Bush’s Means-and-Ends Problem in the Gulf--Why All the Firepower? : Iraq: The buildup exceeds defense needs, but is not enough to dislodge Hussein. Services may be hitching a ride to Arabia to escape budget cutters.

Now that large U.S. forces have been deployed on and near the Arabian Peninsula, with more arriving every day, President Bush is well and truly committed to the territorial defense of Saudi Arabia and the lesser Persian Gulf states. Having repeatedly compared Iraqi President Saddam Hussein to Adolf Hitler, moreover, Bush has inadvertently ensured that no outcome will be judged a victory unless it includes the destruction of the Iraqi regime, or at least Hussein’s personal downfall.

Neither of these exceedingly weighty commitments automatically flowed from the U.S. demand for an Iraqi withdrawal from Kuwait or the Administration’s decision to head off a possible invasion of Saudi Arabia by dispatching U.S. armed forces.

In drawing his “line in the sand,” the President could have opted for a strategy of pure deterrence by threatening to bomb Iraq’s military targets if Baghdad moved against Saudi Arabia. B-52s, flying out of Diego Garcia, could have provided the necessary bomb tonnage. Tactical air power, based in Saudi Arabia, could have carried out precision strikes after suppressing Iraqi air defenses for the B-52s.

A modest ground presence--a few light battalions to provide security around the air bases--would have been needed as well. But such a force is a far cry from the military buildup that still continues. It seems that a strategy of pure deterrence was never seriously considered by the Administration, no doubt because bombardment--if it came to that--is such an extreme instrument and Bush is especially sensitive to Arab opinion.

When it subsequently became clear that the Iraqis would start rounding up American, British and other foreigners for use as shields at potential military and industrial targets, the President rejected suggestions that air strikes be launched before the hostages could be moved into position. By then, he recognized that restoring the status quo by a show of “resolve” wasn’t a desirable policy goal--if both Hussein and his nuclear program survived, a Kuwait II, backed by nuclear weapons, might result in a few years.

Ironically, the success of U.S. diplomacy in rapidly assembling an exceptionally broad anti-Iraqi coalition had, by then, created an additional--and powerful--inhibition to attacking Hussein. A massive U.S. air assault unprovoked by some additional Iraqi outrage would certainly have splintered the coalition, with its Arab partners the first to defect.

Finally, unilateral U.S. military action would have undercut the pleasant prospect of a new post-crisis world in which the U.N. Security Council would, at long last, fulfill its original mission of keeping world order through U.S.-Soviet-Chinese teamwork. This is why the U.S. Navy was ordered to wait for a Security Council resolution before forcibly stopping Iraqi tankers at sea.

All this leaves the President with a set of means that don’t fit his ends. His real, though unofficial, goal of destroying Hussein’s regime is the most extreme of ambitions in any confrontation. His chosen instruments--diplomatic pressure, economic denial, military intimidation--are of slow and uncertain effect. Hussein is not wilting as a result of diplomatic isolation; he’s not trembling before the multinational army assembling in Saudi Arabia; the Iraqis may not revolt even if shortages produced by the trade embargo become acute.

Perhaps it was not appreciated in Kennebunkport, where only a very narrow band of advice reached the President, that the air-strike plan was really quite modest. It only promised to deprive Iraq of the industrial and storage facilities that supply its armed forces, something that can be done reliably by sending off X aircraft loaded with Y weapons Z times. By contrast, there is no reliable--even unreliable--method of destroying regimes, short of conquering their territory.

The buildup of U.S. ground forces, meantime, has passed the level considered sufficient to defend Saudi territory but remains far short of what would be needed to dislodge Iraqi forces from Kuwait. In any combat, the strengths needed for offense and defense are always different. But in the current case, the divergence is extreme. The Iraqis are quite weak offensively (air power, armor) but truly strong defensively (combat engineers, infantry, artillery). Huge numbers of mines have already been laid on the main approaches to Kuwait City.

In the increasingly unlikely event that the Iraqis move into Saudi Arabia, U.S. Army and Marine forces should be able to stop their armored columns long enough to allow air power to finish the job--mechanized forces moving across desert terrain make for easy targets. If, by contrast, U.S. ground forces attack once the buildup is complete, any straightforward offensive to dislodge the Iraqis would be very costly.

The President, to be sure, and his men continue to deny any intention of starting a land war, and there is no need to doubt their word. But there are inevitable dangers of spontaneous combustion. Offensive plans are circulating in the Pentagon--all of them, of course, schemes for elegant offensives. They call for splendid air/ground/amphibious offensives that will cost only a few lives.

That is how most wars begin--optimistic plans pushed by enthusiastic briefers. Add to this the proximity of two hostile armies, and you can easily imagine triggering incidents--artillery fires that need to be suppressed by a “limited” advance, clashes caused by aggressive patrolling and so on.

The U.S. forces arriving in Saudi Arabia are undoubtedly of high quality in both weaponry and personnel. The Iraqi officer corps, by contrast, is incapable of planning elegant tactical maneuvers or, indeed, any rapidly paced operations. Complete U.S. air superiority will further offset the numerical superiority of the Iraqi army. Still, there is every reason to believe that ground combat would be costly for the United States.

The Iraqis are too combat experienced to run from fire and too heavily armed not to inflict many casualties before they are overwhelmed. They also have a great hidden advantage--eight years of warfare with Iran have stripped them of their delusions. The Iraqis know what they cannot do in combat. Fanciful tactics, flashy weapons and promising gadgets destined to fail in combat were eliminated long ago from the Iraqi army.

The U.S. Army and Marine Corps, by contrast, have completed a decade of rapid modernization, in tactics as much as in equipment. Very little of what they have in the way of weapons or tactics has been tested in combat. Much will no doubt work as advertised, but some part will inevitably fail--and such failures will not be matched by parallel failures on the Iraqi side, for their encounter with the realities of war took place long ago.

If the Administration has, in fact, no intention of launching an offensive, its continuing deployment of U.S. ground forces into Saudi Arabia needs to be explained. The level of forces needed for an air-ground defense has already been exceeded.

It is impossible to resist the thought that the services and branches are competing to squeeze all manner of units into the available airlift and sea-lift in order to prove their “post-Cold War” utility, thereby sheltering them from defense budget cuts. In the videotapes of the military parade into Saudi Arabia, all sorts of dubious additions to the forces can be spotted. (Out of deference for the safety of the troops involved, I will not identify the much-photographed unit that was flown to Saudi Arabia with its major weapon virtually inoperable in any passingly realistic combat condition.) And it is not the moment to question the lavish scale of entering logistical support.

It seems that pre-planned logistic packages designed for “bare desert” conditions have been sent to Saudi Arabia, even though U.S. forces have actually moved into well-provided Saudi bases. Vast quantities of mineral water have been flown in, as if there were no Saudi water supplies or filters to purify them. Similarly, the huge number of trucks dispatched is highly questionable. Not only do they hog airlift space; but there is also a profusion of locally available transport (the least the United States can expect from a country it has been called on to protect). Even more conspicuously redundant is the quantity of U.S. warships deployed against a virtually landlocked and navy-less Iraq, especially since aircraft carriers can no longer add much to the land-based air power now in place.

It is disturbing to see a military operation being hijacked, in some ways, by budget-driven bureaucracies; it is equally irritating to witness conspicuous waste, but both phenomena are exceptions. Far more disturbing are the few instances of militarily unsound deployments in the otherwise fabulously rapid and highly efficient dispatch of forces.

If Hussein capitulates--sooner rather than later--or is overthrown, all will be well. If he survives an extended confrontation with no force used on either side, and with some terrorism and perhaps unrest in some Arab countries occuring, matters could rapidly become very unpleasant.