington said the administration's initial approach was
unrealistic. "No country and no military force in recorded history has ever
attempted to simultaneously fight and win a war, preserve the resources and
infrastructure of the country, reduce noncombatant deaths to the absolute
minimum within their capability and conduct a major humanitarian effort," he
said.
The first tactical change is likely to be that ground forces will wait for
airstrikes to pound their opponents. This phase was skipped this month in Iraq
but was carried out for five weeks during the Gulf War, as many commanders here
recall. "My concern is that we're trying to rush things," the Army source said.
"If people would revise their thinking and say, 'Okay, we're going to spend a
couple weeks' time getting positioned and letting the air campaign play out,'
then the initiative can be recaptured."
Rumsfeld, in comments Friday, seemed to reject the notion of broadening the
air campaign in a way that would cause more civilian deaths. "We do not need to
kill thousands of innocent civilians to remove Saddam Hussein from power," he
said at a Pentagon news conference. "At least, that's our belief."
At a meeting on the war at Camp David today, administration officials said
Bush supported Rumsfeld's desire to press ahead with preparations for a ground
offensive while reinforcements are still arriving.
Other officials in Washington were discussing reinterpreting the rules of
engagement to place less emphasis on minimizing civilian casualties and more on
destroying the enemy, even if Iraqi tanks and other heavy weapons are
interspersed with civilians.
The tactics used by the U.S. forces are likely to be tougher, both on the
ground and in the air. With siege warfare looming at Najaf and other cities,
the U.S. military may soon find itself seeking to use tactics that carry
political risks for the administration.
"We're not going to catapult diseased cattle into the city or anything like
that," said one planner. "But there's a question of what you can do and what
you should do."
He cited the example of knocking out electrical power, which the military
can do. But, he added, "Do you want to see pictures on CNN of the baby who died
because power to the incubator was cut off?"
When large-scale ground fighting does intensify, the geographical goals will
change. Instead of a rush to Baghdad, several other tasks now face the U.S.
military. First, Najaf will have to be taken, because commanders don't want to
attack the Republican Guard south of Baghdad with a hostile force potentially
at their rear. Capturing that town, where a suicide bombing killed four U.S.
servicemen today, could take weeks, commanders say.
Then would come the attack on the Republican Guard, and finally, if the
Iraqi government hasn't collapsed by then, a fighting entry into Baghdad. So,
an Army source concluded, the war may last into summer or later.
Asked whether he feels pressure from his superiors to accelerate the fight,
Lt. Gen. William S. Wallace, the V Corps commander and the senior Army officer
in Iraq, said in an interview that he speaks frequently with the American
ground commander in the theater, Lt. Gen. David D. McKiernan. "We're both
products of the same institution, which says that the really cool plan we made
isn't going to survive once we cross the LD," or "line of departure," into
hostile territory, he said. Changed circumstances, particularly in terms of
logistics and enemy resistance, will lead to modifications in the U.S.
approach, he added.
One Army general in Iraq drew an analogy to the Union's initial "on to
Richmond" strategy in the Civil War, which evolved into a strategy of "kill the
enemy army first." The Civil War lasted four years -- during which President
Abraham Lincoln searched among his commanders for one who would take the fight
to the enemy.
"Transportation is the Achilles' heel of this operation right now," the Army
source said. "We can't transport dismounted soldiers right now. When do we get
to the point where we can easily move soldiers and supplies around? We can do
it with helicopters, but you want to minimize landings in this dust."
Additional trucks and other vehicles will not arrive in large numbers for
several weeks.
But as time goes by, other factors could force the U.S. military to act
sooner. In four to six weeks, "there could be real problems" with food supplies
in major Iraqi cities, said Ken Bacon, the former Pentagon spokesman who is
president of Refugees International.
A war that lasts months may also leave a vacuum that could encourage trouble
elsewhere around the globe, some generals and strategists worry. If the
Pentagon does deploy into Iraq all the troops currently scheduled to go, about
half the combat power of both the Army and the Marine Corps will be in Iraq.
One senior general at the Pentagon said he is especially concerned that North
Korea, which has been locked in a confrontation with the United States over its
nuclear program, will attempt to capitalize on the situation.
"Tote up the ground forces, naval forces and air assets in or en route to
the war zone," said retired Army Col. Andrew Bacevich, now a professor of
international relations at Boston University. "Could the U.S. respond to a
second major contingency -- like Korea, for example?" His answer: The Pentagon
may say it can, but he disagrees.
Getting bogged down for months could also cause trouble for the United
States elsewhere in the Middle East, especially if the image of invincible U.S.
military might diminishes. "It's one thing to reach a relatively quick,
antiseptic victory," said retired Army Lt. Col. Andrew Krepinevich, an expert
on global military strategy. "But the longer this goes on . . . then the more
willing states in the region will be to challenge us." He worried especially
that a long, drawn-out fight "winds up being a kind of heroic defeat for the
Iraqis."
Finally, the longer the fighting lasts, the more difficult and expensive the
postwar peacekeeping and rebuilding may be. The Bush administration has never
disclosed how many troops it expects to have to assign to Iraq for peacekeeping
duties, but at one point before the war the staff of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
estimated that 45,000 to 60,000 U.S. and coalition troops would be needed.
Gen. Eric K. Shinseki, the Army chief of staff, estimated in congressional
testimony earlier this month that "several hundred thousand" troops would be
required. Shinseki was publicly contradicted by Deputy Defense Secretary Paul
D. Wolfowitz, who has played a central role in shaping the administration's
Iraq policy. In his own congressional appearance, Wolfowitz rejected Shinseki's
estimate as much too high.
The fighting in Iraq so far, and the talk by field commanders of a war of
months, now makes Shinseki's view of a burdensome occupation appear more
likely, some say. "This could wind up looking like Israel's foray into
Lebanon," said Michael C. Desch, a political scientist at the University of
Kentucky. "We will win this war militarily, no question about it," he said.
"But we can lose it politically."
"There's no doubt in my mind," said retired Lt. Gen. Theodore G. Stroup Jr.,
a former chief of Army personnel. "If it is a more hostile environment, you may
very well find a requirement for a much larger force" than the Bush
administration had hoped to field. The size of the force, he said would depend
on whether the Kurds wind up fighting the Turks in the north, and also on how
much infrastructure is destroyed. Deploying two or three divisions to keep the
peace for six months or a year would strain the Army, which has only 10
active-duty divisions.
Commanders in the field aren't yet worried about postwar scenarios or
civil-military relations. "We're in a long war here, as I think you realize,"
one commander in Iraq told his subordinate officers a few days ago. "I want you
to keep our guys from getting killed in large numbers. That's the bottom
line."
Ricks reported from Washington.
© 2003 The Washington Post Company
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