At Boeing Co.'s high-tech factory in St. Charles, Mo., three shifts are working 24 hours a day turning out smart bombs to replenish Air Force and Navy inventories that ran dangerously low during the Afghan war.
Pentagon planners say it will take six months to produce enough Joint Direct Attack Munitions (JDAMs), the precision systems that guided 1,000-pound bombs to Taliban and al Qaeda targets, to contemplate an attack on Saddam Hussein's Iraq.
Bush administration rhetoric has fueled speculation that a military move against Iraq could be imminent. But the military reality is that it could take up to a year before the United States is ready to launch a coordinated assault likely to achieve the administration's goals of destroying Iraq's weapons of mass destruction capability and replacing Hussein's regime.
According to testimony and interviews with senior administration and Pentagon officials, foreign diplomats and nongovernment analysts, depleted arms stocks, demands on ships and aircraft in the Afghan campaign, severe strains on active duty and reserve forces over the last five months, and the need to obtain regional basing and command center agreements have imposed an unavoidably lengthy timeline on U.S. action.
Despite its tough verbal offensive, and remaining divisions between Pentagon and State Department leaders, sources said, the White House believes that complete, unqualified success in any campaign against Iraq is far more crucial -- politically, militarily and diplomatically -- than the need to act quickly in the absence of an immediate provocation.
Beyond the resource demands of the military, conditions inside Iraq and the surrounding region are still far from optimal. And much of the rest of the world, including countries whose support is seen as critical, remains skeptical or openly hostile to a direct attack.
In recognition of these realities, the administration has developed a strategy of short- and long-term actions designed to ensure that all the elements it sees as necessary for success eventually will converge.
Many of the initial military steps are well underway, based on a working assumption that an attack would begin with a massive air assault on Iraqi antiaircraft defenses and known weapons-of-mass-destruction sites, ideally guided by friendly forces on the ground. This would be followed by the entry of major units of U.S. troops, equipped to withstand chemical or biological weapons attacks.
"Our objectives in Iraq can only be met with forces on the ground," said an official inside the Pentagon with long experience on policy and planning issues. "We can't inspect [chemical weapons facilities] from the air."
In addition to accelerated weapons production, planners are deeply immersed in assessing manpower and equipment and basing needs, factoring in variables including the ongoing Afghan operation and the possibility that new crises, at home or in places such as the Middle East, the Philippines and Colombia, could divert attention and resources.
On the diplomatic front, the administration is working with Russia and other Security Council members to adjust United Nations sanctions in order to mute criticism that they are too harmful to the Iraqi people. It is also orchestrating an escalation of pressure on Hussein to comply with a range of U.N. resolutions, including allowing U.N. inspectors to examine suspected chemical, biological and nuclear weapons sites.
The assumption is that either Hussein will acquiesce, something the administration views as unlikely, or his continued refusal will help convince the world that all peaceful options have been exhausted.
Regional Opposition
Vice President Cheney's tour of 11 countries in the region next month is designed to listen to the concerns of government leaders, assure them that no precipitous action will be taken, demonstrate that the United States is putting in place a comprehensive, workable plan and ask their advice and assistance while emphasizing the seriousness of U.S. intent.
Virtually every country in the region has publicly opposed a U.S. military attack on Iraq. Their leaders say privately they would be happy to wake up one morning and find Hussein gone. But many recall that they have been recruited into past, half-hearted U.S. efforts that not only left him in place, but also made things worse inside Iraq and in the region.
Even as they acknowledge the truth of these complaints, U.S. officials are sometimes exasperated. "Cheney wants to hear them out, and tell them what's going on," said a senior administration official. But such discussions, he said, "are always a challenge. If we say we want to listen to what they think, they accuse us of having no plan. If we give them a plan, they complain we never consult them."
Cheney's hosts are likely to point out the absence in the administration's planning of any clear idea of what would replace the Hussein regime. The White House has instructed a long-skeptical State Department and CIA to step up contacts with leading Iraqi opposition groups. So far, that effort has proceeded on a somewhat less energetic timetable than other aspects of the strategy.
The expatriate-led Iraqi National Congress (INC), the Kurds in northern Iraq and the Shiite population in the south, are nominally allied under a broad opposition umbrella. But Kurdish spokesmen have said in recent weeks that they are leery of signing on to a U.S. plan absent absolute assurance of success, and that no one has yet asked them to. The head of the London office of the Supreme Council of the Islamic Revolution in Iraq (SCIRI), the only credible armed group among southern Shiites, said nothing had changed in their arms-length relationship with the United States. SCIRI's main patron is Iran, which was angered last month when President Bush named Iran, Iraq and North Korea the "axis of evil."
Although a long-testy relationship between the INC and the State Department has improved in recent weeks, the administration has continued to reject INC demands for lethal military training and money to launch operations inside Iraq. Both U.S. and INC officials, however, said a planned March conference here of former Iraqi military officers living in exile was a sign of progress.
Meanwhile, the CIA has continued its long-term covert operations to undermine Hussein and foment a coup from inside the military, a plan agency officials say is enhanced by increased U.N. pressure combined with the ongoing buildup of U.S. forces in the area.
Status of Saudi Base
One of the key issues facing military planners is the availability of air bases in the region with enough capacity to handle not only fighter-bombers, but also AWACS early warning and control aircraft, electronic warfare planes that block enemy radar, C-17 and C-130 supply planes and airborne tankers, as well as at least four Navy carrier task forces.
But experts disagree on how many bases are required to provide for a force that could number 700 to 800 planes, and where they must be. One such disagreement is on the need for Prince Sultan Air Base, 60 miles south of Riyadh, as an operations center and takeoff point for tankers and other nonoffensive aircraft. Its modern, high-tech facilities -- key to the fighting in Afghanistan -- allow the close tracking not only of manned and unmanned aircraft but also of forces on the ground.
"It is a show-stopper unless we get into Saudi Arabia," whose facilities cannot be replicated anywhere else in the region, said retired Air Force Gen. Charles G. Boyd, who now runs the Washington office of the Council on Foreign Relations.
Former Pentagon official Eliot Cohen, now director of strategic studies at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International studies, said he believes that U.S. forces would be better off if they could operate from Saudi Arabia, but that only Turkey and Kuwait were essential. Bahrain, Oman and Kuwait are already providing bases for U.S. use in Afghanistan and in the southern "no-fly zone" the United States, Britain and France have imposed over Iraq since the Gulf War. U.S. patrols over the northern "no-fly zone" use the Turkish air base at Incerlik.
Yet some of those countries have already expressed public reluctance to allow their facilities to be used for a U.S. assault on Baghdad. Although Hussein's departure would ease tensions in the area, Kuwaiti Defense Minister Sheikh Jaber al-Hamad al-Sabah recently told Reuters, "We will not allow any military operation against any state from our country without international cover," presumably meaning U.N. approval.
Turkish President Bulent Ecevit, who has been carrying on his own dialogue with Baghdad, said recently that "we want a military operation against Iraq to be out of the question." But Cohen and others said that regional reaction would change once those governments are certain of the seriousness of U.S. intent.
Boyd said that U.S. military presence in the region could be gradually increased while the administration presses Iraq at the United Nations. "I would send them in while banging drums on the need for more opening to inspectors," Boyd said.
Air Losses Expected
When and if an air assault begins on Iraq, experts agree it will take less than the 39 days needed during the 1991 Gulf War to silence Hussein's air defenses. But Michael O'Hanlon, a military expert at the Brookings Institution, pointed out that U.S. and coalition forces lost 86 aircraft during that effort, one-third of them in the first few weeks of the war, and most of those were low-flying aircraft, hit by Russian and Chinese versions of the shoulder-launched, U.S.-made Stingers.
This time around, with much of Iraq's urban air defenses, along with chemical and biological weapons labs, believed concealed in and around mosques, hospitals, schools and homes, such low-flying planes may be the only way to attack without killing and wounding thousands of civilians that often results from high-altitude bombing even when smart weapons are used. Unlike in Afghanistan, O'Hanlon said, the U.S. public must be prepared for air losses.
Hussein's assumed possession of unconventional weapons requires the United States to make them a first-round target. The administration's repeated declaration that Hussein's elimination is a goal equal to eliminating his weapons is seen as heightening the likelihood that he would use such weapons.
"What deterrent is there on Saddam Hussein since we have told him his head is on a platter?" Boyd asked. "We can never suppose he will do anything but use chemical or biological warfare." Protective gear for troops, which still remains a problem to fight in, has to be stockpiled in the region with allowance for also outfitting civilians.
Iraqi medium-range mobile Scud missiles, so difficult for the United States to locate and destroy during the Gulf War, could easily hit Kuwait and Israel. U.N. weapons inspectors in Iraq in the years following the war found chemical weapons traces in Scud warheads.
The use of smart bombs in Afghanistan has greatly diminished from a peak of about 80 a day, Air Force Secretary James C. Roche said in Senate testimony last week, and "we're able to build inventories up again." Boeing's JDAMs, $20,000 kits that fit onto unguided bombs to turn them into precision weapons, are being produced at roughly 1,500 a month, expanding to 2,000 a month by next year.
Pentagon planners are also working to determine the size of any U.S. force that would be needed to move into Iraq on the ground. Many experts agree with Cohen that the Iraqi army, "in terrible shape at the time of the Gulf War, could not have improved but only gotten worse in the last 10 years." Iraq has not been able to purchase new aircraft or tanks, Cohen said, while Afghanistan has demonstrated that U.S. equipment "is far better now."
But others worry that planners may depend too much on discontented Iraqi troops refusing to fight. Boyd said that the U.S. "cakewalk" anticipated by some will "never happen." Although 100,000 Iraqis deserted and 80,000 surrendered in the Gulf War, he said, this time "they will be fighting on their own soil."
Former Pentagon officials in touch with current planners say as many as 200,000 U.S. ground troops may be needed. By comparison, 60,000 U.S. military personnel are in the Central Command region -- 4,000 of them on the ground in Afghanistan -- Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Gen. Richard B. Myers testified this month.
A 200,000-troop commitment would require a massive support presence, triggering additional call-ups of reserve and National Guard units. Call-ups generated by the domestic response to Sept. 11 and the Afghan fighting have already put 35,000 Americans on active duty. Army Secretary Thomas E. White told senators last week that the services have become "quite concerned about retention," given the current extended mobilizations.
Domestic requirements, he said, including 6,000 National Guard troops now deployed at airports, and 5,000 at seaports, power plants and other infrastructure sites, plus rotations in Bosnia and Sinai peacekeeping forces, were "stressing the force, clearly."
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