Timing Was Political, Military : Allies: Some U.S. Army officers had urged Bush to postpone attack until February. But analysts say the coalition might have unraveled.

President Bush ordered U.S. and allied forces to attack Iraq as swiftly as he did--only 19 hours after the United Nations deadline--for both political and military reasons, U.S. officials and experts outside the government said Wednesday.

But the political considerations may have been foremost in his mind, they said.

Some senior U.S. Army officers had urged Bush to delay any attack against Iraq until February, when more American troops would be fully in place in Saudi Arabia, ready for ground combat.

The Army lost that argument several weeks ago, when Bush decided the war against Iraq should begin “sooner rather than later,” and with a sustained period of air strikes before any ground offensive, knowledgeable sources said.

More recently, some military experts argued that the attack should probably be delayed at least a few days after the Jan. 15 deadline--to force Iraqi troops to remain on alert for hours on end.

“If I were the theater commander, I’d like to put it off a few days,” an Air Force analyst said. “You want to keep (the Iraqis) at a high stage of alert because . . . they’ll get numbed.”

But Bush rejected that advice, too--partly because of his conviction that Saddam Hussein would not move out of Kuwait except by force, officials said, but also because of fears that the international coalition assembled against Iraq might not hold together for a prolonged period.

The assault on Iraq began from the air with massive and simultaneous air strikes on targets from downtown Baghdad to Iraqi positions in Kuwait.

The carefully planned attack appeared to be following the script laid out over the past several months by military officials and air warfare experts. It was an overwhelming demonstration of air power, and air power alone, at least in this early stage of the war.

There was no indication when the attacks would end.

“If this decision had been delayed, you would have seen an amazingly rapid unraveling of the coalition,” explained Edward Luttwak, a prominent defense analyst. “You can’t expect a coalition like this to hold together through a long, drawn-out period of tension.”

“There is a considerable risk, if you wait, that unforeseen political developments will make it more difficult to act,” agreed Richard Perle, an assistant secretary of defense in the Reagan Administration. “Psychologically, when you have a deadline as prominent as the 15th and nothing happens, you run the risk of a letdown--like letting the air out of a balloon.”

“The troops themselves want to get it over with,” he added--noting that U.S. forces would have gradually lost some of their edge if they had been forced to wait through a long stalemate in the desert.

Even before the air strikes against Iraq began on Wednesday evening, Bush Administration officials signaled that all the political and diplomatic obstacles to launching an attack had been cleared away.

The principal U.S. allies--Saudi Arabia, Britain and France--all gave their agreement to an attack after the U.N. deadline during Secretary of State James A. Baker III’s journey through the Middle East and Europe last week, officials said.

Britain’s House of Commons approved war Tuesday, and France’s Senate followed suit Wednesday, guaranteeing political backing for their country’s leaders just as the U.S. Congress did last week.

“Consultation with the coalition is finished,” a senior Administration official said Wednesday afternoon. “The next consultation will be in the form of notification.”

The 19-hour delay between the U.N. deadline and the first bombing raids against Iraqi military targets gave Hussein a final chance to capitulate to the armies around him and announce a withdrawal of his forces from Kuwait--a gambit some officials called a “12th-hour solution.”

But senior Administration officials said that was not the intent of the delay. Instead, they described the 19-hour pause as coincidental, stemming largely from the U.S. Air Force’s desire to launch its first air strikes under cover of night.

The U.N. deadline, at midnight Eastern time on Tuesday, was early morning in Baghdad. The first night available for air strikes was Wednesday--and that was when the Air Force struck.

“We have a major advantage in fighting at night,” an Air Force analyst explained. “Our principal fighters, the F-15E, the F-117 and the F-16, are all night fighters. The Iraqi air force doesn’t do much night training, so that limits their effectiveness at night. . . . And night fighting means you avoid visual observation, visual warning.”

Wednesday night was almost ideal for launching a surprise attack, several officers pointed out, because this month’s new moon came on Tuesday. Any further delay would have meant a gradually lighter sky.

The first weapons to reach targets in Baghdad and elsewhere in Iraq were low-flying unmanned Tomahawk cruise missiles, fired from the battleships Missouri and Wisconsin in the Persian Gulf. Each ship can launch 32 of the highly accurate missiles. Scores of other Tomahawks are carried aboard the six U.S. aircraft carriers ringing the Arabian Peninsula.

The cruise missiles were programmed to hit Iraqi command centers in and around central Baghdad, Pentagon officials said. The weapons also served to force Iraqi air-defense radar operators to “light up” and reveal their positions.

The missiles were followed by waves of attack aircraft--F-117 “stealth” fighters, F-111, F-4G and A-6 bombers and virtually every other aerial attack weapon in the U.S. arsenal, officials said.

Their first priorities were to neutralize antiaircraft weapons and to destroy Iraq’s mobile Scud-B surface-to-surface missiles. They employed laser-guided bombs and radar-seeking HARM missiles to attack the Iraqi weapons, officials said.

Also apparently hit in the first hours of battle were airfields, communications centers and power plants, early reports indicated.

Hundreds of ground-based and carrier-based fighter planes--F-15s, F-16s, F-14s and F/A-18s--swept the skies to protect the U.S. bomber fleet.

Numerous air-refueling tankers and AWACS command-and-control planes went up to support and direct the attacking air force.

Before the attack, the United States had assembled a huge air armada, including more than 2,000 combat and support aircraft. Allied nations contributed several hundred more front-line fighters and bombers.

Every relevant weapon the United States has likely will be employed to continue the strategic air campaign over the next several days. Each aircraft carries specific armament and has a narrow mission.

Stealth fighters fly in fast and low to drop laser-guided bombs on command bunkers and missile control sites. F-4G “Wild Weasels,” working in tandem with F-16 and F-15 fighters, attack antiaircraft batteries with HARM radar-seeking missiles.

FB-111 and F-15E fighter-bombers are assigned to take out air defense installations and sever links between central command facilities and field commanders.

EF-111, EA-7B, RF-4C and RC-135 electronic warfare and reconnaissance craft saturate the battle area with radar and radio emissions to jam Iraqi communications and fix the locations of all radar-emitting enemy weapons.

Thousands of tons of ordnance will be dropped in what is expected to be the most intensive aerial bombardment ever conducted. Electronic warfare technology will be employed on a scale never before attempted.

Officials would not disclose how long the bombardment is likely to last, but most experts--including Air Force officials--predicted the air phase of the war will be pursued for many days, perhaps as long as two weeks.

The Air Force and Navy have stockpiled enough bombs, missiles and bullets to conduct intensive air war for at least 30 days. Backup ordnance was still streaming into the theater as the war began.

Before the fighting began, Air Force officials predicted that three aircraft would be lost each day in the early stages of the war. No losses were announced early last night, but many experts predicted considerably heavier attrition rates than those projected by the Air Force.

The volume of antiaircraft fire in Baghdad, as heard on television broadcasts, was very heavy, but did not appear to be hitting American planes, which seemed to be bombing from relatively high altitudes.

U.S. officials were explicit in advance of the attack about how it would be prosecuted, without discussing specific targets.

“When we launch it, we will launch it violently. We will launch it in a way that will make it decisive so that we can get it over as quickly as possible and there’s no question who won when it’s over,” Gen. Colin L. Powell, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, said during a visit to Saudi Arabia late last month.

“We’re going to go deep (behind Iraqi lines) using aerial assets and challenge them in ways seen and unseen he’s (Hussein) never dreamed of,” Powell said.

It appeared last night that Powell’s statement was not a prediction. It was a statement of fact.

The role of the allied air forces was unclear last evening. British news reports said Royal Air Force Tornado GR1 fighter-bombers had joined the air assault.

The U.S. war plan includes a “strategic pause” at the end of the first phase of bombardment to allow Hussein a last chance to withdraw his troops from Kuwait.

But it was not immediately apparent how long the United States intended to sustain the punishment it began Wednesday night before moving on to the more critical, and much more costly, land assault on the huge Iraqi army.

Luttwak, the military analyst, charged that the air strikes had been poorly planned and would fall short of their maximum effect--because, he complained Gen. Powell and Gen. H. Norman Schwarzkopf, commander of U.S. forces in the gulf, are “prejudiced against air operations.”

“The problem with this air operation is that it was the subject of vehement contention and came out in a rather strange form,” he said. “There are air operations in support of ground attacks, and there are independent air operations, but in the end this one is a mixture of the two. . . . The picture is mottled.”

Luttwak said a “pure air operation” designed to cripple Iraq’s military machine over a long period would concentrate on destroying its supplies before attacking tanks and artillery. But Operation Desert Storm is attacking tanks and artillery along its primary objectives, targets “to reduce the enemy prior to a ground attack,” he noted.

“The Army lost the battle to get permission to act (with a ground attack), but it influenced the bombardment plan because Colin Powell and Norman Schwarzkopf were in charge,” he said.

“We’re going to end up having an air operation shaped by two ground force commanders with prejudices against air operations,” he complained.

AIR SURVEILLANCE IN THE GULF REGION

Using E-3A AWACS strategically: Airborne Warning and Control System has a command center equipped with banks of computers and radar screens designed to track and identify up to 600 aircraft simultaneously. The high-tech plane is not believed to have been used in major combat. It can detect low flying enemy fighters and bombers from up to 230 miles away and is also capable of jamming enemy radar.

Boeing E-3A (Boeing 707) Dimensions Wing span: 145 ft. 9 in. Overall length: 152 ft. 11 in. Overall height: 41 ft. 9 in. Weight Max. total overall: 335,000 lb. Performance Max. level speed: 530 mph. Service ceiling: 29,000 ft. Max flight time: +11 hours Rotordome

Inside the saucer-shaped rotordome of the AWACS is a vast array of radar antennae that feed information to the computers, transmitters and other electronic devices inside the fuselage.

The rotordome rotates every 10 seconds, enabling military technicians to view six complete views of the coverage area each minute.

1. Iraqi radar searches skies for enemy aircraft. 2. AWACS jams enemy radar located at missile bases. 3. U.S. and multiforce attack radar installations with HARM and SRAM missiles. 4. Heavy aircraft such as B-52s and F-111s are then used to drop laser-guided bombs, gravity bombs and air-to-surface missiles to take out the missile sites. Satellites

U.S. strategists watch Iraq and Kuwait from a squadron of satellites that can spot tank tracks in the desert, listen in on Iraqi military communications and give B-52 bombers pinpoint accuracy. THE ADVANTAGE: Satellites--which include reconnaissance, electronic intelligence, early warning, meteoroligical and navigation--monitor the region 24 hours a day. THE DISADVANTAGE: All this monitoring produces a flood of images and information that must be processed before it is useful. Among the high-tech tools believed by many specialists to be in use:

* An electronic intelligence satellite, probably shuttle-deployed, can intercept telephone and radio communications on the ground.

* “Keyhole” or KH-11 high-resolution, optical-imaging reconnaissance satellites. Gave U.S. first evidence of Iraqi military moves in late July, days before invasion. The 12-foot cameras can count tanks, tents, even people on the ground.

* Lacrosse radar-imaging satellite. At its 495-mile-high altitude, can reproduce data in all weather.

* Communications satellites operating in support of the region.

* Navstar navigational satellites in 12,400-mile-high orbits. Used by U.S. warships to provide pinpoint positioning.

* Early-warning satellites, which can detect missile launches.

Source: AP, Washington Post, Jane’s All The Worlds Aircraft. Not to scale