War Should Be ‘Clinical, Efficient’ and ‘Short as Possible,’ Briton Says

A war against Iraq to free Kuwait would have to be short and sharp, senior British defense officials said Wednesday.

“We would try to make it as short as possible,” one senior military official said in a briefing for American correspondents at the Defense Ministry.

A senior defense official indicated that the timing of an assault against the Iraqis would be a political decision rather than a military one. But he added: “We must try to achieve surprise either on the strategic level or the tactical level. Deception operations can form quite a large part of achieving surprise.”

The defense official said that if the allies were “pushed into a war,” they should make sure that it is not protracted. He declared: “You have to make it as clinical and efficient as possible. That is not to say it is going to be an easy thing to manage. We should try to make it as short as possible.”

“The air war is critical,” added another source, who said full superiority would have to be gained in a matter of days. Similarly, he said, the land war should be a matter of “several days, rather than months or weeks.”

Elsewhere, Air Chief Marshal Patrick Hine said during a visit to the Persian Gulf that it appears “increasingly unlikely” that Iraqi President Saddam Hussein will voluntarily withdraw his troops from Kuwait. Hine also said that Britain’s 7th Armor Brigade, the “Desert Rats,” should be fully operational in the gulf in two weeks.

Britain has a force of 12 ships, 40 front-line aircraft and 16,000 troops in Saudi Arabia, the second-largest Western contribution after the United States. Defense Ministry officials listed the current balance of military power in the gulf as 1,600 allied tanks and 750 artillery pieces against 3,600 Iraqi tanks and 2,300 cannon.

However, the allies have the advantage in attack helicopters by a margin of 310 to 125 and in combat aircraft by 1,110 to 800.