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Iraq faces a ‘blitzkrieg’ in Pentagon hi-tech plan

By David Rennie

WASHINGTON: Battle planning for a US war with Iraq is being increasingly dominated by a powerful faction within the Pentagon, urging a radical and untested form of high-technology attack.

The theory calls for air strikes with precision weapons the Wall Street Journal reported, citing Pentagon sources. The aim is to paralyse temporarily an enemy’s ability to fight back, allowing a small, fast-moving ground force to achieve victory before its opponents have a chance to regain their bearings, it said.

The officials said the theory of a lightning strike is emerging as a central part of the Pentagon war plan. The prediction is that a small, fast ground force would be able to start pushing into Iraq less than two weeks after the start of a hi-tech air campaign.

In the 1991 Gulf war, Saddam Hussein’s forces in Kuwait and Iraq were pounded for 40 days by bombers dropping mostly unguided munitions. In the scenario proposed by the modernising faction, Iraqi field commanders would be left crippled and demoralised by strikes in the first hours and days of a US air campaign.

Hi-tech missiles and laser guided bombs would destroy Iraqi radar installations, then satellite guided “smart bombs” would be dropped on radio-relay stations and sever fibre-optic communications lines.

The nation’s electrical power grid would then be attacked by bombs designed to shower power plants and substations with electricity-conducting carbon filaments, short-circuiting transformers.

The theory has the strong support of the defence secretary, Donald Rumsfeld, a self-declared moderniser, but is viewed with intense suspicion by ground commanders from the army and the Marine Corps, the Wall Street Journal reported.

Such critics, who already view Mr Rumsfeld as a visceral critic of the traditional army, fear that faulty intelligence may blunt the effectiveness of such lightning air strikes, leaving their men facing a far stronger enemy than expected.

Sceptical ground commanders point to Operation Anaconda, a campaign to evict 250 al-Qa’eda fighters from the mountains of eastern Afghanistan in March.

When the attacking force of 1,500 ground troops arrived for a battle supposed to last three days, they were pinned down by a hidden army of 1,000 al-Qa’eda fighters who had survived a precision bombardment and successfully hidden from hi-tech allied surveillance.

No army leader would criticise the new theory of “effects-based” warfare in print, but a retired army officer who frequently takes part in Pentagon war games, Col Richard Sinnreich, told the Journal: “I think we’ve given our ability to acquire and then use intelligence about an enemy far more credit than we should.”

According to recent leaks of Pentagon battle plans - any one of which may contain as much disinformation as authentic detail - tradition-minded army generals won a compromise with Mr Rumsfeld and the modernisers, securing a plan that would deploy up to 260,000 troops in a war with Iraq. —LDT

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