KIFL, Iraq, 31 March 2003 — Ten days into the invasion of Iraq, the political imperative of waging a short and decisive campaign is increasingly at odds with the military necessity of preparing for a protracted, more violent and costly war, according to senior military officials.
Top army officers in Iraq say they now believe that they effectively need to restart the war. Before launching a major ground attack on Iraq’s Republican Guard, they want to secure their supply lines and build up their own combat power. Some timelines for the likely duration of the war now extend well into the summer, they say.
This revised view of the war plan, a major departure from the blitzkrieg approach developed over the past year, threatens to undercut early Bush administration hopes for a quick triumph over the government of President Saddam Hussein.
Wars often bring a divergence between political and military leaders. But in the US campaign in Iraq, that point of tension came surprisingly soon, after just a week of fighting, perhaps because an unusually lean launch helped the US force advance so quickly.
Carrying out the original aim of a quick war with minimal civilian casualties would require taking chances that officers here now deem imprudent. In the past week, they found the Iraqi resistance tougher and more widespread than expected, and the planned charge to Baghdad stopped short of the city, with Saddam still in place. The army, which has little more than two divisions here, soon will have three brigades — the rough equivalent of one division — devoted just to the protection of the vulnerable supply lines from Kuwait to Najaf.
And Iraq’s best troops — the Republican Guard and the elite Special Republican Guard — haven’t yet been engaged in large numbers on the ground.
To some commanders in the field, that adds up to a need for longer timelines for the war. They are discussing a more conventional approach that would resemble the 1991 Gulf War. It would mean several weeks of airstrikes aimed at Republican Guard units ringing Baghdad, and resuming major ground attacks after that.
At the same time, commanders say the first 10 days of fighting reaped many successes. An initial plan last year predicted that it would take 47 days for US troops to get within 50 miles of the outskirts of Baghdad, noted a senior army commander. Instead, the 3rd Infantry Division got that far in less than a week. By invading from the south and putting in smaller troop contingents in the west and north, US forces reduced a military problem the size of California to one closer to the size of Connecticut.
In the process, Iraq’s oil fields were not destroyed, and no missiles laden with chemical or biological weapons were fired. US casualties, while painful, were light by the standards of modern military conquest.
“Look at the big picture,’’ said Paul Van Riper, a retired Marine lieutenant general who helped review the war plan. “Three hundred miles, relatively few casualties, and almost no armored vehicles lost.’’
There also remains hope for a “silver bullet’’ outcome that could bring an abrupt change in fortunes. The possibilities are a coup, a bomb that kills Saddam or any one of several other scenarios that “tip the regime,’’ as Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld has put it in White House meetings. “This could all turn around in a couple of weeks,’’ said one retired US general who served in the northern Iraq relief operation in 1991.
But when the US ground attack resumes, it will probably look very different from the first week of fighting. “You adjust the plan,’’ said an army general in Iraq. “The initial strategy was to get to Baghdad as rapidly as you can, change the regime, bring in humanitarian aid and declare victory. Now it’s going to take longer.’’
The next phase of the war is likely to have scaled-back ambitions, not in the eventual goal of removing Saddam, but in how that is achieved.
Retired army Col. Benjamin W. Covington said the administration’s initial approach was unrealistic. “No country and no military force in recorded history has ever attempted to simultaneously fight and win a war, preserve the resources and infrastructure of the country, reduce noncombatant deaths to the absolute minimum within their capability and conduct a major humanitarian effort,’’ he said.
The first tactical change is likely to be that ground forces will wait for airstrikes to pound their opponents. This phase was skipped in Iraq but was carried out for five weeks during the Gulf War, as many commanders here recall.
