LONDON, 21 March 2003 — Forget the “shock and awe” tactics of the world’s mightiest military power. It is intelligence — human and electronic — that will be needed to take out Saddam Hussein, defense analysts said yesterday.
For as the Americans found out in their vain hunt for Osama Bin Laden, accused mastermind of the Sept. 11, 2001 attacks, military hardware can never match inside information.
“Your smart bombs are only as smart as the intelligence you put into them,” said Tim Ripley, leading security research associate at Britain’s University of Lancaster.
“Unless you have the intelligence to drive this stuff, you might as well have dumb bombs,” he said after the first salvo in the war took the world by surprise.
Everyone had expected a massive air strike. Instead the Americans tried to “decapitate” the Iraqi leadership with a precision attack apparently pinpointed by intelligence.
Saddam Hussein defiantly appeared on television shortly afterwards, pointedly referring to the time of the dawn attack on Baghdad.
For the Americans, clearly the chance proved irresistible.
“I think something came the White House’s way at the last minute and presented itself as an opportunity to take out the highest value target,” said Col. Christopher Langton at the International Institute of Strategic Studies.
“So the decision was that instead of starting ‘shock and awe’ we would go for a precision strike that could have achieved everything. I think they decided to take a risk on this and it appears to have failed.”
He added: “There has been an intelligence black hole in Iraq as there was in Afghanistan. There is a lot of catching up to do and technology is not the answer.
“The human factor still remains the critical last piece of the jigsaw and how you work that and use that information.”
Wing Commander Andrew Brookes, another leading analyst at the institute, believed the overnight attack was sparked by a tip-off on the ground.
“I suspect it was human. They listen all the time for mobile phones and e-mails but he (Saddam) is a canny old dog. I suspect somebody might have said he was going somewhere.” But, highlighting what could be a coalition weakness, he said: “Intelligence is a long haul. It is arduous and most of us in the West have gone soft about this. It is hard to find people to endure the deprivation of living in the hills.
“It is much easier to rely on electronics or satellites. But when push comes to shove, there is no better filter than someone saying — ‘it is him driving down the street.’”
Defense analyst Paul Beaver argued: “There is no doubt in my mind that this is going to be an information age war both in terms of convincing the Iraqi Army to give up and in terms of creating targets of opportunity.”
He believes the US may even have a high-level mole in the Iraqi leadership.
“I think that the Americans have somebody at the top as well as more than 30 different types of satellites that can listen to and pinpoint mobile phones even when they are not transmitting.”
Beaver believed that the quality of US intelligence had dramatically improved over the past few months with the transfer of assets from the war against Al-Qaeda to the attack on Iraq.
