[A-List] US imperialism: Iraq

["Michael Keaney" <michael.keaney@xxxxxx>]

Pentagon wins battle for big US ground force
By Peter Spiegel and Stephen Fidler in London
Financial Times: November 10 2002

The Bush administration's decision to move forward with an Iraqi war plan
that includes as many as 250,000 ground troops represents a victory for the
Pentagon's uniformed leadership over top civilian officials, who had pushed
for plans involving smaller, more mobile forces modelled on the Afghan
campaign.

Civilian leaders close to Donald Rumsfeld, US defence secretary,
particularly Douglas Feith, the undersecretary of defence for policy, who is
considered one of the Pentagon's leading thinkers, had pushed for more
innovative plans with heavy reliance on special forces and precision-guided
munitions.

Such a plan could have led to troop deployments of less than 100,000 -
perhaps as few as 60,000.

But General Tommy Franks, head of US central command and the man who will
oversee any invasion, has been pushing for a more conventional plan, and in
recent months has gained the support of an increasingly vocal group of
military leaders both inside and outside the Pentagon.

In a series of hearings on Capitol Hill and interviews with both civilian
and former military leaders over the last two months, several leading
strategists said going in with such a small contingent would be risky,
particularly if coalition forces suffered any early setbacks requiring
reinforcements.

"You don't know what it's going to take exactly, but you want to be sure if
it's a really big fight, you want to be there with really big forces, not
where you could give the Iraqis any hope that they could survive," said
retired Gen Wesley Clark, supreme allied commander for Europe during the
Bosnian campaign.

It is a position Mr Rumsfeld appears to have come around to. Current plans,
first reported at the weekend by the New York Times, call for a rolling
start to an invasion, gradually building to a force of between 200,000 and
250,000, which would be preceded by an air campaign including as many as
1,000 warplanes.

Such a large force would require the US to rely heavily on bases in friendly
Gulf states along the Iraqi border, particularly in Saudi Arabia, which is
still equivocal about co-operating.

The New York Times report suggested the US military would like to set up
forward platforms inside Iraq which, with existing bases in Kuwait, could
serve as the primary launching point for ground forces. Currently there are
about 10,000 ground troops in the region, with more than half in Kuwait.

However, the vast number of combat aircraft and support aircraft would
require at least 15 airfields, and possibly as many as 20, according to
estimates prepared for the House armed services committee by Michael
O'Hanlon, a military analyst at the Brookings Institution.

Without help from Saudi Arabia, which has 31 long paved runways, the US
would be forced to cobble together help from other Gulf states, where
airfields are less developed and poorly stocked. According to Mr O'Hanlon's
estimates, even with four to six aircraft carriers and complete access to
bases in Turkey and Kuwait, such a large force would need at least a dozen
more fields, leading the US to rely on small emirates such as Qatar, Bahrain
and Oman.

The need for such a large invasion force, advocates said, followed from the
concern that many of America's biggest advantages in Afghanistan could
become neutralised in Iraq. Precision air attacks, which gave the
anti-Taliban coalition most of its key victories, would be of more limited
use in Iraq, where Mr Hussein has already moved many prime military targets
into civilian areas.

In addition, most analysts believe Mr Hussein would forgo a battle in the
desert, where his troops suffered enormous losses during Desert Storm due to
superior US mobility, and would draw his six trusted Republican Guard
divisions back to Baghdad where they could stage a drawn-out battle for the
capital.

Not all experts agree on the need for such a large show of force, which
could take months to assemble, particularly if Saudi co-operation is limited
and the US must unload all ground forces in Kuwait. Indeed, current plans
appear to be something of a hybrid, inserting a small number of ground
forces near the end of the air campaign as the full contingent of troops
arrives in the region.

Leading Pentagon policymakers believe widespread demoralisation within the
Iraqi ranks could lead to mass defections should an invasion occur. Mr
Rumsfeld has noted that 70,000 to 80,000 Iraqis deserted or surrendered
within days of the US push into Kuwait.

Under such a scenario, supported by experts such as Lt Gen Thomas McInerney,
former assistant vice-chief of staff for the US Air Force, only 30,000 to
50,000, "maybe not all there at the start", would be needed for a quick
march on Basra in the south and Mosul in the north, which could neutralise a
large group of Iraqi army through either destruction or defection.

Such suggestions, according to a person familiar with Pentagon discussions,
were made early in the Iraq planning process by civilian policymakers, who
put troop totals at 50,000 to 60,000.

But as the proposal moved through the military bureaucracy, the numbers
grew. According to analysts, this reflected the usual caution of uniformed
staff officers, some of whom believed significantly more than 300,000 troops
would be needed.