COMBAT IN PANAMA : NEWS ANALYSIS : Daring U.S. Airborne Assault May Rewrite Military Textbooks

When the first of 4,500 U.S. paratroopers dropped out of the early-morning sky at Panama’s Torrijos International Airport on Wednesday, it marked the opening of a daring and unprecedented assault that military analysts believe will be studied as a textbook case for years to come.

From a strategic standpoint, the attack was executed with planning and precision that analysts called particularly remarkable because of the vast distance covered by the troops, who were flown in from the United States, and the complexity of their mission.

Experts stressed that their appraisals dealt only with the technical military aspects of the operation, not the policy issues behind President Bush’s decision to order the assault--much less the potential political controversy that may erupt at home if order is not quickly restored in Panama and sporadic fighting continues, even if at a militarily insignificant level.

That being said, considered purely in terms of military operations, the Pentagon’s handling of the massive assault appears to have been a considerable achievement.

Waves of paratroopers, helicopter-borne Green Berets and Navy commandos mounted a multipronged assault aimed at neutralizing the headquarters and the most loyal battalions of the Panamanian armed forces. The paratroops were among nearly 10,000 troops airlifted as far as 3,500 miles from Ft. Ord in California.

Until this week, the major surprise attacks in modern military history have been launched from much shorter distances and relied for transportation primarily on ships. The Allied invasion of Normandy, perhaps history’s greatest military surprise since the Trojan Horse, involved crossing about a 75-mile stretch of the English Channel.

“To go on the offensive, to project troops that far, it’s a classic,” one Army general said. “You’ll be reading about it in military histories for a long time.”

The scale of Operation Just Cause is also dwarfed by the 1950 Inchon landing at Inchon, in which 261 vessels put 40,000 U.S. Marine and Army troops ashore on a spit of land south of Seoul during the Korean war--a daring end-run that cut off thousands of enemy troops. Gen. Douglas MacArthur’s famous landing, staged from ships offshore, is considered a brilliant example of surprise and the use of amphibious tactics.

But it was a slow-motion, short-range event compared to Wednesday morning’s timed-to-the-minute, long-distance projection of force by air.

Analysts outside the government tended to agree with the Defense Department’s claims that the assault achieved its primary goal of cutting off the Panamanian military from its leader, Gen. Manuel A. Noriega, even if it failed to capture Noriega himself.

“I have a hard time believing that the strategy was to capture Noriega, because that was iffy to begin with,” said a retired Army general. “They expected that he would not be caught, and that is one of the reasons they used so much force. When you put 15,000 or 20,000 troops into a battle, you practically eliminate the possibility of failure in the overall goal.”

Several analysts said there is no precise precedent for this type of military strike in U.S. history. The 1965 invasion of the Dominican Republic was the closest parallel, but it occurred over a longer time period, and the first contingent was only 405 Marines.

“There is nothing even resembling this in major U.S. wars, from World War II to Korea and Vietnam,” said the retired general, who asked that his name not be used.

The most dramatic strategic element of the Panama assault recalled elements of another, far more massive surprise action--the invasion of Normandy by more than 100,000 Allied troops on June 6, 1944.

As in Panama, paratroopers were a key component of the Normandy plan, and members of the 82nd Airborne division participated in both. And as in Panama, they landed at night after jumping out of airplanes--already a high-risk enterprise--becomes far more dangerous.

To some military experts, the successful parachute drop by the 82nd Airborne Division’s Ready Brigade in Panama symbolized the precision of the entire operation.

“Night drops of parachutists are enormously difficult and complicated, so this was a rather hairy operation,” said retired Army Col. Harry Summers, a specialist in military strategy. “Because this difficult operation went well, it is a good sign that the planning for the entire operation was pretty sound.”

Summers also praised the isolation of the central elements of the Panamanian Defense Forces as another sign of good planning and execution.

Despite the overall effectiveness, Summers said that he saw two substantial mistakes--the failure to secure the Marriott Hotel in Panama City, where Noriega forces seized a number of Americans as hostages, and the failure to immediately knock out the city’s radio transmitter.

“Taking out the radio transmitter would have been easy with smart munitions,” Summers said. “They could set the frequency of the radio transmitter on the bomb and blow it away. But it was in a heavily populated area, and they felt the number of civilian casualties would be too great.”

However, he suggested that a ground force should have been assigned to destroy the transmitter as a top priority to prevent Noriega from trying to rally the nation, as he attempted to a few hours after the invasion.

“The failure to secure the Marriott Hotel was a significant failure,” he added. “The American people were getting their news from journalists there who were very scared, with good cause, and all the successes were being lost.”

The attack has been described in some quarters as overkill, with critics contending that the U.S. force--about 22,500 troops in all, including roughly 13,000 already stationed in Panama--was far larger than necessary. Many of them argued that a “surgical strike” involving a smaller number of troops would have been more effective as well as more politically palatable.

However, Summers and others said that the size of the force was necessary to ensure success when trying to control the far-flung forces of the PDF. Summers insisted that the notion surgical strikes are effective is more illusion than reality.