War plan: Shock and awe Iraqis

WASHINGTON -- Gen. Tommy Franks, who would command U.S. forces against Iraq, briefed President Bush on his war plans at the White House on Wednesday. Those plans, officials said, aim to "shock and awe" Iraqi defenders.

Later, Franks and Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld said at a Pentagon news conference Wednesday that President Bush has not yet decided to go to war.

Rumsfeld, Franks and other senior military and senior national security officials met with Bush at the White House to go over final planning for an Iraq war.

Ten times the firepower of the 1991 Persian Gulf War would be unleashed from the air, and many more of the bombs would be guided by lasers or satellite signals, too, adding to accuracy, one official said.

At the Pentagon news conference, Franks said the U.S. forces now arrayed against Iraq, said to number at least 230,000 with many more on the way, are prepared for a go-ahead from Bush.

"Our troops in the field are trained, they're ready, they are capable," Franks said.

The United States and Britain have more than doubled the number of air patrols in the "no fly" zone over southern Iraq this week to keep Iraqi air defenders off guard and mask the start of any war, the Associated Press reported, quoting an unnamed senior defense official.

Several hundred sorties a day are now being flown over southern Iraq, including F-16 and other attack planes as well as surveillance, refueling and other support aircraft, the official told the AP on condition of anonymity. The official did not reveal specific numbers.

The increase is meant to preserve an element of surprise for the start of a war. An irregular pattern of sorties over the invasion routes in the south makes it more difficult for Iraqi air defenses to foresee a shift from air patrols to actual combat.

If war comes, U.S.-led airstrikes with thousands of bombs and missiles would be combined with quick ground assaults -- a combination aimed at overwhelming Iraqi defenses, preventing them from retaliating with chemical or biological weapons and crushing Iraqi morale.

Targets would include military and political headquarters in Baghdad and elsewhere, air defenses, communications facilities and systems that could be used to launch chemical or biological attacks.

On Wednesday, Gen. Richard Myers, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, warned reporters not to envision a replay of the 1991 Persian Gulf War.

He emphasized the importance of technological advances since 1991 and the effects they would have if there is a war with Iraq.

During the Gulf War, he said, about 10 percent of the munitions were precision guided; for a war in Iraq, the expectation is that level would reach 60 percent to 70 percent.

"The template of Desert Storm will not fit very well," he said, because of the tremendous changes in warfare.

Shock and Awe: Achieving Rapid Dominance -- a 1996 book credited to Harlan Ullman, James Wade, L.A. Edney and the National Defense University Institute for National Strategic Studies -- described the battlefield of the future as one that "will encompass every pressure point that controls or influences the elements of the battle." The concept would be to mass "devastatingly accurate and simultaneous firepower on critical nodes/targets ... rather than necessarily having to mass large armies in the field to engage one another."

Myers would want that achieved quickly.

"If asked to go into conflict in Iraq, what we would like to do is have it be a short conflict," Myers said. "The best way to do that is to have such a shock on the system that the Iraqi regime would have to assume early on that the end is inevitable."

Myers said it would be a mistake to equate this strategy with a scorched earth assault: "Don't confuse shock and awe with civilian casualties."

He and other U.S. officials insist that a war with Iraq would involve extraordinary efforts to minimize civilian casualties. They said they will seek to do that through a variety of methods, ranging from the way targets are chosen to the type of weapons employed. Commanders plan to issue warnings before strikes and use a database listing structures to avoid bombing in Iraq.

Neither Rumsfeld nor Franks would be drawn into predicting the economic or human cost of a war. Franks called such costs "unknowable" given the impossibility of saying with certainty how long the war would last.

-- Information from the Associated Press, Washington Post and Cox News Service was used in this report.

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