The allied strategy for the war's next phase calls for a blitzkrieg in Kuwait--and Iraq
Ferocious as it is, the bombing campaign against Iraq is probably only the prelude to an even more monumental land battle. Unless air power forces Saddam Hussein to his knees, Operation Desert Storm will shift after a matter of weeks to a vast ground campaign to evict his forces from Kuwait. As key military sources sketch it for "Newsweek,' the plan drawn up by Desert Storm commander Gen. Norman Schwarzkopf is a modern blitzkrieg--the first test ever of the U.S. Army's post-Vietnam doctrine of "AirLand Battle." Says retired U.S. Marine Corps. Gen. George Crist: "It's going to be violent, Patton-like armored thrusts, perhaps an amphibious end run...We will (be) moving so fast that the Iraqis won't know what hit 'em."
The timing and exact points of attack are not known, but the strategic heart of the plan is a sweeping flanking maneuver around Saddam's forces in Kuwait. "Newsweek' has learned that weeks ago President Bush made the decision to permit U.S. forces to enter Iraq, giving Schwarzkopf freedom to maneuver well above the southern Iraqi city of Basra; below that line Iraq has some 545,000 troops, 4,200 tanks, 2,800 armored vehicles and about 3,100 pieces of artillery. But Schwarzkopf has his sights on the "center of gravity" of Saddam Hussein's military and of his regime: the 150,000-man elite Republican Guard tank divisions just north of Kuwait (chart).
Saddam, of course, has other ideas. Iraqi doctrine, developed over the last four years of its brutal war with Iran, is built around the notion of "defense in depth," which calls for Iraqi forces to fight from behind redundant fortifications and obstacles. In essence, Saddam has turned the entire territory of Kuwait into a gigantic version of such a layered defense. The first layer is made up of divisions entrenched along the length of the Kuwaiti coast, then west along the Saudi-Kuwaiti border. For up to four miles in front of these lines, the Iraqi combat engineers have laid barbed wire, tank traps, sand berms and minefields. Many of Iraq's tanks are dug into sand, their turrets sticking out as artillery.
Behind these lines, Iraq has deployed small armored units to confront any enemy forces that might break through. Farther back still, stretched west of Kuwait City, Saddam has several divisions of additional "operational reserve" forces. Finally, just south of Basra, lie the Republican Guards. They are equipped with artillery, antiaircraft batteries and T-72 Soviet tanks. If the United States hit these lines frontally, Americans would find themselves reliving World War I's gory Battle of the Somme, in which Britain and France took more than 600,000 casualties in a futile four-month effort to pierce German entrenchments.
Gen. Colin Powell, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, has already dismissed that idea as "mindless"; Schwarzkopf agrees. Instead, he plans to induce the Republican Guards to leave their defensive positions by sending a tank force to meet them, end-running the western end of the Iraqi lines. Schwarzkopf's strike force consists of the crack U.S. Tank forces from Germany--the First and Third U.S. Armored Divisions, and the Second Cavalry Regiment--plus the First Mechanized Infantry Division out of Fort Riley, Kans. Reports from Saudi Arabia say that the 168 Challenger tanks of Great Britain's First Armored Division are deploying west, possibly to join this force, Says Maj. John Chapman, of the U.S. First Armored Division: "I see us employing tactics that capitalize on the speed of our tanks. We will probably use our night-fighting capabilities. I see us massing our combat power, focusing on a narrow point to penetrate those initial defenses. After that, it will be like a kid in a candy store. Only our fuel supply will slow us down."
Schwarzkopf believes terrain can work in his favor. The tigris and the Euphrates rivers join at Al-Qurna, just north of Basra, to form the Shatt al-Arab, which then flows into the gulf. Its delta on the Fao Peninsula is a wilderness of marshes; the Republican Guards' tanks cannot escape that way. Similar obstacles face them to the north, where the Euphrates meanders east to Al-Qurna through swampland and a great lake, the Hawr al-Hammar. If the United States cuts the bridges over the Euphrates and the Shatt al-Arab, the Republican Guards' only escape would be west, along the Euphrates.
That is where Schwarzkopf wants to create his killing ground. To beat U.S. tanks, the Iraqi corps commander would have to keep his forces concentrated. But if the tanks bunch together, they can be hit by U.S. aircraft. If they disperse again to avoid this aerial assault, they will be carved up by Schwarzkopf's ground forces, supported in the air by A-10 tank-killer aircraft, and apache helicopters.
Schwarzkopf has put together two other corps--self-contained groups of forces, each over two divisions strong. In the east there are the U.S. Marines, now representing the biggest amphibious assault force since the Inchon landings. After the Iraqi defense line in Kuwait has been pulverized by bombing--and only then--the Marines' task could be to power through the lines, probably to link up with a simultaneous Marine amphibious landing farther north up the coast of Kuwait, supported by the 16-inch guns of the battleships Wisconsin and Missouri in the Persian Gulf.
Schwarzkopf's second force is the XVIII Airborne Corps, consisting of he 82nd Airborne Division, the 101st Air Mobile Division, the 24th Mechanized Infantry Division and part of the Third Cavalry Regiment. This force, assisted by French, Egyptian, Saudi and Syrian forces, may act as a "pinning" force, engaging the Iraqi lines in order to prevent them from moving out to block the U.S. end run. The First Cavalry Division would remain in theater reserve.
Strike force:
Precisely where Schwarzkopf intends to penetrate the Iraqi defenses and make his run north is a closely guarded secret. "He has several choices, some more ambitious than others. Which he chooses depends on how many divisions he sends," says one official. Much also depends on how much time he is given to ready his strike force. This explains the pleas of Schwarzkopf and his deputy, Lt. Gen. Calvin Walker, for more time. In October Schwarzkopf convinced the president that his plan could work only with the divisions form Germany. They have been practicing AirLand Battle for a decade, and have a long experience of working intimately with the American and British Air Force units sent form NATO to the gulf. But these forces arrived only on Jan. 15, and are still a month away from reaching top form in desert conditions. Col. Jimmy Hitt of the 11th Aviation Brigade said last week that a quarter of his helicopter crews were still at the "walking" stage of readiness.
Unreadiness is only the first kink in the plan. Land battle in the desert has always meant severe logistical strains (box, page 33). Until they get to the Euphrates, Schwarzkopf's forces will be depending on a supply line up form Saudi Arabia for every drop of water. A modern tank division uses 600,000 gallons of fuel a day--twice as much as Gen. George S. Patton's whole Third Army needed each day in World War II. As of Jan. 15, European military sources say, Schwarzkopf had only 50 percent of the munitions he wants.
The Arab allies are also a question mark. The Syrian mechanized division has already been shifted from the immediate combat area because of concern over its willingness to fight, according to Egyptian military officials. It is now well to the west of other Arab forces. U.S. ground commanders say Syrian and Egyptian forces operate according to Soviet doctrine, which calls for them to advance more quickly; they could get ahead of the pack, endangering units to their right or left. "There's a lot of Pickett's Charge quality to their tactics," says a U.S. Army colonel, referring to the disastrous rush by Confederate troops into Union lines at Gettysburg. One of the Army planners' biggest fears is that allied forces might accidentally start firing on one another because of communications problems among multinational troops operating frequently at night.
But perhaps the biggest imponderable facing Schwarzkopf is the human factor. Says Edward Foster of the Royal United Services Institute in London: The ground phase of the war depends more on morale, training and momentum. It will be our armor plate and human bodies against those of the opposition." U.S. troops are trained volunteers who think of themselves as professional soldiers. But whereas the Iraqi forces have spent eight of the last 10 years living through the deprivation and violence of near-constant war, Americans are accustomed to economic prosperity and regular weekend passes. Except for some officers who fought in Vietnam, their combat experience is limited almost entirely to drills. The ferocity of AirLand Battle, in which hundreds or even thousands of Americans could be either wounded or killed, will tax their morale. Last week some Marine units were visited by a military psychiatrist who attempted to prepare them for the psychological side of battle.
Meanwhile, the Republican Guards are dug in deep--dozens of feet below the ground in some cases, with much of their munitions, including tanks and antiaircraft batteries, protected in bunkers. They are getting blasted by round-the-clock B-52 bombing strikes. Air-war advocates say the onslaught could break their will, just as Egyptian forces were made to surrender in the Sinai desert by Israeli airstrikes in the 1967 war. But the Republican Guard may not crack quickly. "You can pound them with [massive raids] and do lots of damage," says retired Marine Gen. Bernard M. Trainor, who spent two months covering Iraq's troops in the Iran-Iraq War as a New York Times correspondent, "but these are Iraqi nationalists and they'll fight."
However the battle ultimately takes shape, Saddam's objective is not to limit his own troops' losses: he sacrificed more than a hundred thousand lives against Iran and seems willing to do so again. Instead, he will seek to maximize the casualties inflicted upon his enemy. To him, apparently, American public opinion itself is the war's center of gravity. Trainor says Saddam formed his contempt for United States staying power in 1983, when President Ronald Reagan pulled American peace-keeping forces out of Beirut after losing 241 Marines in a suicide truck-bomb attack. The Iraqi dictator is seeking to make the coming ground struggle "the mother of all battles." Norman Schwarzkopf and the U.S. military see their chance to exorcise the ghosts of defeat in Vietnam once and for all.
THE GROUND WAR STILL TO COME: A LIKELY SCENARIO
In the first hours of battle it almost seemed that the war might be won with air power alone. But eventually soldiers and marines must finish the job on the ground. This time, the land war will be as distinctive as the earlier air war. It will mark the first test of the U.S. Army's post-Vietnam doctrine of "AirLand Battle"--a modern blitzkrieg characterized by rapid, violent armored thrusts--against Saddam Hussein's 545,000 troops in Kuwait and southern Iraq. Below, one scenario drawn from "Newsweek's' correspondents, military insiders and analysts:
1. U.S. F-111s bomb bridges
With alliance forces massed on the Saudi border, bridge bombings cut off Iraqi supply and retreat lines across the Tigris and Euphrates river delta, trapping Saddam's elite Republican Guards.
2. U.S. tanks go in
Alliance forces avoid a frontal attack on the Soviet-style layered defenses in southern Kuwait. Instead, the largely Arab forces arrayed on the Saudi side of the border launch a holding attack. Meanwhile the American VII and perhaps XVIII Corps make an end run west of the fortifications, slicing northward to swing behind the Iraqi forces in Kuwait--a classic envelopment maneuver.
3. Destroying the guard
Having survived earlier B-52 strikes, the Republican Guards emerge from their bunkers to face the allies. B-52s pulverize the exposed guards. Tanks and aircraft pick off survivors.
4. Marines take the line
After bombing smashes the Iraqi defensive line on the Kuwait border, the Marines push through it. They work north to link up with a Marine amphibious landing near Kuwait City to retake the Kuwaiti capital.
JOHN BARRY, DOUGLAS WALLER, CAROL BERGER, TONY CLIFTON and DANIEL PEDERSEN